To Kowalke, “the nose of the aircraft looked like a porcupine” with all the protruding antennae. This time, his plane was equipped with instruments to measure radiation. The next day, Kowalke flew the City of Baraboo back to Hiroshima. From the air, a large cloud of smoke was all that remained of the city. The devastation covered 4.7 square miles around the explosion point, or hypocenter.
Between 70,000 and 80,000 died in the conflagration, with up to another 70,000 injured, while 69% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. The blast rippled across the city, starting a massive firestorm that burned for hours afterward.
On the ground, people saw a white flash followed immediately by a massive explosion. Two minutes later Little Boy started downward, exploding over central Hiroshima one minute later. A weather plane flew an hour ahead and confirmed all was clear over Hiroshima. “It wasn’t really talked about much,” he later recalled, “but even so, we did feel that what we were doing would end the war and solve all our problems at that time.”Īt 2:45 AM the next morning Colonel Paul Tibbetts took off in Enola Gay to carry the bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, to its destination. He and his crew knew the extra importance of the mission. He flew “a rather uneventful run” and delivered a report of clear conditions. At the controls was Baraboo native First Lieutenant Garvin Kowalke, who had named the plane after his hometown. The B-29 City of Baraboo drew the weather reconnaissance mission for August 5. The story of the Enola Gay begins in early 1945 when it rolled off the line at Boeing Aircrafts Omaha (Nebraska) plant. Image of the Crew from the City of Baraboo from the Sauk County Historical Society To not attract attention, the planes flew singly and swung out over Korea and the East China Sea to avoid giving away their special interest in those cities. With weather such a critical factor, the Twentieth Air Force, based in the Mariana Islands 1,500 miles f ro m Japan, began a program of B-29 flights over the target areas to assess conditions. Hiroshima was also headquarters for the Second General Army, responsible for defending Japan’s western half. All had been chosen because of their military and industrial significance. Twelve days before, on July 25, the War Department instructed General Carl Spaatz, commander of Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, to use the two atomic bombs on Japan “as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945.” The target cities were four: Hiroshima, Kokura (modern Kitakyushu), Niigata, and Nagasaki. For the first time, nuclear weapons had been used in war. On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first victim of an atomic attack.