Little Boy
Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima
Little Boy was a type of atomic bomb created by the United States as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The name is also often used to describe the specific bomb (L-11) used in the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay" on 6 August 1945, making it the first nuclear weapon used in warfare, and the second nuclear explosion in history, after the Trinity nuclear test. It exploded with an energy of approximately and had an explosion radius of approximately which caused widespread death across the city. It was a gun-type fission weapon which used uranium that had been enriched in the isotope uranium-235 to power its explosive reaction.
Little Boy was developed by Lieutenant Commander Francis Birch's group at the Los Alamos Laboratory. It was the successor to a plutonium-fueled gun-type fission design, Thin Man, which was abandoned in 1944 after technical difficulties were discovered. Little Boy used a charge of nitrocellulose to fire a hollow cylinder (the "bullet") of highly enriched uranium through an artillery gun barrel into a solid cylinder (the "target") of the same material. The design was highly inefficient: the weapon used on Hiroshima contained of uranium, but less than a kilogram underwent nuclear fission. Unlike the implosion design developed for the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb design that was used against Nagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima.
After the war, numerous components for additional Little Boy bombs were built. By 1950, at least five weapons were completed; all were retired by November 1950.
Naming the bomb.
There are two primary accounts of how the first atomic bombs got their names. Los Alamos Laboratory and Project Alberta physicist Robert Serber stated, many decades after the fact, that he had named the first two atomic bomb designs during World War II based on their shapes: Thin Man and Fat Man. The "Thin Man" was a long, thin device, and its name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies about "The Thin Man". The "Fat Man" was round and fat so it was named after Kasper Gutman, a rotund character in Hammett's 1930 novel "The Maltese Falcon", played by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 film version. Little Boy was named by others as an allusion to Thin Man since it was based on its design. It was also sometimes referred to as the "Mark I" nuclear bomb design, with "Mark II" referring to the abandoned Thin Man, and "Mark III" to the "Fat Man."
In September 1945, another Project Alberta physicist, Norman F. Ramsey, stated in his brief "History of Project A," that the early bomb ballistic test shapes designs were referred to as "Thin Man" and "Fat Man" by (unspecified) "Air Force representatives" for "security reasons," so that their communications over telephones sounded "as if they were modifying a plane to carry Roosevelt (the Thin Man) and Churchill (the Fat Man)," as opposed to modifying the B-29s to carry the two atomic bomb shapes as part of Project Silverplate in late 1943.
Another explanation of the names, from a classified United States Air Force history of Project Silverplate from the 1950s, implies a possible reconciliation of the two versions: that the terms "Thin Man" and "Fat Man" were first developed by someone at or from Los Alamos (i.e., Serber), but were consciously adopted by the officers in Silverplate when they were adopting their own codenames for their own project (including "Silverplate"). As Silverplate involved modifying B-29s for a secret purpose, deliberately using codenames that would align with modifying vehicles for Roosevelt and Churchill would serve their needs well.
Development.
Early gun-type design work.
Because of its perceived simplicity, the gun-type nuclear weapon design was the first approach pursued by the scientists working on bomb design during the Manhattan Project. In 1942, it was not yet known which of the two fissile materials pathways being simultaneously pursued—uranium-235 or plutonium-239—would be successful, or if there were significant differences between the two fuels that would impact the design work. Coordination with British scientists in May 1942 convinced the American scientists, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, that the atomic bomb would not be difficult to design and that the difficulty would lie only in the production of fuel. Calculations in mid-1942 by theoretical physicists working on the project reinforced the idea that an ordinary artillery gun barrel would be able to impart sufficient velocity to the fissile material projectile.
Several different weapon designs, including autocatalytic assembly, a nascent version of implosion, and alternative gun designs (e.g., using high explosives as a propellent, or creating a "double gun" with two projectiles) were pursued in the early years of the project, while the facilities to manufacture fissile material were being constructed. The belief that the gun design would be an easy engineering task once fuel was available led to a sense of optimism at Los Alamos, although Oppenheimer established a small research group to study implosion as a fallback in early 1943. A full ordnance program for gun-design development was established by March 1943, with expertise provided by E.L. Rose, an experienced gun designer and engineer. Work was begun to study the properties of barrels, internal and external ballistics, and tampers of gun weapons. Oppenheimer led aspects of the effort, telling Rose that "at the present time [May 1945] our estimates are so ill founded that I think it better for me to take responsibility for putting them forward." He soon delegated the work to Naval Captain William Sterling Parsons, who, along with Ed McMillan, Charles Critchfield, and Joseph Hirschfelder would be responsible for rendering the theory into practice.
Concern that impurities in reactor-bred plutonium would make predetonation more likely meant that much of the gun-design work was focused on the plutonium gun. To achieve high projectile velocities, the plutonium gun was long with a narrow diameter (suggesting its codename as the Thin Man) which created considerable difficulty in its ballistics dropping from aircraft and fitting it into the bomb bay of a B-29.
In early 1944, Emilio G. Segrè and his P-5 Group at Los Alamos received the first samples of plutonium produced from a nuclear reactor, the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Analyzing it, they discovered that the presence of the isotope plutonium-240 (Pu-240) raised the rate of spontaneous fission of the plutonium to an unacceptable amount. Previous analyses of plutonium had been made from samples created by cyclotrons and did not have as much of the contaminating isotope. If reactor-bred plutonium was used in a gun-type design, they concluded, it would predetonate, causing the weapon to destroy itself before achieving the conditions for a large-scale explosion.
From Thin Man to Little Boy.
As a consequence of the discovery of the Pu-240 contamination problem, in July 1944 almost all research at Los Alamos was redirected to the implosion-type plutonium weapon, and the laboratory was entirely reorganized around the implosion problem. Work on the gun-type weapon continued under Person's Ordnance (O) Division, for use exclusively with highly enriched uranium as a fuel. All the design, development, and technical work at Los Alamos was consolidated under Lieutenant Commander Francis Birch's group.
In contrast to the plutonium implosion-type nuclear weapon and the plutonium gun-type fission weapon, the uranium gun-type weapon was much simpler to design. As a high-velocity gun was no longer required, the overall length of the gun barrel could be dramatically decreased, and this allowed the weapon to fit into a B-29 bomb bay without difficulty. Though not an optimal use of fissile material compared to the implosion design, it was seen as a nearly guaranteed weapon.
The design specifications were completed in February 1945, and contracts were let to build the components. Three different plants were used so that no one would have a copy of the complete design. The gun and breech were made by the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, D.C.; the target case and some other components by the Naval Ordnance Plant in Center Line, Michigan; and the tail fairing and mounting brackets by the Expert Tool and Die Company in Detroit, Michigan. The bomb, except for the uranium payload, was ready at the beginning of May 1945. Manhattan District Engineer Kenneth Nichols expected on 1 May 1945 to have enriched uranium "for one weapon before August 1 and a second one sometime in December", assuming the second weapon would be a gun type; designing an implosion bomb for enriched uranium was considered, and this would increase the production rate. The enriched uranium projectile was completed on 15 June, and the target was completed on 24 July. The target and bomb pre-assemblies (partly assembled bombs without the fissile components) left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, California, on 16 July aboard the heavy cruiser , arriving on 26 July. The target inserts followed by air on 30 July.
