The rest is history.Īmerica's first wartime atomic blast, detonated at 8:16 a.m., about 1,890 feet above ground, destroyed the city of Hiroshima and killed nearly 100,000 inhabitants and spelled the beginning of the end of the war against the Japanese. The 393d Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, named after Tibbets mother and piloted by Tibbets, took off from North Field, Tinian, about six hours flight. The centrepiece of the exhibit was supposed to be the restored Enola Gay, the airplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. and Guy Gugliotta, Air and Space Exhibit Gets Flak Even before Takeoff. The exhibit, scheduled to open in the spring of 1995, the 50 th anniversary of the end of World War II, would focus on the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "That's the only things I would say I am sorry for."ĭowney was in the control tower the morning the Enoa Gay rumbled down the runway for its mission over Hiroshima.įor a while, "I didn't think they would make it" off the ground, but the B-29 bomber's tires finally cleared the runway and disappeared into the early morning darkness. Flying into Controversy: Enola Gay a Target Decades after Hiroshima, Phoenix. "I would say I am sorry that you Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I am sorry you attacked the Philippines, I am sorry for their unspeakable acts of barbarism on Americans during the Bataan Death March, I am sorry that Japan was such a barbaric nation," Downey said. Piloted by COL Paul Tibbets, this B-29 made it into the history books on the morning of 6 August 1945 when it dropped an atomic payload on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.
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A flight log for the Enola Gay on its journey to Hiroshima was kept by the co-pilot Robert A Lewis.
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Would he apologize for America's use of the atomic bombs that finally brought a nation to its knees in surrender? The most well known of these was the B-29 Enola Gay. The Enola Gay flew the very first mission targeting a city Hiroshima with an atomic bomb. If Americans invaded the Japanese homeland, they would have faced "every Japanese man, woman and child with hoes, scythes, sticks and stones."ĭowney said he is often asked what he would say to the survivors of the bombing.