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In 1961, the Enola Gay was fully disassembled and moved to the Paul E. There its wings began to rust and vandals even damaged the plane. Notably, from 1953 to 1960, its home was Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. To Kowalke, “the nose of the aircraft looked like a porcupine” with all the protruding antennae. Following World War II, the Enola Gay had been moved around from location to location.
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This time, his plane was equipped with instruments to measure radiation. The next day, Kowalke flew the City of Baraboo back to Hiroshima.
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From the air, a large cloud of smoke was all that remained of the city. The devastation covered 4.7 square miles around the explosion point, or hypocenter. Between 70,000 and 80,000 died in the conflagration, with up to another 70,000 injured, while 69% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. The blast rippled across the city, starting a massive firestorm that burned for hours afterward. On the ground, people saw a white flash followed immediately by a massive explosion. Two minutes later Little Boy started downward, exploding over central Hiroshima one minute later. A weather plane flew an hour ahead and confirmed all was clear over Hiroshima. “It wasn’t really talked about much,” he later recalled, “but even so, we did feel that what we were doing would end the war and solve all our problems at that time.”Īt 2:45 AM the next morning Colonel Paul Tibbetts took off in Enola Gay to carry the bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, to its destination. He and his crew knew the extra importance of the mission.
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He flew “a rather uneventful run” and delivered a report of clear conditions. At the controls was Baraboo native First Lieutenant Garvin Kowalke, who had named the plane after his hometown. The B-29 City of Baraboo drew the weather reconnaissance mission for August 5. Image of the Crew from the City of Baraboo from the Sauk County Historical Society To not attract attention, the planes flew singly and swung out over Korea and the East China Sea to avoid giving away their special interest in those cities. With weather such a critical factor, the Twentieth Air Force, based in the Mariana Islands 1,500 miles f ro m Japan, began a program of B-29 flights over the target areas to assess conditions. Hiroshima was also headquarters for the Second General Army, responsible for defending Japan’s western half. All had been chosen because of their military and industrial significance. Twelve days before, on July 25, the War Department instructed General Carl Spaatz, commander of Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, to use the two atomic bombs on Japan “as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945.” The target cities were four: Hiroshima, Kokura (modern Kitakyushu), Niigata, and Nagasaki. For the first time, nuclear weapons had been used in war. Shiroyama had no large factories and was nestled among green foothills far back from both the railroad station and the port.On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first victim of an atomic attack. On that day eight members of my family disappeared from the earth. I experienced the atomic bombing in Shiroyama-machi, 800 meters from the hypocenter. Ray Gallagher, crewman on Bockscar for the Nagasaki mission and on The Great Artiste for the Hiroshima mission But at that time, you are realizing, "Could we have killed this monster now and could we have gotten rid of it?" And which we did. We have lost our own loved ones and we realize what death is. I say that with an open heart for the simple reason that now as years have come on us, we realize the number and death. In those years, you did not think about the poor people that were on the ground that had to take all that we gave them.