Although all of its components had been individually tested, no full test of a gun-type nuclear weapon occurred before the Little Boy was dropped over Hiroshima. The only test explosion of a nuclear weapon concept had been of an implosion-type device employing plutonium as its fissile material, which took place on 16 July 1945 at the Trinity nuclear test. There were several reasons for not testing a Little Boy type of device. Primarily, there was the issue of fissile material availability. K-25 at Clinton Engineer Works was designed to produce around 30 kilograms of enriched uranium per month, and the Little Boy design used over 60 kilograms per bomb. So testing the weapon would incur a considerable delay in use of the weapon. (By comparison, B Reactor at the Hanford Site was designed to produce around 20 kilograms of plutonium per month, and each Fat Man bomb used around 6 kilograms of material.) Because of the simplicity of the gun-type design, laboratory testing could establish that its parts worked correctly on their own: for example, dummy projectiles could be shot down the gun barrel to make sure they were "seated" correctly onto a dummy target. Absence of a full-scale test in the implosion-type design made it much more difficult to establish whether the necessary simultaneity of compression had been achieved. While there was at least one prominent scientist (Ernest O. Lawrence) who advocated for a full-scale test, by early 1945 Little Boy was regarded as nearly a sure thing and was expected to have a higher yield than the first-generation implosion bombs.
Though Little Boy incorporated various safety mechanisms, an accidental detonation of a fully-assembled weapon was very possible. Should the bomber carrying the device crash, the hollow "bullet" could be driven into the "target" cylinder, possibly detonating the bomb from gravity alone (though tests suggested this was unlikely), but easily creating a critical mass that would release dangerous amounts of radiation. A crash of the B-29 and subsequent fire could trigger the explosives, causing the weapon to detonate. If immersed in water, the uranium components were subject to a neutron moderator effect, which would not cause an explosion but would release radioactive contamination. For this reason, pilots were advised to crash on land rather than at sea. Ultimately, Parsons opted to keep the explosives out of the Little Boy bomb until after the B-29 had taken off, to avoid the risk of a crash that could destroy or damage the military base from which the weapon was launched.
Design.
The Little Boy was in length, in diameter and weighed approximately . The design used the gun method to explosively force a hollow sub-critical mass of enriched uranium and a solid target cylinder together into a super-critical mass, initiating a nuclear chain reaction. This was accomplished by shooting one piece of the uranium onto the other by means of four cylindrical silk bags of cordite powder. This was a widely used smokeless propellant consisting of a mixture of 65 percent nitrocellulose, 30 percent nitroglycerine, 3 percent petroleum jelly, and 2 percent carbamite that was extruded into tubular granules. This gave it a high surface area and a rapid burning area, and could attain pressures of up to . Cordite for the wartime Little Boy was sourced from Canada; propellant for post-war Little Boys was obtained from the Picatinny Arsenal. The bomb contained of enriched uranium. Most was enriched to 89% but some was only 50% uranium-235, for an average enrichment of 80%. Less than a kilogram of uranium underwent nuclear fission, and of this mass only was transformed into several forms of energy, mostly kinetic energy, but also heat and radiation.
Assembly details.
Inside the weapon, the uranium-235 material was divided into two parts, following the gun principle: the "projectile" and the "target". The projectile was a hollow cylinder with 60% of the total mass (). It consisted of a stack of nine uranium rings, each in diameter with a bore in the center, and a total length of , pressed together into the front end of a thin-walled projectile long. Filling in the remainder of the space behind these rings in the projectile was a tungsten carbide disc with a steel back. At ignition, the projectile slug was pushed along the , smooth-bore gun barrel. The slug "insert" was a 4-inch cylinder, 7 inches in length with a axial hole. The slug comprised 40% of the total fissile mass (). The insert was a stack of six washer-like uranium discs somewhat thicker than the projectile rings that were slid over a 1-inch rod. This rod then extended forward through the tungsten carbide plug, impact-absorbing anvil, and nose plug backstop, eventually protruding out of the front of the bomb casing. This entire target assembly was secured at both ends with locknuts.
When the hollow-front projectile reached the target and slid over the target insert, the assembled super-critical mass of uranium would be completely surrounded by a tamper and neutron reflector of tungsten carbide and steel, both materials having a combined mass of . Neutron initiators inside the assembly were activated by the impact of the projectile into the target.
Counter-intuitive design.
The material was split almost in half, with at one end a group of rings of highly enriched uranium with 40% of the supercritical mass, and at the other end another group of slightly larger rings with 60% of the supercritical mass, which was fired onto the smaller group, with four polonium-beryllium neutron initiators to make the supercritical mass explode.
A hole in the center of the larger piece dispersed the mass and increased the surface area, allowing more fission neutrons to escape, thus preventing a premature chain reaction. But, for this larger, hollow piece to have minimal contact with the tungsten carbide tamper, it must be the projectile, since only the projectile's back end was in contact with the tamper prior to detonation. The rest of the tungsten carbide tamper surrounded the sub-critical mass target cylinder (called the "insert" by the designers) with air space between it and the insert. This arrangement packs the maximum amount of fissile material into a gun-assembly design.
For the first fifty years after 1945, every published description and drawing of the Little Boy mechanism assumed that a small, solid projectile was fired into the center of a larger, stationary target. However, critical mass considerations dictated that in Little Boy the more extensive, hollow piece would be the projectile. Hollow cylinders have higher critical masses than solid pieces of fissile material, because any neutrons encountered by or generated by the material are more likely to get scattered in the air than to continue a chain reaction. The larger piece would also avoid the effects of neutron reflection from the tungsten carbide tamper until it was fully joined with the rest of the fuel. Once joined and with its neutrons reflected, the assembled fissile core would comprise more than two critical masses of uranium-235. In 2004, John Coster-Mullen, a truck driver and model maker from Illinois who had studied every photograph and document on the Hiroshima bomb to make an accurate model, corrected earlier published accounts.
Fuze system.
The fuzing system was designed to trigger at the most destructive altitude, which calculations suggested was . It employed a three-stage interlock system:
Rehearsals.
The Little Boy pre-assemblies were designated L-1, L-2, L-3, L-4, L-5, L-6, L-7, and L-11. Of these, L-1, L-2, L-5, and L-6 were expended in test drops. The first drop test was conducted with L-1 on 23 July 1945. It was dropped over the sea near Tinian in order to test the radar altimeter by the B-29 later known as "Big Stink", piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, the commander of the 509th Composite Group. Two more drop tests over the sea were made on 24 and 25 July, using the L-2 and L-5 units in order to test all components. Tibbets was the pilot for both missions, but this time the bomber used was the one subsequently known as "Jabit". L-6 was used as a dress rehearsal on 29 July. The B-29 "Next Objective", piloted by Major Charles W. Sweeney, flew to Iwo Jima, where emergency procedures for loading the bomb onto a standby aircraft were practiced. This rehearsal was repeated on 31 July, but this time L-6 was reloaded onto a different B-29, "Enola Gay", piloted by Tibbets, and the bomb was test dropped near Tinian. L-11 was the assembly used for the Hiroshima bomb, and was fully assembled with its nuclear fuel by 31 July.
