Everything was happening as it always does, until a single U.S. plane flies over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The plane, code named Enola Gay, was a B-29 that held the first ever atomic bomb. The pilot had a mission, and one mission only, to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, and force them to surrender. According to History.com, Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets was the pilot of the plane that left Tinian Island in the Marianas at 2:45 a.m. After a five hour flight “Little Boy” (the nickname for the atomic bomb being used) was dropped over Hiroshima. The bomb detonated 1,900 feet over a hospital, and decimated the majority of the city. The bomb had a blast force equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT, and the cloud of the explosion is said to have reached up to 70,000 feet in the air. Hiroshima had a total of 90,000 building before the explosion, and only 28,000 were still standing afterwards. Only 20, out of the original 200 doctors, were alive and able to tend to the wounded, and only 150 out of 1,780 nurses were able-bodied. In John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, he tells of how the city government had hundreds of schoolgirls out in the open cleaning fire lanes--in the event of if an incendiary bomb attack-- when “Little Boy” was dropped from the Enola Gay. The amount of spontaneous fires that erupted from the explosion were so great in number that a crew member on board the Enola Gay was quoted: “It’s pretty terrific, what a relief it
Everything was happening as it always does, until a single U.S. plane flies over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The plane, code named Enola Gay, was a B-29 that held the first ever atomic bomb. The pilot had a mission, and one mission only, to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, and force them to surrender. According to History.com, Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets was the pilot of the plane that left Tinian Island in the Marianas at 2:45 a.m. After a five hour flight “Little Boy” (the nickname for the atomic bomb being used) was dropped over Hiroshima. The bomb detonated 1,900 feet over a hospital, and decimated the majority of the city. The bomb had a blast force equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT, and the cloud of the explosion is said to have reached up to 70,000 feet in the air. Hiroshima had a total of 90,000 building before the explosion, and only 28,000 were still standing afterwards. Only 20, out of the original 200 doctors, were alive and able to tend to the wounded, and only 150 out of 1,780 nurses were able-bodied. In John Hersey’s book, Hiroshima, he tells of how the city government had hundreds of schoolgirls out in the open cleaning fire lanes--in the event of if an incendiary bomb attack-- when “Little Boy” was dropped from the Enola Gay. The amount of spontaneous fires that erupted from the explosion were so great in number that a crew member on board the Enola Gay was quoted: “It’s pretty terrific, what a relief it