Grim engagements at places like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima became legendary.
Battles went on for months and were often fought hand-to-hand, with rifles, knives and flame throwers. One air battle was so lopsided in favor of the Americans that it was called a turkey shoot. Japanese suicide pilots crashed their planes into American vessels. Huge ships went to the bottom with their crews. Naval and air battles had been sudden, brief and deadly. The fighting on land, at sea and in the air had been savage. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, an average of 5,000 were still dying each week. More than 100,000 American soldiers, sailors and Marines had already been killed in the Pacific since Japan’s attack on the U.S. (Matt McLain/The Washington Post) A shortened war, a dreadful cost This week, commemorations are scheduled across the country, with socially distanced candlelight vigils and the tolling of bells, and because of the covid-19, ceremonies and remembrances have moved online. It would be the start of a frightful era of weapons that could defy control and menace civilization.īut as “Dimples Eight Two” picked up speed that morning, its mission was born of its time: deliver a blow that the United States hoped might finally end the global butchery of World War II. Tens of thousands more would die the same way at Nagasaki a few days later, and the world would subsequently be hearing about megatons, mutual assured destruction, proliferation, nuclear winter, meltdowns and dirty bombs. It was an important enemy military site with a wartime population about 280,000, according to the historians Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts.Īlmost half of them were about to be incinerated, crushed, and irradiated by the crude atomic weapon named “Little Boy” that the Enola Gay carried.
(AP)įifteen hundred miles to the north-northwest, under a waning crescent moon, lay a 400-year-old Japanese city most Americans probably had never heard of but whose name was about to be etched into the pages of history. Shumard, assistant engineer and Staff Sgt. Jacob Besser, radar countermeasures officer. Tibbets, 509th Composite Group commanding officer and pilot Capt. John Porter, ground maintenance officer Capt. Enola Gay navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the last surviving crew member, died in Georgia in 2014.This undated photo includes most members of 12-man crew of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima posing in the Mariana Islands in 1945 during World War II. Robert Lewis died in Virginia in 1983, Tibbets in 2007 in Ohio. Japan surrendered six days later, ending the war. Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, another U.S. “People don’t realize how many times he flew aboard the Enola Gay,” Steven Lewis said. But Tibbets only flew the Enola Gay a couple of times, while Lewis had piloted the aircraft 16 times during test flights leading up to the Hiroshima mission. The move made Tibbets a household name after his crew completed the world’s first atomic bombing mission, which destroyed much of the Japanese city and killed tens of thousands of its citizens. Paul Tibbets was also the pilot of the Enola Gay, relegating the lower-ranked Lewis to co-pilot. “Any records of that mission would be significant.”Īs commander of the Hiroshima mission, Col. “The Enola Gay was the most significant aircraft of World War Two,” said Larry Starr, collections manager at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, New York.
“He wrote down everything and he kept everything,” said Steven Lewis, 57, of Hampton Township, New Jersey. The younger Lewis said his father recorded details of every flight he took, including the three dozen he made aboard the Enola Gay.
#Pilot of enola gay archive#
The flight logs covering Lewis’ service in the Army Air Forces from 1942-46 are among an extensive archive of his documents handed down to his son, Steven Lewis.
A meticulous record-keeper, Lewis’ handwritten entry in his personal flight log for that historic day reads: “No#1 Atomic bomb a huge success.” 6, 1945, bombing mission that changed the world. Lewis, a 27-year-old pilot from Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, logged a total of 36 flights aboard the Enola Gay, including the Aug.