Bombing of Hiroshima.
Parsons, the "Enola Gay"'s weaponeer, was concerned about the possibility of an accidental detonation if the plane crashed on takeoff, so he decided not to load the four cordite powder bags into the gun breech until the aircraft was in flight. After takeoff, Parsons and his assistant, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson, made their way into the bomb bay along the narrow catwalk on the port side. Jeppson held a flashlight while Parsons disconnected the primer wires, removed the breech plug, inserted the powder bags, replaced the breech plug, and reconnected the wires. Before climbing to altitude on approach to the target, Jeppson switched the three safety plugs between the electrical connectors of the internal battery and the firing mechanism from green to red. The bomb was then fully armed. Jeppson monitored the bomb's circuits.
The bomb was dropped at approximately 08:15 (JST) on 6 August 1945. After falling for 44.4 seconds, the time and barometric triggers started the firing mechanism. The detonation happened at an altitude of . It was less powerful than the Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki, but the damage and the number of victims at Hiroshima were much higher, as Hiroshima was on flat terrain, while the hypocenter of Nagasaki lay in a small valley. According to figures published in 1945, 66,000 people were killed as a direct result of the Hiroshima blast, and 69,000 were injured to varying degrees. Later estimates put the deaths as high as 140,000 people. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that out of 24,158 Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, 6,789 were killed or missing as a result of the bombing.
The exact measurement of the explosive yield of the bomb was problematic since the weapon had never been tested. President Harry S. Truman officially announced that the yield was . This was based on Parsons's visual assessment that the blast was greater than what he had seen at the Trinity nuclear test. Since that had been estimated at , speech writers rounded up to 20 kilotons. Further discussion was then suppressed, for fear of lessening the impact of the bomb on the Japanese. Data had been collected by Luis Alvarez, Harold Agnew, and Lawrence H. Johnston on the instrument plane, "The Great Artiste", but this was not used to calculate the yield at the time. More rigorous estimates of the bomb yield and conventional bomb equivalent were made when more data was acquired following the end of the war. A 1985 study estimated the bomb's yield was around .
Physical effects.
After being selected in April 1945, Hiroshima was spared conventional bombing to serve as a pristine target, where the effects of a nuclear bomb on an undamaged city could be observed. While damage could be studied later, the energy yield of the untested Little Boy design could be determined only at the moment of detonation, using instruments dropped by parachute from a plane flying in formation with the one that dropped the bomb. Radio-transmitted data from these instruments indicated a yield of about 15 kilotons.
Comparing this yield to the observed damage produced a rule of thumb called the lethal area rule. Approximately all the people inside the area where the shock wave carried such an overpressure or greater would be killed. At Hiroshima, that area was in diameter.
The damage came from three main effects: blast, fire, and radiation.
Blast.
The blast from a nuclear bomb is the result of X-ray-heated air (the fireball) sending a shock wave or pressure wave in all directions, initially at a velocity greater than the speed of sound, analogous to thunder generated by lightning. Knowledge about urban blast destruction is based largely on studies of Little Boy at Hiroshima. Nagasaki buildings suffered similar damage at similar distances, but the Nagasaki bomb detonated from the city center over hilly terrain that was partially bare of buildings.
In Hiroshima, almost everything within of the point directly under the explosion was completely destroyed, except for about 50 heavily reinforced, earthquake-resistant concrete buildings, only the shells of which remained standing. Most were completely gutted, with their windows, doors, sashes, and frames ripped out. The perimeter of severe blast damage approximately followed the contour at .
Later test explosions of nuclear weapons with houses and other test structures nearby confirmed the 5 psi overpressure threshold. Ordinary urban buildings experiencing it were crushed, toppled, or gutted by the force of air pressure. The picture at right shows the effects of a nuclear bomb-generated 5 psi pressure wave on a test structure in Nevada in 1953.
A major effect of this kind of structural damage was that it created fuel for fires that were started simultaneously throughout the severe destruction region.
Fire.
The first effect of the explosion was blinding light, accompanied by radiant heat from the fireball. The Hiroshima fireball was in diameter, with a surface temperature of , about the same temperature as at the surface of the sun. Near ground zero, everything flammable burst into flame. One famous, anonymous Hiroshima victim, sitting on stone steps from the hypocenter, left a permanent shadow, having absorbed the fireball heat that permanently bleached the surrounding stone. Simultaneous fires were started throughout the blast-damaged area by fireball heat and by overturned stoves and furnaces, electrical shorts, etc. Twenty minutes after the detonation, these fires had merged into a firestorm, pulling in surface air from all directions to feed an inferno which consumed everything flammable.
The Hiroshima firestorm was roughly in diameter, corresponding closely to the severe blast-damage zone. (See the USSBS map, right.) Blast-damaged buildings provided fuel for the fire. Structural lumber and furniture were splintered and scattered about. Debris-choked roads obstructed firefighters. Broken gas pipes fueled the fire, and broken water pipes rendered hydrants useless. At Nagasaki, the fires failed to merge into a single firestorm, and the fire-damaged area was only one-quarter as great as at Hiroshima, due in part to a southwest wind that pushed the fires away from the city.
As the map shows, the Hiroshima firestorm jumped natural firebreaks (river channels), as well as prepared firebreaks. The spread of fire stopped only when it reached the edge of the blast-damaged area, encountering less available fuel. The Manhattan Project report on Hiroshima estimated that 60% of immediate deaths were caused by fire, but with the caveat that "many persons near the center of explosion suffered fatal injuries from more than one of the bomb effects."
Radiation.
Local fallout is dust and ash from a bomb crater, contaminated with radioactive fission products. It falls to earth downwind of the crater and can produce, with radiation alone, a lethal area much larger than that from blast and fire. With an air burst, the fission products rise into the stratosphere, where they dissipate and become part of the global environment. Because Little Boy was an air burst above the ground, there was no bomb crater and no local radioactive fallout.
However, a burst of intense neutron and gamma radiation came directly from the fission of the uranium. Its lethal radius was approximately , covering about half of the firestorm area. An estimated 30% of immediate fatalities were people who received lethal doses of this direct radiation, but died in the firestorm before their radiation injuries would have become apparent. Over 6,000 people survived the blast and fire, but died of radiation injuries. Among injured survivors, 30% had radiation injuries from which they recovered, but with a lifelong increase in cancer risk. To date, no radiation-related evidence of heritable diseases has been observed among the survivors' children.
After the surrender of Japan was finalized, Manhattan Project scientists began to immediately survey the city of Hiroshima to better understand the damage, and to communicate with Japanese physicians about radiation effects in particular. The collaboration became the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in 1946, a joint U.S.–Japanese project to track radiation injuries among survivors. In 1975 its work was superseded by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.
