Enola Gay goes on display
9Named after the mother of her pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay was a B-29 superfortress (the most sophisticated bomber of World War 2 and the first to house its crew in a pressurized cabin). It deployed the first atomic weapon, a bomb called Little Boy, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945.
This single, albeit fairly large, bomb released the power of 15 000 tons of TNT in an instant and leveled 3 quarters of the city. The explosion killed something like 70 000 people on the day with maybe as many dying of injuries and radiation sickness within the next few months.
The proponents of the use of the atomic bombs against Japan, generally speaking, believe that it shortened the war and thereby actually saved lives by preventing the need for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands which was projected to have taken at least a year and would have killed between 400 000 and 800 000 US servicemen (not to mention the likely millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians who would have died).
This was the dominant narrative in the US for decades but the position has come under strenuous attack from historians and activists since around late 1980s who, again generally speaking, contend that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan had a greater impact on the country's decision to surrender than the annihilation of two more of its cities (the firebombing campaign before the atom bombs were dropped had already left 67 of Japan’s devastated with between 25% and 90% of buildings destroyed) .
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