Seventy-five years ago, the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Here's an up-close at the plane, the Pacific island from which it departed and the Japanese city today.
The US needed the islands so its state-of-the-art B-29 bombers could strike Japan, 1,500 miles away. And in the summer of 1944, after three months of combat that included some of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific, the US secured the islands and quickly built large air bases for its new bombers.
While what surrounds us on this tropical morning has changed, what is underneath is the same asphalt laid by US Navy Seabees, or construction battalions, 75 years ago. My guide is Don Farrell, a California native who moved to the Pacific islands in the 1970s. Locals recognize him as the chief historian of Tinian, and he's detailed the story of what happened here in 1945 in his book,"He led the effort to get these bomb pits excavated and preserved more than a decade ago, and describes how the atomic bombs were loaded into the B-29s.
The journey is a few short minutes in the car. It would have been much longer for the lumbering B-29 and its 9,700-pound payload. It's about a two-minute drive down the runway. Farrell provides the imagery as to what Tibbets would have seen -- the tents, the troops, B-29s by the dozens.They were doing something that had never been done and something they believed would hasten the end of World War II and certainly change history.You can see that airplane now in suburban Washington, DC.
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