In 1962, scientists at Los Alamos created a mockup of Little Boy known as "Project Ichiban" in order to answer some of the unanswered questions about the exact radiation output of the bomb, which would be useful for setting benchmarks for interpreting the relationship between radiation exposure and later health outcomes. But it failed to clear up all the issues. In 1982, Los Alamos created a replica Little Boy from the original drawings and specifications. This was then tested with enriched uranium but in a safe configuration that would not cause a nuclear explosion. A hydraulic lift was used to move the projectile, and experiments were run to assess neutron emission.
Conventional weapon equivalent.
After hostilities ended, a survey team from the Manhattan Project that included William Penney, Robert Serber, and George T. Reynolds was sent to Hiroshima to evaluate the effects of the blast. From evaluating the effects on objects and structures, Penney concluded that the yield was 12 ± 1 kilotons. Later calculations based on charring pointed to a yield of 13 to 14 kilotons. In 1953, Frederick Reines calculated the yield as . Based on the Project Ichiban data, and the pressure-wave data from "The Great Artiste", the yield was estimated in the 1960s at 16.6 ± 0.3 kilotons. A review conducted by a scientist at Los Alamos in 1985 concluded, on the basis of existing blast, thermal, and radiological data, and then-current models of weapons effects, that the best estimate of the yield was with an uncertainty of 20% (±3 kt). By comparison, the best value for the Nagasaki bomb was evaluated as with an uncertainty of 10% (±2 kt), the difference in uncertainty owing to having better data on the latter.
To put these numerical differences into context, it is necessary to know that the acute effects of nuclear detonations, especially the blast and thermal effects, do not scale linearly, but generally as a cubic root. Specifically, the distance of these effects scale as a function of the yield raised to an exponential power of <templatestyles src="Fraction/styles.css" />1⁄3. So the range of the overpressure damage expected from a detonated 12 kiloton weapon with a height of burst at would be expected to be , whereas a 20 kiloton weapon would have the same range extend to , a difference of only . The areas affected for each would be and , respectively. As such, the practical differences in effects at these yield ranges are smaller than may at first appear, if one assumes that there is a linear relationship between yield and damage.
Although Little Boy exploded with the energy equivalent of around 15 kilotons of TNT, in 1946 the Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that the same blast and fire effect could have been caused by 2.1 kilotons of conventional bombs distributed evenly over the same target area: "220 B-29s carrying 1.2 kilotons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high-explosive bombs, and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs." Since the target was spread across a two-dimensional plane, the vertical component of a single spherical nuclear explosion was largely wasted. A cluster bomb pattern of smaller explosions would have been a more energy-efficient match to the target.
Post-WWII.
When the war ended, it was not expected that the inefficient Little Boy design would ever again be required, and many plans and diagrams were destroyed. However, by mid-1946 the Hanford Site reactors were suffering badly from the Wigner effect. Faced with the prospect of no more plutonium for new cores and no more polonium for the initiators for the cores that had already been produced, the Director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, ordered that some Little Boys be prepared as an interim measure until a solution could be found. No Little Boy assemblies were available, and no comprehensive set of diagrams of the Little Boy could be found, although there were drawings of the various components, and stocks of spare parts.
At Sandia Base, three Army officers, Captains Albert Bethel, Richard Meyer, and Bobbie Griffin attempted to re-create the Little Boy. They were supervised by Harlow W. Russ, an expert on Little Boy who served with Project Alberta on Tinian, and was now leader of the Z-11 Group of the Los Alamos Laboratory's Z Division at Sandia. Gradually, they managed to locate the correct drawings and parts, and figured out how they went together. Eventually, they built six Little Boy assemblies. Although the casings, barrels, and components were tested, no enriched uranium was supplied for the bombs. By early 1947, the problem caused by the Wigner effect was on its way to solution, and the three officers were reassigned.
The Navy Bureau of Ordnance began in 1947 to produce 25 "revised" Little Boy mechanical assemblies for use by the nuclear-capable Lockheed P2V Neptune aircraft carrier aircraft (which could be launched from, but not land on, the "Midway"-class aircraft carriers). Components were produced by the Naval Ordnance Plants in Pocatello, Idaho, and Louisville, Kentucky. Enough fissionable material was available by 1948 to build ten projectiles and targets, although there were only enough initiators for six. However, no actual fissionable components were produced by the end of 1948, and only two outer casings were available. By the end of 1950, only five complete Little Boy assemblies had been built. All were retired by November 1950.
The Smithsonian Institution displayed a Little Boy (complete, except for enriched uranium), until 1986. The Department of Energy took the weapon from the museum to remove its inner components, so the bomb could not be stolen and detonated with fissile material. The government returned the emptied casing to the Smithsonian in 1993. Three other disarmed bombs are on display in the United States; another is at the Imperial War Museum in London.
Notes.
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References.
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Paul Tibbets
United States Air Force general (1915–2007)
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. (23 February 1915 – 1 November 2007) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. He is best known as the aircraft captain who flew the B-29 Superfortress known as the "Enola Gay" (named after his mother) when it dropped a Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Tibbets enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he flew anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic. In February 1942, he became the commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group, which was equipped with the Boeing B-17. In July 1942, the 97th became the first heavy bombardment group to be deployed as part of the Eighth Air Force, and Tibbets became deputy group commander. He flew the lead plane in the first American daylight heavy bomber mission against German-occupied Europe on 17 August 1942, and the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe on 9 October 1942. Tibbets was chosen to fly Major General Mark W. Clark and Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Gibraltar. After flying 43 combat missions, he became the assistant for bomber operations on the staff of the Twelfth Air Force.
Tibbets returned to the United States in February 1943 to help with the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. In September 1944, he was appointed the commander of the 509th Composite Group, which would conduct the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, he participated in the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946, and was involved in the development of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet in the early 1950s. He commanded the 308th Bombardment Wing and 6th Air Division in the late 1950s, and was military attaché in India from 1964 to 1966. After leaving the Air Force in 1966, he worked for Executive Jet Aviation, serving on the founding board and as its president from 1976 until his retirement in 1987.
After the war he received wide publicity, including motion picture portrayals, and became a symbolic figure in the debate over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Early life.
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was born in Quincy, Illinois, on 23 February 1915, the son of Paul Warfield Tibbets Sr. and his wife, Enola Gay Tibbets. When he was five years old, the family moved to Davenport, Iowa, and then to Iowa's capital, Des Moines, where he was raised, and where his father became a confections wholesaler. When he was eight, his family moved to Hialeah, Florida, to escape from harsh midwestern winters. As a boy, he was very interested in flying. One day, his mother agreed to pay one dollar to get him into an airplane at the local carnival. In 1927, Tibbet's father, hired
barnstormer, Doug Davis, to fly over Hialeah Park Race Track as a promotional stunt. Tibbets, who was 12 years old at the time, flew with Davis, dropping Baby Ruth candy bars with tiny parachutes to the crowd of people attending the races.
