dropped another atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki. The plane returned to Tinian Island, from which it had come.

Shortly after that, the first shock wave hit us, and the plane snapped all over.” All we saw in the airplane was a bright flash. on the turn and ran away as fast as we could. “Immediately took the airplane to a 180° turn. When the bomb left the airplane, the plane jumped because you released 10,000 lbs.,” Theodore Van Kirk, the plane’s navigator, later recalled.

“It was just like any other mission: some people are reading books, some are taking naps. The Enola Gay is a B-29 Superfortress, which pilot Paul Tibbets named after his mother, and which had been stripped of everything but the necessities, so as to be thousands of pounds lighter than an ordinary plane of that make.