As the city disappeared under a mushroom cloud, Captain Robert Lewis – co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the weapon – wrote in his log “My God, what have we done?” Three days later the U.S. "They certainly don't care to have us drop any more bombs of atomic energy like this.On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima, Japan – the first time such a catastrophic weapon was ever used in conflict.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PILOT OF THE ENOLA GAY PLUS#
It would be another 27 days - plus a second nuclear mushroom over Nagasaki - before Japan surrendered, ending a war that began with its 1937 invasion of China and stretched across the Asia-Pacific region. Using the atomic bomb, developed amid utmost secrecy, was hugely popular with war-weary Americans at the time - and 70 years on, a majority today still think it was the right thing to do.įifty-six percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in February said using the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was justified, compared to 79 percent of Japanese respondents who said it was not. Were it not for the atomic bomb, many Americans contend, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of American soldiers would have died in a US-led invasion of the Japanese mainland.Īt the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's vast public collection of historic aircraft near Dulles airport outside Washington, every display gets a succinct 150-word description, including Enola Gay. It's hard to miss in the vastness of the Udvar-Hazy Center, sharing hanger space with dozens of others planes including an Air France Concorde, the original Boeing 707 prototype and the Space Shuttle Discovery. Twenty years ago, during its restoration, Enola Gay found itself at the center of a firestorm between World War II veterans and a younger generation of historians who questioned the use of "The Bomb." "On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan," its plaque simply notes, with no mention of the death or destruction it sowed. Veterans and their supporters in Congress alleged that a 50th anniversary exhibition - with the polished front section of Enola Gay as its star attraction - depicted the wartime Japanese "more as victims, not aggressors," wrote John Correll of the Air Force Association. "A package of lies," said Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay's commander, said at the time. "Many are second-guessing the decision to use the atomic weapons. Stunned by the backlash, the Smithsonian reconceived its planned exhibition, titled "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War" at least five times, before it opened in 1995 for a two-year run that drew four million visitors.īy then, the exhibition had been stripped down to a straightforward recounting of the Enola Gay and its historic mission, minus any discussion of the merits or morality of the use of atomic weapons. "We don't celebrate this artifact as much as we have it here to display," Jeremy Kinney, the Smithsonian's curator of vintage US warplanes, told AFP on the footbridge that passes Enola Gay at cockpit level. "We try to interpret it as much as we can, and then allow people to interpret it themselves as well.