6, 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped on that city. Necessary Evil is one of three B-29 Superfortresses that flew over Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. They had different engines, fewer guns and a larger bomb bay. Their planes were reconfigured B-29 Superfortress bombers. The 509th Composite Group, lead by Tibbets, spent months training in Wendover, Utah, before being shipped off to an American air base on the Pacific island of Tinian. Tibbets said it would be dangerous but if they were successful, it could end the war. Paul Tibbets, who was recruiting officers for a special mission. After completing his training, he was approached by Col. Gackenbach enlisted in the Army Aviation Cadet Program in 1943. Today, the 95-year-old is the only surviving crew member of those three planes. Army Air Corps and a navigator on the mission. Russell Gackenbach was a second lieutenant in the U.S. There were three strike planes that flew over Hiroshima that day: the Enola Gay, which carried the bomb, and two observation planes, the Great Artiste and the Necessary Evil. It was the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in warfare. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. READ MORE: The Hiroshima Bombing Didn't Just End WWII.Gackenbach, whose duties included documenting the event with his camera, is the last surviving member of the Hiroshima mission. The topography of Nagasaki, which was nestled in narrow valleys between mountains, reduced the bomb’s effect, limiting the destruction to 2.6 square miles. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning. Hiroshima’s devastation failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, however, and on August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, from Tinian. The plane dropped the bomb-known as “Little Boy”-by parachute at 8:15 in the morning, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city. base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with spearheading the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, codenamed “The Manhattan Project” (for the engineering corps’ Manhattan district).ġ6 Images 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' Are Dropped
government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” The Manhattan ProjectĮven before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists-many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe-became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.