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Little was known about radioactive fallout in 1945, but by the ’50s, scientists realized that wind, rain and waterways would have spread radioactive particles beyond the blast area and across the landscape. There were also considerable ecological impacts. The bomb obliterated the city and its infrastructure, destroying 60,000 buildings. Approximately 80,000 people were killed immediately by the blast, while over the coming months, thousands more would die due to burns, radiation sickness and cancer, with malnutrition also contributing to the number of fatalities.
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Most were civilians, although there was a military garrison in the city. The city of Hiroshima has estimated the bomb and its after-effects caused the deaths of 237,000 people. According to Caron, ‘it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city.’ Tail gunner Robert Caron described the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima as ‘a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke’, which ‘had a red core in it’ and ‘everything was burning inside’. Seconds later there was an intense flash of light, followed by two shockwaves that rocked the plane as it set course back to its base on the Pacific island of Tinian. Paul Tibbets then forced the plane into a sharp banking dive away from the detonation point. Weighing 4,400 kg (9,700 pounds), the bomb was so heavy that after it was released, the aircraft’s nose lurched up dramatically. The Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, becomes the first aircraft in history to drop an atomic bomb. And that 40 years later, the song has lost none of its charm, and consolidated its place in the pantheon of popular music…Ī fateful moment: 8.15am Japan Standard Time on Monday, August 6, 1945. Or perhaps equally baffling: that an irresistible, dancefloor-filling, almost gleeful song about this infamous plane, and one of history’s darkest days, could top the charts. But also the fact that, the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the aircraft’s pilot and commanding officer, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr, had named the Enola Gay after his mother. The devastating power of nuclear weapons, for instance. It therefore seems an appropriate moment to reconsider, through the lens of OMD’s song, how we might begin to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible. The Enola Gay, the United States Army Air Forces plane that dropped the bomb, inspired Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) to write a synth-pop song of the same name, which reaches its fortieth anniversary this year. The last survivor of its crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died on 28 July 2014 at the age of 93.Seventy-five years have passed since an atomic bomb known as ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima. Since 2003, the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. The cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the National Mall, for the bombing's 50th anniversary in 1995, amid controversy. In the 1980s, veterans groups engaged in a call for the Smithsonian to put the aircraft on display, leading to an acrimonious debate about exhibiting the aircraft without a proper historical context.
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Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961. In May 1946, it was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in a secondary target, Nagasaki, being bombed instead.Īfter the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the near-complete destruction of the city.
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Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. The Enola Gay () is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.