In the late 1920s, business issues forced Tibbets's family to return to Alton, Illinois, where he graduated from Western Military Academy in 1933. He then attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, and became an initiated member of the Epsilon Zeta chapter of Sigma Nu fraternity in 1934. During that time, Tibbets took private flying lessons at Miami's Opa-locka Airport with Rusty Heard, who later became a captain at Eastern Airlines. After his undergraduate work, Tibbets had planned on becoming an abdominal surgeon. He transferred to the University of Cincinnati after his second year to complete his pre-med studies there, because the University of Florida had no medical school at the time. However, he attended for only a year and a half as he changed his mind about wanting to become a doctor. Instead, he decided to enlist in the United States Army and become a pilot in the United States Army Air Corps.
Early military career.
Because he went to a military school, attended some college, and had some flight experience, Tibbets qualified for the Aviation Cadet Training Program. On 25 February 1937, he enlisted in the army at Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and was sent to Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas, for primary and basic flight instruction. During his training, he showed himself to be an above-average pilot. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and received his pilot rating in 1938 at Kelly Field in San Antonio.
After graduation, Tibbets was assigned to the 16th Observation Squadron, which was based at Lawson Field, Georgia, with a flight supporting the Infantry School at nearby Fort Benning. It was at Fort Benning that Tibbets met Lucy Frances Wingate, then a clerk at a department store in Columbus, Georgia. The two quietly married in a Roman Catholic seminary in Holy Trinity, Alabama, on 19 June 1938 even though Tibbets was a Protestant. Tibbets did not inform his family or his commanding officer, and the couple arranged for the notice to be kept out of the local newspaper. They had two sons. Paul III was born in 1940, in Columbus, Georgia, and graduated from Huntingdon College and Auburn University. He was a colonel in the United States Army Reserve and worked as a hospital pharmacist. He died in West Monroe, Louisiana, in 2016. The younger son, Gene Wingate Tibbets, was born in 1944, and was at the time of his death in 2012 residing in Georgiana in Butler County in southern Alabama.
While Tibbets was stationed at Fort Benning, he was promoted to first lieutenant and served as a personal pilot for Brigadier General George S. Patton, Jr., in 1940 and 1941. In June 1941, Tibbets transferred to the 9th Bombardment Squadron of the 3d Bombardment Group at Hunter Field, Savannah, Georgia, as the engineering officer, and flew the A-20 Havoc. While there he was promoted to captain. In December 1941, he received orders to join the 29th Bombardment Group at MacDill Field, Florida, for training on the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. On 7 December 1941, Tibbets heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while listening to the radio during a routine flight. Due to fears that German U-boats might enter Tampa Bay and bombard MacDill Field, the 29th Bombardment Group moved to Savannah. Tibbets remained on temporary duty with the 3d Bombardment Group, forming an anti-submarine patrol at Pope Army Airfield, North Carolina, with 21 B-18 Bolo medium bombers. The B-18s were used as an intermediate trainer, which pilots flew after basic flight training in a Cessna UC-78 and before qualifying in the B-17.
War against Germany.
In February 1942, Tibbets reported for duty with the 29th Bombardment Group as its engineering officer. Three weeks later he was named the commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group, equipped with the B-17D. It was initially based at MacDill, and then Sarasota Army Airfield, Florida, before moving to Godfrey Army Airfield in Bangor, Maine.
In July 1942 the 97th became the first heavy bombardment group of the Eighth Air Force to be deployed to England, where it was based at RAF Polebrook. It had been hastily assembled to meet demands for an early deployment, and arrived without any training in the basics of high altitude daylight bombing. In the first weeks of August 1942, under the tutelage of Royal Air Force veterans, the group received intensive training for its first mission. The group commander, Lieutenant Colonel Cornelius W. Cousland, was replaced by Colonel Frank A. Armstrong Jr., who appointed Tibbets as his deputy.
Tibbets flew the lead bomber "Butcher Shop" for the first American daylight heavy bomber mission on 17 August 1942, a shallow-penetration raid against a marshalling yard in Rouen in Occupied France, with Armstrong as his co-pilot. This was not Tibbets's regular aircraft, "Red Gremlin", nor his regular crew, which included bombardier Thomas Ferebee and navigator Theodore Van Kirk, who later flew with him in "Enola Gay". On 9 October 1942, Tibbets led the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe, attacking industrial targets in the French city of Lille. Poor bombing accuracy resulted in numerous civilian casualties and less damage to the rail installations than hoped, but the mission was hailed an overall success because it reached its target against heavy and constant fighter attack. Of the 108 aircraft in the raid, 33 were shot down or had to turn back due to mechanical problems.
On that first mission, Tibbets saw in real time that his bombs were falling on innocent civilians. At the time, he thought to himself, "People are getting killed down there that don't have any business getting killed. Those are not soldiers". But then he thought back to a lesson he had learned during his time at medical school from his roommate who was a doctor. This doctor explained to him about his former classmates who failed the program and ended up in drug sales. The reason why they had failed the program was because "they had too much sympathy for their patients", which "destroyed their ability to render the medical necessities". It dawned on Tibbets that:<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />I am just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. I am supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I won't be worth anything if I do that ... I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb. That was the thing that I was going to do the best of my ability. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don't care whether you are dropping atom bombs, or 100-pound bombs, or shooting a rifle. You have got to leave the moral issue out of it.
In the leadup to Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, the commander of the Eighth Air Force, Major General Carl Spaatz was ordered to provide his best two pilots for a secret mission. He chose Tibbets and Major Wayne Connors. Tibbets flew Major General Mark W. Clark from Polebrook to Gibraltar while Connors flew Clark's chief of staff, Brigadier General Lyman Lemnitzer. A few weeks later Tibbets flew the Supreme Allied Commander, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower, there. "By reputation", historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, Tibbets was "the best flier in the Army Air Force".
Tibbets had flown 25 combat missions against targets in France when the 97th Bomb Group was transferred to North Africa as part of Major General Jimmy Doolittle's Twelfth Air Force. For Tibbets, the war in North Africa introduced him to the realities of aerial warfare. He said that he saw the real effects of bombing civilians and the trauma of losing his brothers in arms. In January 1943, Tibbets, who had now flown 43 combat missions, was assigned as the assistant for bomber operations to Colonel Lauris Norstad, Assistant Chief of Staff of Operations (A-3) of the Twelfth Air Force. Tibbets had recently been given a battlefield promotion to colonel, but did not receive it, as such promotions had to be confirmed by a panel of officers. He was told that Norstad had vetoed the promotion, saying "there's only going to be one colonel in operations".
Tibbets did not get along well with Norstad, or with Doolittle's chief of staff, Brigadier General Hoyt Vandenberg. In one planning meeting, Norstad wanted an all-out raid on Bizerte to be flown at . Tibbets protested that flak would be most effective at that altitude. When challenged by Norstad, Tibbets said he would lead the mission himself at 6,000 feet if Norstad would fly as his co-pilot. Norstad backed down, and the mission was successfully flown at .
War against Japan.
