Enola gay movie dropping bomb
At 7:15 a.m., the bomber crew armed the bomb, and the plane began its ascent. As a result, the overloaded Enola Gay used more than two miles of runway to get aloft. Despite the bomb’s moniker, it weighed nearly 10,000 pounds. Instead of 12 men on the Enola Gay, people would think there were only nine. Colonel Paul Tibbets piloted the lead bomber, Enola Gay, which carried a nuclear bomb nicknamed Little Boy. Jeppson was worried that without some addition, the importance of his role, along with that of Navy Capt. Jeppson was concerned because he learned his name, along with two others, would be absent from a list of crew members long-ago stenciled on the side of the infamous B-29 bomber by the military. The new Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was about to open with the Enola Gay on display. It was 2003 when Jeppson felt compelled to come forward. Today he lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Molly, retired after a career spent at the helm of a handful of high-tech companies and working as consultant for the Department of Energy.
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Jeppson turned to graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, after leaving the military. Now 90, Tibbets lives in a modest brick home in a well-kept neighborhood in Columbus and travels occasionally for air shows and veterans’ ceremonies. Most of the lives saved were Japanese,” the 84-year-old said from his suburban Atlanta retirement home near the base of Stone Mountain, where a large relief memorial carved out of the bare rock depicts Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. “I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run.
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Tibbets immediately steered into a 160-degree turn, a maneuver long planned and practiced, to take the bomber away from the explosion.
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The 9,000-pound bomb fell down toward the city as the Enola Gay banked away, the crew hoping to escape with their lives.ĭespite decades of controversy over whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb - which left some 140,000 dead in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki three days later - Van Kirk remains convinced it was necessary because it shortened the war and relieved the Allies of having to mount a land invasion that might have cost far more lives on both sides. > When the bomb was released, the Enola Gay's nose lurched up, the plane freed of a four-and-a-half-ton weight. Under cover of night, he guided the bomber nearly exactly as planned - the plane was just 15 seconds behind schedule. Kim Darby as Lucy Tibbetts Billy Crystal as Lt. It was a perfect mission, Van Kirk recalls. Enola Gay: The Men, The Mission, The Atomic Bomb is a 1980 American made-for-television historical drama film about the B-29 mission that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II. Van Kirk, then 24, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped “Little Boy” - the world’s first atomic bomb - over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.