How 12 'Enola Gay' Crew Members Remember Dropping the Atomic Bomb (mentalfloss.com)
- Reference: 0178639496
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/11/0518238/how-12-enola-gay-crew-members-remember-dropping-the-atomic-bomb
- Source link: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24269/crew-enola-gay-dropping-atomic-bomb
"Twelve men were on that flight..." remembers the online magazine Mental Floss , adding " [1]Almost all had something to say after the war ."
> The group was segregated from the rest of the military and trained in secret. Even those in the group only knew as much as they needed to know in order to perform their duties. The group deployed to Tinian in 1945 with 15 B-29 bombers, flight crews, ground crews, and other personnel, a total of about 1770 men. The mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (special mission 13) involved seven planes, but the one we remember was the Enola Gay.
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> Air Force captain Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk did not know the destructive force of the nuclear bomb before Hiroshima. He was 24 years old at that time, a veteran of 58 missions in North Africa. Paul Tibbets told him this mission would shorten or end the war, but Van Kirk had heard that line before. Hiroshima made him a believer. Van Kirk felt the bombing of Hiroshima was worth the price in that it ended the war before the invasion of Japan, which promised to be [2]devastating to both sides . " I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese."
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> In 2005, Van Kirk came as close as he ever got to regret. "I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life..."
Many of the other crewmembers also felt the bomb ultimately saved lives.
The Washington Post has also [3]published a new oral history of the flight after it took off from Tinian Island. The oral history was assembled for a new book published this week titled [4] The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. .
> Col. Paul W. Tibbets, lead pilot of the Enola Gay: We were only eight minutes off the ground when Capt. William S. "Deak" Parsons and Lt. Morris R. Jeppson lowered themselves into the bomb bay to insert a slug of uranium and the conventional explosive charge into the core of the strange-looking weapon. I wondered why we were calling it ''Little Boy." Little Boy was 28 inches in diameter and 12 feet long. Its weight was a little more than 9,000 pounds. With its coat of dull gunmetal paint, it was an ugly monster...
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> Lt. Morris R. Jeppson, crew member of the Enola Gay: Parsons was second-in-command of the military in the Manhattan Project. The Little Boy weapon was Parsons's design. He was greatly concerned that B-29s loaded with conventional bombs were crashing at the ends of runways on Tinian during takeoff and that such an event could cause the U-235 projectile in the gun of Little Boy to fly down the barrel and into the U-235 target. This could have caused a low-level nuclear explosion on Tinian...
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> Jeppson: On his own, Parsons decided that he would go on the Hiroshima mission and that he would load the gun after the Enola Gay was well away from Tinian.
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> Tibbets: That way, if we crashed, we would lose only the airplane and crew, himself included... Jeppson held the flashlight while Parsons struggled with the mechanism of the bomb, inserting the explosive charge that would send one block of uranium flying into the other to set off the instant chain reaction that would create the atomic explosion.
The navigator on one of the other six planes on the mission remember that watching the mushroom cloud, "There was almost complete silence on the flight deck. It was evident the city of Hiroshima was destroyed."
And the Enola Gay's copilot later remembered thinking: "My God, what have we done?"
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24269/crew-enola-gay-dropping-atomic-bomb
[2] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=20050807&id=mh0fAAAAIBAJ&sjid=56cEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5362,1018809
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/06/hiroshima-oral-history/
[4] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Devil-Reached-Toward-the-Sky/Garrett-M-Graff/9781668092392
Enola G*y (Score:2)
Fixed that to get past the DOGE filters.
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[1]In case someone doesn't get the reference [snopes.com].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/10/dei-enola-gay-wwii/
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MAGAs will alter history books to call it Enola Straight.
Funny (Score:3)
I was told by a lawyer who works on internarional war crimes that the only way for you to avoid a war crime persecution as a soldier is to actually refuse orders (i.e. insubordination) even though you know you will be court martialled. So all these pilots and bomb droppers are actual war criminals. Sorry but that's how it works.
Re: (Score:1)
I was told that when anyone starts a post with "I was told", they are usually about to post something that looks like a pointless strawman argument. And that's it's probably a troll.
Also, the best way to avoid a war crimes prosecution is to be on the winning side.