When General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, the Chief of United States Army Air Forces, requested an experienced bombardment pilot to help with the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, Doolittle recommended Tibbets. Tibbets returned to the United States in February 1943. At the time, the B-29 program was beset by a host of technical problems, and the chief test pilot, Edmund T. Allen, had been killed in a crash of the prototype aircraft.
Working with the Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas, Tibbets test-flew the B-29 and soon accumulated more flight time in it than any other pilot. He found that without defensive armament and armor plating, the aircraft was lighter, and its performance was much improved. In simulated combat engagements against a P-47 fighter at the B-29's cruising altitude of , he discovered that the B-29 had a smaller turning radius than the P-47, and could avoid it by turning away.
After a year of developmental testing of the B-29, Tibbets was assigned in March 1944 as director of operations of the 17th Bombardment Operational Training Wing (Very Heavy), a B-29 training unit based at Grand Island Army Air Field, Nebraska, and commanded by Armstrong. Its role was to transition pilots to the B-29. Crews were reluctant to embrace the troublesome B-29, and to shame the male crews, Tibbets taught and certified two Women Airforce Service Pilots, Dora Dougherty and Dorothea (Didi) Johnson Moorman, to fly the B-29 as demonstration pilots, and the crews' attitude changed.
On 1 September 1944, Tibbets reported to Colorado Springs Army Airfield, the headquarters of the Second Air Force, where he met with its commander, Major General Uzal Ent, and three representatives of the Manhattan Project, Lieutenant Colonel John Lansdale Jr., Captain William S. Parsons, and Norman F. Ramsey Jr., who briefed him on the project. Tibbets was told that he would be in charge of the 509th Composite Group, a fully self-contained organization of about 1,800 men, which would have 15 B-29s and a high priority for all kinds of military stores. Ent gave Tibbets a choice of three possible bases: Great Bend Army Airfield, Kansas; Mountain Home Army Airfield, Idaho; or Wendover Army Air Field, Utah. Tibbets selected Wendover for its remoteness.
When the operation was still in its development stages, Armstrong and Colonel Roscoe C. Wilson were the leading candidates to command the group who was designated to drop the atomic bomb. Wilson was the Army Air Force project officer who provided liaison support to the Manhattan Project. Armstrong was an experienced combat veteran against German targets, but he was in his forties and had been severely injured in a fire in the summer of 1943. Wilson had no combat experience and was qualified primarily because of his engineering background and association with the project. Tibbets was considerably younger than both men and had experience in both staff and command duties in heavy bomber combat operations. He was already an experienced B-29 pilot, which made him an ideal candidate for the top-secret project. Tibbets indicated that the decision on what aircraft to use to deliver the bomb was left to him.
Tibbets was promoted to colonel in January 1945 and brought his wife and family along with him to Wendover. He felt that allowing married men in the group to bring their families would improve morale, although it put a strain on his own marriage. In order to disguise all the civilian engineers on base who were working on the Manhattan Project, Tibbets was forced to lie to his wife; he told her that the engineers were "sanitary workers". At one point, Tibbets found that Lucy had co-opted a scientist to unplug a drain. During a meeting with these "sanitary engineers", Tibbets was told by Robert Oppenheimer that his aircraft might not survive the shock waves from an atomic bomb explosion.
On 6 March 1945 (concurrent with the activation of Project Alberta), the 1st Ordnance Squadron, Special (Aviation) was activated at Wendover, again using Army Air Forces personnel on hand or already at Los Alamos. Its purpose was to provide "skilled machinists, welders and munitions workers" and special equipment to the group to enable it to assemble atomic weapons at its operating base, thereby allowing the weapons to be transported more safely in their component parts. A rigorous candidate selection process was used to recruit personnel, reportedly with an 80% rejection rate. The 509th Composite Group reached full strength in May 1945.
With the addition of the 1st Ordnance Squadron to its roster in March 1945, the 509th Composite Group had an authorized strength of 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men, almost all of whom deployed to Tinian, an island in the northern Marianas within striking distance of Japan, in May and June 1945. The 320th Troop Carrier Squadron kept its base of operations at Wendover. In addition to its authorized strength, the 509th had attached to it on Tinian all 51 civilian and military personnel of Project Alberta. Furthermore, two representatives from Washington, D.C. were present on the island: the deputy director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, and Rear Admiral William R. Purnell of the Military Policy Committee.
The ground support echelon of the 509th Composite Group received movement orders and moved by rail on 26 April 1945, to its port of embarkation at Seattle, Washington. On 6 May the support elements sailed on the SS "Cape Victory" for the Marianas, while the group's materiel was shipped on the SS "Emile Berliner". An advance party of the air echelon flew by C-54 to North Field, Tinian, between 15 and 22 May, where it was joined by the ground echelon on 29 May 1945. Project Alberta's "Destination Team" also sent most of its members to Tinian to supervise the assembly, loading, and dropping of the bombs under the administrative title of 1st Technical Services Detachment, Miscellaneous War Department Group.
On 5 August 1945, Tibbets formally named his B-29 "Enola Gay" after his mother. "Enola Gay", serial number 4486292, had been personally selected by him, on recommendation of a civilian production supervisor, while it was still on the assembly line at the Glenn L. Martin Company plant in Bellevue, Nebraska. The regularly assigned aircraft commander, Robert A. Lewis, was unhappy to be displaced by Tibbets for this important mission, and became furious when he arrived at the airfield on the morning of 6 August to see the aircraft he considered his painted with the now-famous nose art. Lewis would fly the mission as Tibbets's co-pilot.
At 02:45 the next day—in accordance with the terms of Operations Order No. 35—the "Enola Gay" departed North Field for Hiroshima, Japan, with Tibbets at the controls. Tinian was approximately away from Japan, so it took six hours to reach Hiroshima. The atomic bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was dropped over Hiroshima at 08:15 local time. Tibbets recalled that the city was covered with a tall mushroom cloud after the bomb was dropped.
Tibbets was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by Spaatz immediately after landing on Tinian. He became a celebrity, with pictures and interviews of his wife and children in the major American newspapers. He was seen as a national hero who had ended the war with Japan. Tibbets later received an invitation from President Harry S. Truman to visit the White House. The 509th Composite Group was awarded an Air Force Outstanding Unit Award in 1999.
Post-war military career.
The 509th Composite Group returned to the United States on 6 November 1945, and was stationed at Roswell Army Airfield, New Mexico. Colonel William H. Blanchard replaced Tibbets as group commander on 22 January 1946, and also became the first commander of the 509th Bombardment Wing, the successor to the 509th Composite Group. Tibbets was a technical advisor to the 1946 Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, but he and his "Enola Gay" crew were not chosen to drop another atomic bomb.
Tibbets then attended the Air Command and Staff School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. On graduating in 1947 he was posted to the Directorate of Requirements at Air Force Headquarters at the Pentagon. When the head of the directorate, Brigadier General Thomas S. Power, was posted to London as air attaché, he was replaced by Brigadier General Carl Brandt. Brandt appointed Tibbets as director of Directorate of Requirements's Strategic Air Division, which was responsible for drawing up requirements for future bombers. Tibbets was convinced that the bombers of the future would be jet aircraft and thus became involved in the Boeing B-47 Stratojet program. He subsequently served as B-47 project officer at Boeing in Wichita from July 1950 until February 1952. He then became commander of the Proof Test Division at Eglin Air Force Base in Valparaiso, Florida, where flight testing of the B-47 was conducted.
