Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombings of (1945).The U.S. Army Air Forces' (USAAF) mission to use atomic bombs began in mid‐1944 when Gen. “Hap” Arnold, USAAF commander, initiated a special force to deliver a new “heavy and bulky” superweapon. He appointed Col. Paul W. Tibbets, a veteran of the first B‐17 mission over Europe, to command the 509th Composite Group, built around the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, commanded by Maj. Charles W. Sweeney. To accommodate the bomb, Tibbets had his B‐29s stripped of most defensive armaments. Most crew training took place at Wendover Field, Utah. The lead aircraft, flown by Tibbets, was a new B‐29, which he named the Enola Gay after his mother.
By mid‐1945, Manhattan Project scientists produced two kinds of atomic bombs: a gun type, detonated by firing one mass of uranium down a cylinder into another mass...
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