“"One plane. One bomb. One city. The world changed at 8:15 AM."”
On August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets piloted the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay from Tinian Island in the Marianas. At 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time, bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released Little Boy over Hiroshima. It fell for 44 seconds and detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima. The blast, equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT, killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly. By year's end, the death toll reached 140,000. Three days later, another B-29, Bockscar, dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15. The Enola Gay was named after Tibbets' mother. The crew knew they were carrying something extraordinary, but most did not understand its full implications until they saw the mushroom cloud rising above the city. The aircraft is now displayed at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, a reminder of both technological achievement and devastating consequence.
The B-29's pressurized cabin, remote-controlled defensive gun turrets, and 3,700-mile range made it the only aircraft capable of delivering atomic weapons to Japan from the Marianas—an engineering leap that changed strategic bombing doctrine permanently.