Tibbets returned to Maxwell Air Force Base, where he attended the Air War College. After he graduated in June 1955, he became Director of War Plans at the Allied Air Forces in Central Europe Headquarters at Fontainebleau, France. He left Lucy and his sons behind in Alabama, and he and Lucy divorced that year. During his posting to France, he met a French divorcee named Andrea Quattrehomme, who became his second wife. He returned to the United States in February 1956 to command the 308th Bombardment Wing at Hunter Air Force Base, Georgia, and married her in the base chapel on 4 May 1956. They had a son, James Tibbets.
In January 1958, Tibbets became commander of the 6th Air Division at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. and was promoted to brigadier general in 1959. This was followed by another tour of duty at the Pentagon as director of Management Analysis. In July 1962, he was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as deputy director for operations, and then, in June 1963, as deputy director for the National Military Command System. In 1964, Tibbets was named military attaché in India. He spent 22 months there on this posting, which ended in June 1966. He retired from the United States Air Force (USAF) on 31 August 1966.
Later life and death.
After his retirement from the Air Force, Tibbets worked for Executive Jet Aviation (EJA), an air taxi company based in Columbus, Ohio, and now called NetJets. He was one of the founding board members and attempted to extend the company's operations to Europe, but was unsuccessful. He retired from the company in 1968, and returned to Miami, Florida, where he had spent part of his childhood. The banks foreclosed on EJA in 1970, and Bruce Sundlun became president. Sundlun lured Tibbets back to EJA that year. Tibbets succeeded Sundlun as president on 21 April 1976, and remained in the role until 1986. He served for a year as a consultant before his second and final retirement from EJA in 1987.
Tibbets died in his Columbus, Ohio, home on 1 November 2007, at the age of 92. He had suffered small strokes and heart failure during his final years and had been in hospice care. He was survived by his French-born wife, Andrea, and two sons from his first marriage, Paul III and Gene as well as his son, James, from his second marriage. Tibbets had asked for no funeral or headstone, because he feared that opponents of the bombing might use it as a place of protest or destruction. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over the English Channel; he had flown over the Channel many times during the war.
Tibbets' grandson Paul W. Tibbets IV graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1989, and in April 2006 became commander of the 393rd Bomb Squadron, flying the B-2 Spirit at Whiteman AFB, Missouri. The squadron was one of the two operational squadrons that had formed part of the 509th Composite Group when Tibbets commanded it. Paul Tibbets IV was promoted to brigadier general in 2014, and became Deputy Director for Nuclear Operations at the Global Operations Directorate of the United States Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. As such, he was responsible for America's strategic nuclear forces. On 5 June 2015, he assumed command of the 509th Bomb Wing.
Legacy.
In later life, Tibbets strongly defended the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and became a symbolic figure in the debate over their use. At the time of his posting to India, a newspaper denounced him as the "world's greatest killer". In a 1975 interview he said: "I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did ... I sleep clearly every night". "I knew when I got the assignment", he told a reporter in 2005, "it was going to be an emotional thing. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible".
In 1976, the United States government apologized to Japan after Tibbets re-enacted the bombing—complete with a mushroom cloud—in a restored B-29 at an air show in Texas. He said that he had not intended for the re-enactment to insult the Japanese people. In 1995, he denounced the 50th-anniversary exhibition of the "Enola Gay" at the Smithsonian Institution, which attempted to present the bombing in context with the destruction it caused, as a "damn big insult", due to its focus on the Japanese casualties rather than the brutality of the Japanese government. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1996.
Tibbets, Paul W.
Colonel (Air Corps), U.S. Army Air Forces
393d Bombardment Squadron, 509th Composite Wing, Twentieth Air Force
Date of Action: 6 August 1945
Awards and decorations.
Distinguished Service Cross citation.
Citation:
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress 9 July 1918, takes pleasure in presenting the Distinguished Service Cross to Colonel (Air Corps) Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., United States Army Air Forces, for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as Pilot of a B-29 Very Heavy Bomber in the 393d Bombardment Squadron, 509th Composite Group (VH), Twentieth Air force, while participating in a bombing mission on 6 August 1945, over Japan. On this date Colonel Tibbets flew a B-29 type aircraft in a daring daylight strike against the city of Hiroshima on the main island of Honshu, Japan, from a base in the Marianas Islands carrying for the first time a type of bomb totally new to modern warfare. Flying the 1,500 miles of open water to the coast of Japan, he guided his plane over the island of Shikoku and the Inland Sea, threatened with the constant danger of anti-aircraft. He successfully dropped his bomb upon reaching the Target city, this single attack being the culmination of many months of tireless effort, training and organization unique in the Army Air Forces history, during which he constantly coped with new problems in precision bombing and engineering. The result of this attack was tremendous damage to the city of Hiroshima, contributing materially to the effectiveness of our strikes against the enemy. By extraordinary flying skill, gallant leadership, and successful performance of the flight despite considerable danger, Colonel Tibbets thereby rendered outstanding, distinguished and valorous service to our Nation.
In popular culture.
Barry Nelson played Tibbets in the film "The Beginning or the End" (1947). "Above and Beyond" (1952) depicted the World War II events that involved Tibbets; Robert Taylor starred as Tibbets and Eleanor Parker played the role of his first wife Lucy. Tibbets was also the model for screenwriter Sy Bartlett's fictional character "Major Joe Cobb" in the film "Twelve O'Clock High" (1949), and for a brief period in February 1949 was slated to be the film's technical advisor until his replacement at the last minute by Colonel John H. deRussy. ', a 1980 made-for-television movie, somewhat fictionalized, told the story of Tibbets crew. Patrick Duffy played Tibbets and Kim Darby played Lucy.
In other fictional portrayals, Nicholas Kilbertus was Tibbets in the film "Day One" (1989), David Gow played him in the TV movie "Hiroshima" (1995), and Ian Shaw played the part in the BBC's TV docudrama "Hiroshima" (2005), for which Tibbets was also interviewed on camera. An interview with Tibbets also appeared in the movie "Atomic Cafe" (1982), as well as was in the 1970s British documentary series "The World at War", and the "Men Who Brought the Dawn" episode of the Smithsonian Networks' "War Stories" (1995). Tibbets figured largely in the 2000 book "Duty: A Father, His Son and the Man Who Won the War" by Bob Greene of the "Chicago Tribune". In 1989, he published his memoir "Flight of the Enola Gay" which chronicles his life to that date.
Notes.
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References.
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Enola Gay (disambiguation)
The Enola Gay is a USAAF B-29 Superfortress, that dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb used in warfare, on Hiroshima in Japan during WWII
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Enola Gay may also refer to:
See also.
Topics referred to by the same term
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 This page lists associated with the title .

