Enola Gay

The Enola Gay was the B-29 bomber that carried and dropped the first combat atomic bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Its place in the account extends beyond the delivery of the weapon: it links the mechanics of the bombing to the official control of news about it and to the sharply different reactions of people who learned what had happened.

Aircraft and Mission

At exactly 8:14 a.m. on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the untested, gun-type uranium bomb over Hiroshima. The aircraft was named for the mother of its pilot, Paul Tibbets. The bomb weighed 9,700 pounds, a concrete measure of the weapon carried by the bomber on its combat mission.

Reporting the Bombing

John Manley was in Washington, sent there by J. Robert Oppenheimer to report on the bombing. After a five-hour communications delay, Manley received a message from Captain Parsons, the Enola Gay’s arming officer, that the visible effects were greater than those at the New Mexico test. Manley was about to call Oppenheimer when Leslie Groves stopped him: no information about the bombing was to be released until the president announced it. Manley waited through the night, then reached Oppenheimer just as Harry S. Truman’s statement went out on nationwide radio. Their exchange made the Enola Gay’s mission part of a second operation—the controlled transmission of news from the Pacific to the public and to the scientists who had built the bomb.

Reactions and Consequences

At Tinian, Phil Morrison had helped prepare the bomb and load it aboard the Enola Gay. He recalled that Los Alamos personnel held a party that night, but he sat on the edge of a cot wondering what was happening in Hiroshima. At Los Alamos, accounts of celebration and restraint coexisted: some parties went on, while an attempted gathering among scientists became a fiasco. After leaving a party, Oppenheimer saw a physicist retching in the bushes; the sight made him recognize that an accounting had begun. The Enola Gay thus appears not only as the aircraft that delivered Little Boy, but as the point of departure for consequences that could not be contained by the mission’s success.