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Les Rowe, who taught the men how to assemble the bombs and deal with problems. The bombs came in pieces, but nobody knew where the pieces came from. The bombs were assembled on site within 20-by-40-foot cabins where only bomb assemblymen were admitted. Later, hydraulic loading ramps solved that problem. However, it was impossible to synchronize all the movements to prevent the bomb from tilting. At first, B-29s were modified with cables to facilitate loading the bombs onto the bay. Loading the bombs onto the aircrafts proved a different challenge. Fat Man, however, required numerous tests with different tail fins so it would not "porpoise," or dive in and out of air currents. Once appropriate tail fins were added to its aerodynamic shape, it would fly in a downward curve with pinpoint accuracy. What the men did know is that they had to figure out a way to make the nearly five-ton bombs "fly" from their moving aircrafts to a desired target under possibly different situations. Not knowing exactly what they were, they dubbed the cylindrical-shaped one "Little Boy" and the pumpkin shaped one "Fat Man." Otherwise they referred to them as "the weapon" or "the gimmick." The men, however, did not use the term "bomb" for the weapons. Every concern revolved around whether two differently shaped bombs could be delivered on target. The men flew as far as the California coast and an airfield in Batista, Cuba, practicing their over-water navigation training.īut the focus of the group's effort lay in performing ballistics testing. At Wendover, Van Kirk and Van Pelt devised navigational problems, worked them out together and practiced until perfect. Radars in 1945 could at best detect most land masses.
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Most were used to long flights over land, but lacked experience flying over water or at night. Hundreds of other second world war artefacts are being auctioned at Bonhams, from American flags flown in Normandy on D-Day to Japanese military maps of Iwo Jima.Navigators faced another challenge. Steven Lewis said he is putting the second world war documents up for sale ahead of his plans to publish his father’s manuscript of wartime experiences in a book at a later date. The other Lewis items for auction include personal photographs from the war and his hand-drawn diagram of the Hiroshima bombing run showing the bomb blast’s expected shock wave range and the evasive flight path the Enola Gay would take after detonation. Enola Gay navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the last surviving crew member, died in Georgia in 2014. Robert Lewis died in Virginia in 1983, Tibbets in 2007 in Ohio. Japan surrendered six days later, ending the war. Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, another US B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. “People don’t realise how many times he flew aboard the Enola Gay,” Steven Lewis said. But Tibbets only flew the Enola Gay a couple of times, while Lewis had piloted the aircraft 16 times during test flights leading up to the Hiroshima mission. The move made Tibbets a household name after his crew completed the world’s first atomic bombing mission, which destroyed much of the Japanese city and killed tens of thousands of its citizens.
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Photograph: NY Daily News via Getty ImagesĪs commander of the Hiroshima mission, Colonel Paul Tibbets was also the pilot of the Enola Gay, relegating the lower-ranked Lewis to co-pilot. The crew of the Enola Gay, with Captain Robert Lewis third from right.