“I have so much to tell you, but none of it will go threw (sic) so I might as well save it until I get home,” he wrote. Mindful of the military censor, he wrote that his fourth mission had taken place the day before and that he’d been promoted to private first class. His parents saved all his letters and Nancy Nelson still has them. Hot dogs and beer were served, but the crew was hustled away for debriefing that began with shots of whiskey to loosen them up.Īfter that, they were allowed to join the party, except all the beer and hot dogs were gone. amid great hoopla by Army brass and photographers.
He said he pulled out his book and “picked up where I left off.” “There was not much talk of what we had done,” Nelson wrote. Nancy said her husband radioed messages in Morse code: “He sent the message to Truman: ‘Results good.’ Then they decided the results were better than good, so they said ‘Results excellent’ on the next one.”
#Enola gay ww2 mission windows#
As Hiroshima receded into the distance, crew members looked back through the windows and gaped at the mushroom cloud rising more than 30,000 feet. Two shock waves from the explosion buffeted the plane. The Enola Gay turned and headed back toward the base. “Little Boy,” as the bomb had been nicknamed, dropped from 30,000 feet and detonated above the city as planned. Over Hiroshima, the bomb bay doors opened at 8:15 a.m. Nelson, an inveterate reader, pulled out a novel, “Watch Out for Willie Carter,” a boxing story.
For most of the six-hour flight, there was little to do. The Enola Gay, named for the mother of colonel and pilot Paul Tibbets, took off at 2:45 a.m. “I knew it was an important mission because we were told this mission had the potential to end the war,” Nelson wrote. That was one tipoff to the gravity of the situation. they boarded the plane in the glare of floodlights, with hundreds of officials present. They ate breakfast in the mess hall and said prayers in the chapel. As Nelson himself related in a posthumously published autobiography, “At the time I still did not fully understand the scope of the mission, or the strength of the weapon we were carrying.” 5 shortly before midnight for a briefing in which they learned they would be dropping a bomb. The crew had no idea what they were practicing for. Nelson flew on three routine missions on the B-29, each time accompanied by two other planes. Plane and crew were sent to Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands. On June 14, he was among those who went to Omaha, Nebraska to pick up the silver-plated B-29 from the factory. “He thought: ‘I can’t be a pilot, but I can be on a plane.’” A sergeant looked at his papers and told him: “Oh, you’re meant for overseas.” “Dick was just elated,” Nancy said. In April 1945, he reported to the 509th Squadron in Wendover, Utah. Unbeknownst to him, he was being investigated by the Manhattan Project’s security team. Everyone else in his class received assignments and shipped out. Instead, he went to the Air Corps’ radio school in South Dakota and after graduation was sent to the B-29 base in Clovis, New Mexico to await orders. Army after high school, hoping to become a pilot like his older brother. Nevertheless, she heard her husband’s stories so many times in the years to come that in his speaking engagements, if he’d forget a detail, he would look at her and she would prompt him.īorn in Moscow, Idaho in 1925, Richard relocated with his family to Los Angeles at age 3 and enlisted in the U.S. Nancy Nelson was only 13 when World War II ended. It seems a shame this film falls so short in these details.We met Thursday, the 75th anniversary of the bombing. It seemed the director, the writers, and the actors had little or no knowledge about the Manhattan Project and especially the 509th mission details. The 509th Composite Group consisted of about two thousand men, so his personally choosing less than fifty of the two thousand was no big deal. A few of the men I remember he selected included his radio operator, bombardier, navigator, and two other enlisted men who actually flew with him on the mission. In fact, Tibbets did indicate that he wanted to make personnel selections, but that was probably no more than thirty men he had commanded previously. Tibbets was portrayed as saying he wanted to pick his own men rather than the ones selected by his superiors. Bob Lewis is portrayed as an old buddy of Paul Tibbets, yet I do not recall ever reading or seeing any documentation that would support such a relationship. This film gets the chronological timing wrong in several places and uses comic relief when none is required. Hey folks, I have read many books and have seen many films about the Manhattan Project and dropping the atomic bombs on Japan.