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Peer de Silva, the official courier for the Fat Man core, signs for 6.1 kg of plutonium at Los Alamos, NM. The U-235 target for Little Boy is cast at Los Alamos. This directive constitutes final authorization for atomic attack no further orders are issued. It lists the following targets in order of priority: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. General Leslie Groves drafts the directive authorizing the use of the atomic bombs as soon as bomb availability and weather permit. 24, 3 should be available in September, and more each month - reaching 7 or more in December.Ĭombat hemispheres for Fat Man are fabricated at Los Alamos. He also receives an estimate of atomic bomb availability: Little Boy should be ready for use on Aug. In order of choice it is: Hiroshima, Kokura, and Niigata. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in Potsdam for meeting between President Truman and Soviet Premier Stalin, receives current target list. President Harry Truman receives report on the successful Trinity test. The 509th Composite Group begins flying practice missions over Japan. Little Boy bomb units, accompanied by the U-235 projectile, are shipped out of San Francisco on the USS Indianapolis for Tinian Island. The "Gadget," an plutonium implosion device, detonates successfully in the Trinity test at Alamogordo, NM, demonstrating that the Fat Man atomic bomb design will work. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.Thanks to Clay Perkins and David Wargowski for their contributions to this timeline. When he heard the news of Hiroshima, writer Paul Fussell, then a 21-year-old second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in France and mentally preparing for the hell that an invasion of Japan was bound to be, thought, "We were going to live. The bombs cost tens of thousands of lives-perhaps 120,000 were killed immediately in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with many more dying later from the effects of radiation-but they saved lives too. But, plainly, the most terrible war ever known ended earlier than it would have because of the Enola Gay's mission. 9-and how many Japanese and Americans would have died before it did. Ever since, there has been controversy over when the war would have ended had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima-a second was detonated over the city of Nagasaki on Aug. On the B-29, Van Kirk remembers, "somebody said-and I thought so too-'This war is over.'"Įight days later, it was. people moaning from pain, with eyes popped out and intestines coming out of their stomachs." As the Enola Gay turned south for the long ride home, Yamaoka and her mother headed for a military compound. When she came to, she had burns all over her body, and, she says, she could "hear people calling out for help and the crackle of fire coming from burning houses. Today she describes it as like a burst of light from an unearthly photo shoot, big enough to cover the sky, "blue-yellow and very beautiful." Yamaoka was blown off her feet. On the ground, half a mile from where the bomb dropped, Michiko Yamaoka, then a 15-year-old student, saw the same flash. "All we saw," recalls Van Kirk, "was a bright flash." Then it exploded." The pilot of the Enola Gay, Colonel Paul Tibbets, had put the plane into a 180˚ turn to the west and was getting away from the target as fast as he could. It was supposed to take 43 seconds, and we all concluded it had been a dud, because it took longer. Says Van Kirk: "I was timing it with my watch. The plane then dropped a single bomb, weighing five tons.
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the crew was 15 seconds later than planned. and was scheduled to arrive over Hiroshima, a city at the south end of the Japanese island of Honshu, at 8:15 a.m. "I'll never forget the pineapple damn fritters." The Enola Gay left Tinian, in the Marianas chain, at 2:45 a.m. "I love the damn things," Van Kirk, 84, says today from his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. Theodore (Dutch) Van Kirk had pineapple fritters. They remembered staying up through the night and eating breakfast long before dawn. 6, 1945, boarded the B-29 bomber with the name Enola Gay painted on its nose would forget little about that long day.