Colonel Paul Tibbets could not relax at the controls of his B-29 bomber. The Enola Gay had been a faithful girl. She and her crew had come through many tough scrapes during her career. But this flight was different. They had never flown a mission like this before. No one had.
Flanked by two other super fortresses, one to monitor the weather for them and the other do principle photography for the event, the Enola Gay carried on, driving high through the sky with the Japanese islands now below them. If all went well today, another mission would soon follow.
Paul’s hopes were high. Their new super weapon, it had been decided, could not be spared. The dire situation in Japan required an extreme response. Already a number of cities had been subjected to firebombing. Many had died. But the greatest threats from the Japanese remained in two principle cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Here, it had been discovered by Central Command, were the hotspots for a super virus evidently developed by the Japanese as a last resort against Allied invasion. During the war in the Pacific, the American Navy had already witnessed the sort of tactics the Japanese were willing to employ in order to kill their enemies.
The Kamikaze had destroyed numerous vessels. Flying their bomb-laden planes into the sides of destroyers and cruisers, they had managed maximum damage. They did not consider their lives too great a cost to accomplish the desires of their emperor.
The boys on the ground had already taken to calling this terrifying disease the Kamikaze Plague. All because the Japanese were willing to sacrifice themselves in order to spread this killer virus to the soldiers encroaching upon their territory. Just like the Kamikaze pilots ramming their fighter planes into Allied ships, the citizens of the island nation were willing to feed their bodies to this monster in order to wrestle their enemies into death with them.
As far as Paul and his crew were concerned, the bomb couldn’t have come at a better time. “By the grace of God Almighty,” a few had even said. He had never known the boys to be religious, but he couldn’t help agreeing with them on this point. The firebombing campaigns had done a good job in smaller outbreak areas, burning everything down to the ground, but this was large scale. It required more than what they could accomplish with conventional weapons.
Before he knew it, Hiroshima lay before them, the early morning sun bathing it in bright light. “Ferebee,” Paul called over the radio headset.
“Yes, Colonel?”
“It’s time,” Paul said. “Turning over control to you on my mark. Three, two, one, go.”
Major Thomas Ferebee assumed control of the Enola Gay, marking the time at 8:09AM. Little Boy waited in its harness. Time crept by onboard, every second ticking by with enough anxiety to put the whole crew in sanitariums for a year. Bombay doors opened in preparation. The bomb was armed and ready to drop.
At precisely 8:15AM, Little Boy was released from the belly of the Enola Gay. A crosswind blew that morning. Not so much that it would make a difference. Eight hundred feet off the mark wasn’t much when you were packing one hundred and forty pounds of Uranium-235 and a yield of sixteen kilotons of TNT.