'My teeth told me': What it was like aboard the Enola Gay

Eighty years ago, a group of B-29 bombers flew a world-altering mission. Here are memories of the crew.

Eighty years ago today, on Aug. 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay took off from Tinian Island, in the Northern Mariana Islands, for a mission that its flight crew knew would make history. It belonged to the 509th Composite Group, a unit that had been created and trained in secret for some nine months for the sole purpose of dropping the world’s first atomic bomb. In addition to the Enola Gay, which carried the bomb itself, the mission involved several other B-29s, including the weather reconnaissance plane Straight Flush, the camera plane Necessary Evil and the Great Artiste, which carried scientific observers from Project Alberta, the forward-deployed science component of the Manhattan Project. The Enola Gay’s commander and lead pilot for the mission, Col. Paul W. Tibbets, was barely 30 years old. Though Tibbets had known the secret of the Manhattan Project since its start, many of the Enola Gay crew learned the phrase “atomic bomb” only when they gathered for the August mission itself.

This oral history is based on archives and books from three continents and more than 100 first-hand memoirs, as well as government reports, testimonies, speeches and memories from reunions of the 509th Composite Group. Times aboard the plane are given in Chamorro Standard Time, the time zone of the base in the Northern Mariana Islands, while Japan Standard Time was an hour earlier. Quotes have been edited for clarity and concision.

https://wapo.st/40RU8OL