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509th Composite Group |
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The Aftermath
Legacy of the
Enola Gay (Don't Miss It!!)
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Late in the summer of 1980 a small band of men approaching retirement age convened in Washington. At five-year intervals in the previous thirty-five years they had met in other cities to reminisce and exchange news. On this occasion they also had an additional attraction. They would be able to visit their beloved Enola Gay. With great expectations, they drove to Silver Hill, in Suitland, Maryland, just outside Washington's city limits, where the National Air and Space Museum has its Paul E. Garber Restoration, Preservation, and Storage Facility. When they had last seen her, she was a proud, brilliantly shiny, beautifully sleek B-29 Superfortress--the most powerful bomber the Army Air Forces flew in World War II. In 1945, the Enola Gay and the men who were now visiting her had ended the war. Others could also claim to have contributed. But the Enola Gay and the men of the 509th had, some would argue, actually ended the war all by themselves. Fifteen years later, largely inspired by these veterans' visit that day, the National Air and Space Museum would be preparing an exhibition on the mission of the Enola Gay. Prominently featured in that gallery would be the restored fifty-six-foot-long forward fuselage of the aircraft, memorabilia donated by the men of the 509th, and a video-film the museum had produced, in which crew members of the Enola Gay and her sister ship Bockscar recalled their missions. The Enola Gay had played a pivotal role in the lives of the 509th veterans visiting the National Air and Space Museum's Paul E. Garber Restoration Facility that day in 1980. In their youth, on Tinian Island in the Pacific, they had worked on the aircraft, flown in her, or walked past her a hundred times with pride. Ken Eidnes, twenty-two years old at the time, had taken some of the first color pictures of her in an era when color photos were rare. Driving to Garber that day, he and his comrades could still recall this powerful aircraft gleaming under Tinian's tropical sun. Imagine their disappointment when they were ushered into a gloomy shed. On the concrete floor next to the wall lay a dull-gray hulk, severed in half. Forward and aft sections were propped up side by side on makeshift steel yokes painted a garish yellow. Where the wings had been removed, the gashed fuselage gaped. Where the engines had been removed from the wings, disheveled tubes protruded from the hollows. The rear gunner's turret was smashed; years earlier, vandals had intruded. Birds had followed and made the turret their home, tearing apart webbing to construct their nests. The engines also had become home to birds, whose corrosive droppings gutted their once smoothly moving parts. The Enola Gay was a wreck! Who could have allowed this to happen? Who was responsible for this outrage? To fully understand, we must return to the days following the Allies' victory. A POSTWAR ODYSSEY Once the war had ended with the signing of the armistice on the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945, the Enola Gay remained on Tinian until November 6. She was then flown to Roswell AAFB in New Mexico to serve with a squadron that would remain operational despite the massive reduction in force that had returned many of the men to civilian life. After the war, in the summer of 1946, the United States conducted Operations Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to test the effects of nuclear explosions. Bikini's isolation in mid-Pacific Ocean, just north of the equator, made the atoll an ideal site. It provided adequate secrecy and was sufficiently remote from habitation to prevent a threat from radioactive fallout--or so it was hoped. After undergoing modifications, the Enola Gay was ready to join the tests. Tibbets flew her to Kwajalein Island in the Marshalls but then found himself and his aircraft largely shunted aside. A different crew was selected to conduct the first test, whose prime task was to see the effect of an atomic explosion on seventy obsolete naval vessels assembled in Bikini's lagoon. Bikini is an extinct volcano that juts up from the ocean floor. The irregular crater rim here and there protrudes from the water in a necklace of small islands enclosing a shallow, central lagoon, only two hundred feet at its deepest point, but stretching twenty-five miles east-west and fifteen miles north-south. Most of the little islands are barely a hundred yards wide, a few hundred yards long, and quite flat. Only a few rise more than twenty feet above high tide. Two of the islands, Bikini and Eneu, occupy as much area as the two dozen others combined. Even Bikini, the largest of them all, claims less than a square mile of land. What these little islands lacked in size they made up in beauty. In 1946 they were covered with lush tropical vegetation and tall palms. Wonderfully colored fish swam in the lagoon. Multicolored seashells adorned the beaches. Bikini Atoll had been home to 162 Malayo-Polynesian natives, who lived on coconuts, the fish they caught, and local vegetation. Within months of the war's end, however, the atoll's entire population was evacuated so that tests could be conducted. These Bikinians, their children, and their grandchildren were not to see their homeland again for over four decades. When they finally returned, their paradise had been transformed into a wasteland that the United States was attempting to clean up and restore. The bomb dropped on July 1, 1946, at Bikini was identical to the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. As Tibbets recalls it, the Air Force had decided to replace him and his men with a new, less-experienced team. At dawn on July 1, they set out to drop their bomb on the USS Nevada, right at the center of the cluster of ships and painted a bright orange to make her easily visible from 30,000 feet. But because of an apparent error in the crew's computations, they missed the target ships by a third of a mile. General Curtis LeMay, in charge of the entire operation, was furious. He asked Tibbets to return to Washington as his personal emissary to report the unfortunate incident to General Carl Spaatz. Tibbets left at once, returning in the Enola Gay without her having taken part in the tests. Later that month, the Army Air Forces decided to mothball the Enola Gay, and on July 24, 1946, she was flown to Davis-Monthan AAFB, at Tucson, Arizona, for storage. There she stayed for three years.
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