“Suddenly, the light of a thousand suns illuminated the cockpit,” remembered “Bockscar” co-pilot Fred Olivi. 9, 1945, bad weather and thick clouds forced the pilots to deviate and travel to their secondary target, where citizens of Nagasaki experienced the same hell that occurred three days prior.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsĪ day later, after no sign of surrender from the Japanese, the decision was made to use the second atomic bomb - “Fat Man.” The target was originally not the city of Nagasaki, but that of Kokura, the location of Japan’s largest munitions depot. The Bockscar and its crew, who dropped a Fat Man atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people, and the nuclear fallout in the following years is believed to have killed some 200,000 more people as a result of severe burns, trauma, radiation exposure, and cancer. Life that existed before was annihilated, and 70,000 of the 76,000 total buildings were destroyed - 48,000 blown into non-existence. “It was very much as if you’ve ever sat on an ash can and had somebody hit it with a baseball bat,” recalled Navigator Theodore Van Kirk, as he described the shockwave. Two days after his approval, pilots boarded the Enola Gay, the callsign for their B-29 bomber, and lifted off from the Pacific island of Tinian en route for Hiroshima.Īt 8:15 a.m., the lone plane in the sky carrying the 9,000-pound uranium-enriched atomic bomb - known as “ Little Boy” - released from the bomb bay and floated by parachute, detonating the equivalent of 12,000 to 15,000 tons of TNT over the populated city. Curtis LeMay approved Operation Centerboard I, a decision that ultimately forced the Japanese to surrender and forever changed the world.