1945
The Enola Gay dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Pilot Paul Tibbets (centre) can be seen with six of the aircraft's crew.
The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the near-complete destruction of the city. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in a secondary target, Nagasaki, being bombed instead.
Enola Gay after Hiroshima mission, entering hard stand. It is in its 6th Bombardment Group livery,
with victor number 82 visible on fuselage just forward of the tail fin.
After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico.
In May 1946, it was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961.
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In the 1980s, veterans groups engaged in a call for the Smithsonian to put the aircraft on display, leading to an acrimonious debate about exhibiting the aircraft without a proper historical context. The cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the National Mall, for the bombing's 50th anniversary in 1995, amid controversy. Since 2003, the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Centre.
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The last survivor of its crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died on 28 July 2014 at the age of 93.
Enola Gay on display at the National Air & Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Centre.
Source: Wikipedia
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