- #ENOLA GAY PILOTS WHAT HAVE WE DONE HOW TO#
- #ENOLA GAY PILOTS WHAT HAVE WE DONE MOVIE#
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Over a large area a black, sticky rain fell, leaving indelible stains. Half an hour later, a fire storm began, which turned into a tornado. On the ground, the blast demolished buildings, killing many people.
The city was hidden by the mushrooming cloud.' His co-pilot, Robert Lewis, wrote in his journal, 'What have we done?'
)Īfter 'Little Boy' was dropped, 'a bright light filled the plane,' wrote Paul Tibbets later. It's not quite what it seems, as the first film was unsatisfactory and the scene was re-shot later. There is a famous photograph of soldiers raising the US flag on Mount Suribachi. (Nearly 7,000 US Marines were killed there only 212 of the 20,000 Japanese survived.
On the way, Paul Tibbets did a symbolic and unscheduled circuit of Iwo Jima, the Pacific island where many US soldiers had been killed in a month-long battle with Japanese troops earlier in 1945 - the first US invasion of Japanese territory. The Enola Gay flew from the island of Tinian in the Pacific, accompanied by 2 observation planes, there to observe the military experiment this was. The bomb had a nickname too: 'Little Boy'. The only member of the crew in the know was the Enola Gay's pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr. The crew were trained to operate the planes, but they were not told just what bomb they were carrying until take-off on August 6. The B-29 Superfortress bomber named 'Enola Gay' had been (with 14 others) specially modified to carry the weight of an atomic bomb yet still fly high and fast. He had asked a military chief to estimate how many US soldiers might be killed if the US army invaded Japan.
#ENOLA GAY PILOTS WHAT HAVE WE DONE FREE#
In a letter he wrote 8 years later Harry Truman said, 'Dropping the bombs ended the war, saved lives and gave the free nations a chance to face the facts'.
#ENOLA GAY PILOTS WHAT HAVE WE DONE HOW TO#
(He had been at the Potsdam Conference, meeting the UK's prime minister Winston Churchill and the Russian leader Joseph Stalin to discuss how to sort out post-war Europe). Ladybirds are quite difficult to dislodge, and the rhyme, when recited, was traditionally supposed to induce them to fly off of their own accord.Īlthough the count-down had begun long before, the final order to drop 2 atomic bombs on Japan was given by President Harry Truman - who himself was in the air at the time, flying home from Germany. There are numerous explanations for it, too. 'ladybirds': there are numerous versions (not all in English) of the nursery rhyme which begins, 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, Your house is on fire and your children are gone'. In ancient legend salamanders were supposed to be able to live in fire. 'salamanders': a salamander is a lizard-like amphibian with a smooth skin. 'drizzle': this means 'rain lightly', but here is used to evoke the way the bees descend, buzzing, on to the flowers.
#ENOLA GAY PILOTS WHAT HAVE WE DONE MOVIE#
'Marilyn's skirts': there is a famous film clip/still photograph of the American movie star Marilyn Monroe, in which she walks over a pavement air vent and the warm air from it blows the full skirt of her light-coloured dress upwards over her head. ' Enola Gay': this was the name given to (and painted on) the plane which carried the bomb to Hiroshima.