You’ve got to leave the moral issue out of it. At 2:45 a.m., the plane took off, and at 8:15 a.m., the crew of the Enola Gay released Little Boy, the world’s first nuclear weapon, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. I don’t care whether you’re dropping atom bombs, or whether you’re dropping 100-pound bombs, or you’re shooting a rifle. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb and that was the thing that I was going to do to the best of my ability.
Tibbets added, “I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I’m supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. So, I thought, you know, I’m just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they couldn’t practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. And he was telling me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. “Well, then I got a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. “The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, … I said to myself, ‘People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. Horigan said photographs taken just before the Enola Gay with its crew of 10 men left the island of Tinian for Japan show that the name was added later. Few stories encapsulate human endeavour, achievement, sacrifice, and failure in quite such stark contrasts as the taking of the island of Tinian, once the centre of USAAF operations in the Pacific and now just a little-visited speck in the largest ocean in the world.In the 1989 interview, Tibbets also spoke of a lesson he learned in Cincinnati about doing his job: Indianapolis succeeded in its mission, but was left to return to Pearl Harbor unescorted, resulting in one of the most unfortunate and gristly episodes in US maritime history. This Portland-class heavy cruiser was handed a secret mission ‘of the utmost significance to national security’, that of taking the enriched uranium and other vital parts of the atomic weapons to Tinian. At 02.45 hours on the morning of 6 August 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, named after the pilots mother, Enola Gay, lifted off from a tiny island deep. Part of this is another story, that of the warship USS Indianapolis. The story of that battle is told here, in the words and images of the men who took part in that memorable, and ultimately epoch-changing, campaign. Five and a half hours earlier, the B-29 departed from Tinian, a small Pacific. But, before all this, had been the battle for the island – the preliminary naval bombardment, the aerial strikes and the amphibious assault. The Enola Gay dropped the 8,900-pound bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy,' over Hiroshima at 8:15 A.M. With six runways, four of which were built for the huge Superfortresses, it was from there that atomic destruction of Japan began.
The sparsely-populated island of Tinian was turned into the biggest air base in the world. With the capture of these islands, the defeat of Hirohito’s Imperial Japan became a certainty as for the first time in the war land-based heavy bombers could fly all the way to Tokyo and back. But what is often forgotten is that these missions were only possible following the savage battles to seize the Northern Mariana Islands – which, crucially, were within the B-29’s operational range of Japan. The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and of a second nuclear device on Nagasaki three days later, is known throughout the world. The B-29 carried just one bomb the target was Hiroshima. At 02.45 hours on the morning of 6 August 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay, lifted off from a tiny island deep in the Pacific Ocean on one of the most important missions in human history.