B-29 Enola Gay Nose

This is the bombardier station where Major Thomas Ferebee pushed The Lever which dropped the "Little Boy" atom bomb on Hiroshima, killing 75,000 Japanese immediately and a few thousand more later from radiation and other causes. Among those killed were 19,000 Japanese soldiers who were conveniently doing their morning calisthenics on an immense parade ground not far from Ground Zero. You never hear any mention of them, as all references to the people of Hiroshima seem to portray them as gentle civilians living a peaceful life removed from the war.

In fact, Hiroshima was a military city and had been for a century, proud of its samurai tradition. An eighth of the population were uniformed soldiers, Hiroshima being the headquarters of the Japanese Second Army. A good portion of the civilian population was engaged in war industries to support that army.

All the alternatives to dropping the Bomb involved a higher death toll. MacArthur's staff figured that the Allies would suffer 125,000 casualties in the first four months of Operation Olympic, the first half of the invasion of Japan which would conquer Kyushu. A naval blockade to starve Japan into submission would probably have killed millions. The ongoing conventional air campaign had killed hundreds of thousands already. Without The Bomb, the air, land, and sea campaigns would probably have proceeded simultaneously to decimate the Japanese population.

If the first two atom bombs didn't work, the plan was to drop nine more to support the invasion of Kyushu, placing three each inland behind each of the three beachheads to clean out the intensive fortifications. The entire campaign to conquer Japan planned to use as many as fifty atom bombs.

Ferebee dropped his Bomb looking through the bombsight centered in the crescent shaped window in the center of this picture. It sighted through the optically flat window panel below it.

I met Ferebee and shook his hand at a Houston gun show at AstroHall about four years ago. He was sporting a handlebar moustache. Even though he was close to eighty, you could see he was a wild man in his youth. He retired a colonel after service in Vietnam. He passed away fairly suddenly from cancer a couple years back.