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Oh look, another liberal armchair prosecutor. War crimes are defined by the international laws in place at the time the event occured, not 80 years later. If you want to talk about war crimes how about discuss the literal torture the japanese carried out on their prisoners as well as starving them and working them to death never mind what the got up to in china. The japanese culture at the time was a poisonous, borderline evil imperial cult.
Mindless piffle (Score:2)
The saying "There are no winners in war" is a pure moron play. It's the trite stuff amateur script writers put into TV shows.
It's fine to declare that nobody should start a war, as an OPINION.
It's fine to state that lots of people are "losers" in war, as a fact.
It is, however, objectively false to state that there are no winners in a war - the winners are the winner, and most people are mighty happy about that. When the NAZIs decided to roll tanks and making the Polish people into losers, and then they deci
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Thank you for speaking sense to the ignorant here. (For those of you who think I'm being sarcastic - I am not. Read the links they supplied. Then comment.
History books (Score:2)
Actually, it's NOT always the winners who write the history books.
If you did K-12 in the USA in public schools, there's a good chance you got your history from a book ( "A People's History of the United States" ) written by an anti-American Marxist named Howard Zinn, who wrote his history books to be as anti-American as he could make them while still getting school boards to buy them. He was a big hit with left-leaning unionized school teachers who stuck up for the books any time they [the books] or he [Zinn]
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Their actions were not seen as war crimes at the time. The notion of what constitutes a "war crime" has been widened several times throughout the years, and after the war.
In retrospect though ...
Re:Funny (Score:4, Interesting)
The crew probably wouldn't be convicted anyway, as they likely had little idea what the consequences of their actions would be. It was the first time an atomic bomb was dropped on a city full of people.
The people who made the decision to drop it on a city though, that's another matter.
NHK recently covered a new VR experience based on the experiences of a survivor who was 11 at the time. Even this short news report is a hard watch: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I've been to Hiroshima. I would urge anyone to go, it's a profound experience. Regardless of what you think of the rights and wrongs of the bombing, understanding what it did to people will change your perspective.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRH593nq2O4
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> NHK recently covered a new VR experience based on the experiences of a survivor who was 11 at the time. Even this short news report is a hard watch: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch [youtube.com]?... [youtube.com]
Thank you for posting this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch
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Thank you for watching it. I think it's really important to preserve these memories.
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> Their actions were not seen as war crimes at the time. The notion of what constitutes a "war crime" has been widened several times throughout the years, and after the war.
> In retrospect though ...
In retrospect (and I say this as a grown adult with every bit of professionalism and in defense of every American), he fucking started it.
The actual war crime, happened on December 7, 1941. What happened after that, any lawyer would find a defensible argument from Americas perspective. We dropped warning leaflets for days. All Japan had to do before the Enola Gay flew, was surrender. Which they eventually did exactly that. A means to an END.
True but irrelevant (Score:2)
I trotted out the usual argument about how many lives the nukes saved, and a friend who has actually studied international law argues that the constraints on behaviour imposed by the Geneva conventions are assumed to be about what civilised nations regard as acceptable. On that definition the nukes were criminally illegal.
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> I was told by a lawyer who works on internarional war crimes that the only way for you to avoid a war crime persecution as a soldier is to actually refuse orders (i.e. insubordination) even though you know you will be court martialled.
It doesn't sound like this lawyer knows what he's doing.
> So all these pilots and bomb droppers are actual war criminals. Sorry but that's how it works.
And if he told you that, he REALLY doesn't know what he's doing. Not only would this be ex post facto, but go ask your lawyer friend if he's ever heard of mens rea. And before you ask, no, that doesn't have anything to do with diarrhea.
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I was told by a lawyer who works on international law crimes that another way to avoid a war crime “persecution” (sic) is to not commit a war crime. Sorry but that’s how it works.
Re: One of many unpunished war crimes (Score:1)
Ha! How the art of trolling has fallen.
garbage (Score:2)
The Japanese were NOT actually trying to surrender. SOME Japanese made an effort to stop the fighting on terms favorable, and this would have preserved the Imperial Japanese Empire in the form that had been running wild across the Pacific theater mass-murdering the innocent - an absolutely non-starter negotiating point. None of the allies would have accepted any of this, given the total disregard for diplomatic and societal norms they'd displayed. Remember: the attack on Pearl Harbor was a sneak attack on a
First act of the cold war (Score:3)
The US had already flattened several Japanese cities with conventional and incendiary bombs. The Japanese command was hard-lined, caring more about their honour than of the lives of the Japanese people, asking of them to fight to the last man.
