Enola Gay

There she is.

The Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, serial number 4486, with a wingspan of 141 feet, four right duplex cyclone radials, each putting out 2,200 horsepower, and more history in that aluminum skin than almost anything else that has ever flown.

I stood there for a long time just looking at her.

Today on The Hangar, I want to tell you the full story, not just August 6th, 1945, which is the story most people think they know.

They flew and trained and flew some more, carrying shapes that looked like bombs but weren't until the shapes were second nature.

Tibbetts named the airplane after his mother.

Enola Gay Tibbets, he had the name painted on the nose the night before the mission without telling anyone he was going to do it.

Think about that for a moment.

After agonizing over the decision, President Truman gives the go-ahead.

A few days later, the crew of a B-29 named Enola Gay, after the Captain Paul Tibbett's mother, takes off from their air base in Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands.

In the plane's belly is a 15-kiloton uranium bomb, nicknamed Little Boy.

Their target, Hiroshima, in Western Japan.

It takes the Enola Gay and its deadly cargo six hours to fly to Hiroshima, 500 miles from the capital, Tokyo.

The weather over Hiroshima is clear and crisp.

The crew circle overhead.

A lot of professions depended on the ability to do rote math quickly and accurately under time pressure.

And I think two examples that bring it to life, the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, set aside two precious crew spots for engineers with slide rules and pencils and paper to do a lot of the low-level math mechanics based on their best sense of wind speed and the velocity of the plane and where the target would be to compute the release time.

Many people are familiar with the book or the film Hidden Figures, which is fantastic.

These incredibly talented Black women involved in the Apollo space missions that were doing triple integrals by hand to make sure that every aspect of the logistics of a space flight was done in the right sequence at the right time.

We made the parts for it, but we never dropped another one like Little Boy.

It was so dangerous, and once you, you had to connect it in flight, and once you did, if that Angola Gay had, uh- If it had crashed, the, the bomb would have gone off anywhere.

It could have gone off on the runway, where a lot of B-B-29s didn't make it over the cliff, and especially in Tinian.

So all of the things he said were not true.

It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made most useful.

On August 6th, 1945, a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, instantly killing an estimated 80,000 people.

Colonel Paul Tibbetts, the pilot of the Enola Gay, later said, If Dante had been with us on that plane, he would have been terrified.

The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge.

It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire.

And then you have to wonder, like when you watch a movie like Titanic, there's this character played by this actor named Billy Zane who – it's interesting because he made like two movies.

He made a movie about an American B-17, Enola Gay, or not – I mean, I can't remember what the name of it is.

And then he made Titanic, and I don't know – He kind of disappeared, and he's probably been on television forever, and I don't watch television, so I don't know that.

But he's running around the Titanic with a gun, trying to kill the kid, you know, trying to kill Leonardo DiCaprio.

And the B-29 is one of those airplanes that gets overshadowed by its own history.

Most people, when they hear B-29, they think Enola Gay, they think Boxcar, they think the Pacific 1945, two cities, and the end of a war in a single morning.

That is fair.

Those airplanes changed the world.