Aerial bombing of cities
Bombardment of a city from aircraft
The aerial bombing of cities is an optional element of strategic bombing, which became widespread in warfare during World War I. The bombing of cities grew to a vast scale in World War II and is still practiced today. The development of aerial bombardment marked an increased capacity of armed forces to deliver ordnance from the air against combatants, military bases, and factories, with a greatly reduced risk to its ground forces. The killing of civilians and non-combatants in bombed cities has variously been a deliberate goal of strategic bombing, or unavoidable collateral damage resulting from intent and technology. A number of multilateral efforts have been made to restrict the use of aerial bombardment so as to protect non-combatants and other civilians.
Before World War I.
Kites.
Incendiary kites were first used in warfare by the Chinese. During the Song dynasty the "Fire Crow", a kite carrying incendiary powder, a fuse, and a burning stick of incense was developed as a weapon. Walter de Milemete's 1326 "De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum" treatise depicts a group of knights flying kites laden with a black-powder filled firebomb over the wall of city. In the 17th century, the forces of Thai king Phetracha tied gunpowder barrels to kites used for airborne assault.
First Italian War of Independence.
In 1849, Austrian forces besieging Venice during the First Italian War of Independence launched some 200 incendiary balloons, each carrying a 24- to 30-pound bomb that was to be dropped from the balloon with a time fuse over the besieged city. The balloons were launched from land and from the Austrian navy ship SMS "Vulcano" that acted as a balloon carrier, though the attack ended in failure as winds blew the balloons away, none reaching their intended target.
Italian Invasion of Libya.
The first ever air raid was conducted during the Italo-Turkish War by Italian forces against the Ottoman province of Libya on November 1, 1911. Giulio Gavotti dropped 1.5 kg of bombs on Ain Zara, a village 8 km west of the capital Tripoli.
Balkan War.
Adrianople (presently Edirne) was bombed by Bulgaria in 1912 in the First Balkan War. Historically, it was the first bombardment of a city from a heavier-than-air aircraft.
In the morning of 29 October 1912 at 9:30 a.m. the plane Albatros F-3 took off from an airfield near the village of Mustafa Pasha – present day Svilengrad, Bulgaria. The pilot was captain Radul Mikov with spotter and bombardier Prodan Tarakchiev. The airfield was specially created to carry out the take off and landing. According to the report weather conditions were perfect. The flight lasted for 1 hour and 20 minutes and the altitude was 500m. During the flight the crew flew over the city of Edirne, discovered hidden Ottoman forces in the nearby villages and flew towards to city railroad station, near the village of Karaagach. The plane was equipped with two bombs, which were released at 10:00 am over the station. The crew landed successfully at the airfield with 4 holes on the hull.
A number of journalists and military attachés attended the site.
Mexican Revolution.
In May 1914, during the revolution of 1910–17, General Venustiano Carranza, later president, ordered a biplane to bomb Neveria Hill adjacent to the downtown area of Mazatlán in order to take the city. The bomb landed not on target but in a city street and in the process killed four civilians, including a French diplomat, and wounded several others.
World War I.
The first civilian target to be bombed from the air was the Belgian city of Antwerp. This city, at that moment the National Redoubt of Belgium, was bombed during the night of 24–25 August 1914. Instead of targeting the surrounding fortresses, the Zeppelin LZ 25's intention was to bomb the clearly distinguishable historical centre of the city. The zeppelin dropped approximately ten bombs, killing ten people and injuring forty.
The British Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) undertook the first Entente strategic bombing missions on 22 September 1914 and 8 October, when it bombed the Zeppelin bases in Cologne and Düsseldorf. The aeroplanes carried twenty-pound bombs, and at least one airship was destroyed. On 19 January 1915 two German Zeppelins dropped 24 fifty-kilogram (110 lb) high-explosive bombs and ineffective three-kilogram incendiaries on the English towns of Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, King's Lynn, and the surrounding villages; in all, four people were killed, 16 injured, and monetary damage was estimated at £7,740.
London was bombed for the first time on 30 May 1915. In July 1916, the German government allowed directed raids against urban centers, sparking 23 airship raids in 1916 in which 125 tons of ordnance were dropped, killing 293 people and injuring 691. Gradually British air defenses improved and the Germans also introduced large bomber aircraft for bombing Britain. In 1917 and 1918 there were only eleven Zeppelin raids against England, and the final raid occurred on 5 August 1918, which resulted in the death of KK Peter Strasser, commander of the German Naval Airship Department. By the end of the war, 51 raids had been undertaken, in which 5,806 bombs were dropped, killing 557 people and injuring 1,358. In the course of the Zeppelin raids the Germans lost more than half their airships and 40% of their crew. It has been argued that the raids were effective far beyond material damage inflicted, in diverting and hampering wartime production, and diverting twelve squadrons and over 10,000 men to air defenses.
The British developed an Independent Force of long-range bombers that could bomb Berlin, but the war ended before these raids began.
After the war, bombers' increasing sophistication led to the general belief that aerial bombing would both destroy cities and be impossible to stop; as Stanley Baldwin stated in a 1932 speech, "The bomber will always get through".
Interwar period.
Iraqi revolt against the British.
After World War I, there were protests in Iraq against continued British rule. Many Iraqis across a wide spectrum of opinion opposed the British Mandate for Iraq. The Iraqi revolt against the British began, with peaceful demonstrations in May 1920. Initial demands were rejected by the British administration, and fighting broke out in June 1920. This was suppressed, with many deaths, and at very high costs to the Empire. A policy of 'aerial policing', an invention of Winston Churchill's was brought in. This amounted to aerial bombing of rebelling tribesmen, followed up by pacification by ground troops. This continued up to the mid 1920s. The aerial campaign included Sir Arthur Harris, who commanded a Vickers Vernon squadron engaged in the bombing and strafing of revolting tribesmen. Harris once remarked that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand."
Somaliland Campaign.
Following the end of World War I, the British stepped up their efforts in their war against the Dervish movement, their sultan Diiriye Guure and emir, the so-called "Mad Mullah", whom they had been fighting for the control the area formerly known as British Somaliland. However, they had been unable to defeat the Dervish movement for nearly 25 years. In January 1920, the British launched a combined aerial and land attack against the Dhulbahante garesas, bombarding Taleeh, the capital of the revolt. The Somaliland Campaign has been described as one of the bloodiest and longest-running conflicts in the history of sub-Saharan Africa and the Somali forces are noted for concurrently repelling the invading British, Italian and Abyssinian forces for a period of 25 years.
Tulsa race massacre.
In the United States during the Tulsa race massacre of May 31 – June 1, 1921, private aircraft flown by white men dropped kerosene bombs on the Greenwood neighborhood.
Cristero War.
During the Cristero War in Mexico in 1929, Irish pilot and mercenary Patrick Murphy mistakenly dropped several improvised "suitcase bombs" on the border town of Naco, Arizona, while bombing government forces in the adjacent town of Naco, Sonora, for the Cristero revolutionaries. The bombing, which caused damage to many buildings and injured several bystanders on the American side of the international