Therefore they did not view Hiroshima and Nagasaki much different than other bombed cities.
What really convinced them to surrender was that the USSR had invaded the largely undefended north, and with very rapid progress. The Japanese military leadership did not fear destruction as much as they feared subjugation under Soviet rule, and the obliteration of Japanese religion and culture. So, they chose between the lesser of two evils.
But the decision was still not unanimous. There was an attempt from a faction to stop the Emperor from announcing the surrender.
It is true that the US primary intention was that the bomb would have forced Japan to surrender. It was therefore easy to use that as the official narrative after the war.
But the US also has a secondary intention: to show the world, and USSR in particular, the destructive power of the atomic bomb, to become the dominant power in the world.
There were even talks among US commanders to A-bomb several Russian cities, to obliterate the USSR, and thereby communism's influence in the world.
Those ideas were for some scientists in the Manhattan Projects the reason why they leaked bomb plans to the Soviet Union: to create a stalemate so that the bomb would never be used again.
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And don't forget MacArthur's plan to quickly win the Korean War - which included dropping a few dozen nukes on North Korea...
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> And don't forget MacArthur's plan to quickly win the Korean War - which included dropping a few dozen nukes on North Korea...
Since North Korea had the backing of the Soviet Union at the time, I doubt any win would have been “quick” had we done that.
Russias nuclear program expanded rapidly after World War II. They were developing multi-stage nuclear systems by the 50s, so an attack on North Korea would have likely triggered the chain reaction a Cold War avoided for decades.
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That version is consistent with what I know about Japanese culture and the USSR's involvement. I'm far more inclined to believe it.
Bombing civilians, even in western nations, has never been effective. In Britain, we don't talk about the Blitz Panic, if the Blitz is referred to at all, it is in the context of unifying the nation's resolve.
Why, then, in a culture that put honour above all else, the emperor above all people, and the military over all mindsets, would bombing a city have any different effect? It
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USA could have given them time to discuss the implications before dropping the second bomb.
> What really convinced them to surrender was that the USSR had invaded the largely undefended north
Hard to say, as there were multiple factions forming, all having different views with no clear winner. The concept of nuclear weapons was still processing in their minds, not being sure what to make of it. Some thought it too difficult make many, but others say not enough was known about US's process to estimate quantiti
Slow news day (Score:3)
None of this is remotely new, using it is pure clickbait.
Why the nukes were illegal (Score:2)
This is from a friend who has studied the subject. I find his conclusions challenging
'All countries are bound by the Hague conventions (according to the signatories, 'including the US, UK and France), regardless of whether their enemies or they themselves have signed them. This was stated explicitly, and justified by stating that they were the minimum standards for the conduct of war among "civilised peoples" and so anyone could and should be punished for failing to meet them.
'The Geneva conventions, on the
Stunning Drop-Off in War Deaths Since (Score:2)
[1]This whole vid [vimeo.com] is well worth your time (seriously, make a note to watch the whole thing today if you haven't), but the last section (starting at 14:20) is particularly striking in how few war deaths have occured since the invention (and rapid development/manufacture) of nuclear weapons.
It's a decade old and could use an update, but I was surprised to recently read that it mostly holds up even with the Ukraine/Russia War.
[1] https://vimeo.com/128373915
Myth busted (Score:1)
I remember around the 1980s a myth circulated that all crewmembers had sooner or later comitted suicide because they couldn't live with the guilt.
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Very true. The word "gay" had it flagged for deletion by the "delete the history we don't agree with" purge of the current administration.
> WASHINGTON [March 7, 2025] — References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient [US Army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers], the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.
> The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by AP, includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher. [1]https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-ou... [nbcnews.com]
[2]Texas Marine Sgt. Alfredo Gonzalez’s webpage was removed from the U.S. Navy history website [cbs42.com]
[3]Jackie Robinson's military service was briefly taken down from the Department of Defense's website [foxnews.com]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/war-heroes-gay-plane-images-flagged-removal-pentagons-dei-purge-rcna195344
[2] https://www.cbs42.com/washington/washington-dc/medal-of-honor-recipient-briefly-removed-from-naval-history-website/
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/sports/dod-briefly-takes-down-online-feature-about-jackie-robinsons-military-service-includes-dei-link