It was a presidential decision, and he was an officer that carried out his duty,' Glenn said. Tibbets failed to recognize that an allied invasion of Japan, which the bomb helped avert, would have resulted in the deaths of several million people. John Glenn, who was a Marine fighter pilot, said people who criticized Gen. He said he practiced at great altitudes and eventually was able to turn the large aircraft in about 40 seconds.įormer U.S. Because of the bomb's force, he was told he could not fly straight ahead after it exploded but would have to turn 159 degrees to the expanding shock wave and leave the area fast. Tibbets executed a well-rehearsed diving turn to avoid the blast effect.
The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy exploded in a nuclear inferno on the city. Tibbets, then a colonel in the Army Air Forces, guided the four-engine plane he named in honor of his mother toward the Aioi Bridge in central Hiroshima, a city of 250,000 chosen because it was a military center and had no prisoner-of-war camps.Īt 8:15 a.m. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off carrying a uranium atomic bomb assembled under extraordinary secrecy.
