THE BOMB THAT CHANGED THE WORLD - Hiroshima: 75 Years Later

WWII veterans recall the tough missions leading up to Hiroshima and the efforts to hide the Enola Gay, seen here returning from dropping the atomic bomb on that city 75 years ago today

Hiroshima: 75 Years Later

Hiroshima: 75 Years Later is a landmark 2-hour documentary to mark the anniversary of the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in wartime. Using never-before-seen archival footage, a long-suppressed color film from the immediate aftermath of the bomb, and overlooked audio testimony from core protagonists and victims, the film provides a unique and highly personal understanding of the most devastating experiment in human history. Told entirely from the first-person perspective of leaders, physicists, soldiers, and survivors, Hiroshima: 75 Years Later presents the moral, scientific, and military conundrums of the atomic bomb, as felt by those closest to it.

Memories of the unit that hid the Enola Gay, which dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima 75 years ago today

Day after day, the planes took off. Sometimes one minute apart, the shiny new “Superfortresses” humming through the sky over the vast Pacific to strike at the heart of the enemy and end World War II.

Maj. Jack Koser took to the skies on those never-ending flights. So did 1st Lts. Ed Vincent and Warren Higgins. Fresh-faced they flew. Some, teenagers barely out of high school. Now one has passed the century mark and others are not far behind.

Their planes had painted pictures and names like “Flak Alley Sally” and “Lucky Strike” and “Here’s Lucky.”

They hit the Japanese homeland hard. Fires raged. Mines they dropped dotted the harbors and bays, stalling supplies and choking the country’s navy.

Today, Aug. 6, marks the 75th anniversary of the day that the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, hitting Hiroshima, Japan, and three days later another bomb for Nagasaki.

Those historic, cataclysmic events sped up the end of the war and set the stage for the nuclear arms race and subsequent Cold War. The single bomb dropped this day in 1945 killed an estimated 140,000 people from both the blast and aftereffects.

The plane that dropped the big one.

And there was another piece of military technological history that some argue had a larger hand in ending the war than it gets credit for — the B29 Superfortress.

Though Tinian was where the famed “Enola Gay” launched its fateful mission to deliver the first A-bomb, it was also home to the 6th Bomb Group, which served as cover for the super-secret mission.

The unit also hid the “Enola Gay” for a time, before it loaded its infamous payload “Little Boy” the first Atomic Bomb dropped in war — on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.

The 6th Bomb Group, part of the Army Air Corps’ 313th Bomb Wing, 20th Air Force, made it to Tinian, one of the last Pacific islands in a chain leading to mainland Japan, months after Allied forces took the island in a battle that lasted just a few days but claimed more than 5,000 Japanese forces and more than 300 U.S. Marines.

Koser, Vincent and Higgins served on different crews, but all had similar experiences. They’d signed up with the new Army Air Corps to fly. At first, they’d been trained on the B-17 “Flying Fortress,” which was helping win the war in Europe.

But that aircraft, as good as it was, couldn’t compare to the B-29. And the B-17 just couldn’t make the distances needed in this combat theater.

The older bomber could carry a crew of 10, flying up to 287 mph for a maximum range of about 2,000 miles. That might get a crew to Japan. It wouldn’t get them back.

The new B-29, however, carried an 11-person crew and could go 357 mph for a range of 3,250 mph.

The B-29 featured the first-ever fully pressurized nose and cockpit in a bomber; an aft area for the crew was also pressurized, making it far more comfortable to fly.

And it could carry a lot more bombs.

Which is exactly what it did over Japan.

B-29s in flight off of Tinian during World War II. (Bill Webster/6th Bomb Group Association)

Though the first A-bomb changed warfare forever, the bombing runs on Tokyo, some experts argue, may have done as much or more to devastate the Japanese military’s will to fight. They claimed as many or more casualties and laid waste to as much territory in an even larger city.

Vincent, 97, was only 19 years old when he flew as a co-pilot on early missions out of Tinian to Japan. He remembers seeing flashes of light from Iwo Jima as Marines took the island to provide bombers a refueling and stopover on their missions to the mainland.

Though the tide had turned, ground troops and aircrews had no illusions that the Japanese military would simply surrender.

Despite months of sustained bombing and island after island falling, they continued to fight.

Retired Marine Maj. John Haynes, 90, was only 15 years old when he landed on Okinawa. He missed the taking of the island but was likely one of the bodies to be flung ashore on mainland Japan in the seemingly inevitable invasion.

Secret weapon
Unknown to the Tinian crews or the Marines slogging through the island campaign, a new weapon was on its way.

A few weeks before Aug. 6, 1945, Koser was leading flights over Tinian as they prepped for more missions when he noticed more planes than usual in the 6th Bomb Group formation.

Seemed funny, but he didn’t take much notice.

Higgins and Vincent heard rumors about this new group and noticed that they’d painted the same unit design on the tail of their planes, even though they weren’t part of the 6th.

They asked, but the new guys were kept off at a distance and didn’t really talk much with the other crews.

“When they first came, we wondered what in the world were those guys doing,” Vincent said. “They weren’t going on any missions. We were going on missions and getting shot at.”

But, as good soldiers do, these Air Corps members continued on the mission.

“I don’t think anybody talked about it, we were all scared,” Vincent said.

His plane alone, “Flak Alley Sally” tallied 141 bullet holes in it from the anti-aircraft fire his crew took over Japan.

They flew one mission that was 19 hours 40 minutes long, likely the longest in the history of the war and covered 4,400 miles to reach and mine a harbor in Korea that still had Japanese forces.

Maybe the biggest news of the war came to the soldiers on Tinian almost as an afterthought.

USO entertainers pose for photos on the B-29 bomber wing while visiting troops in the Pacific during World War II. (Irving Winkler Collection)

“We found out after they dropped it,” Higgins, 96, said. “We were there, on the same airfield. They took off from Tinian, but until they bombed, we didn’t know anything. We weren’t even allowed to talk about atoms, didn’t even know what they were.”

For Haynes and others like him, mopping up continued. He and other Marines were sent to China to accept the surrender of masses of Japanese troops after the surrender.

David Wilson, a co-historian of the 6th Group and son of one of its members, maintains a lifelong personal connection to it through his late father, Staff Sgt. Bernard Wilson.

Wilson said that his father was most proud of three things during the war — that he was on the longest bombing mission, that he flew over the USS Missouri as the Japanese high command surrendered, ending the war, and that he was on a mission to bomb the main railroad access that would have helped stall the Japanese should there have been a land invasion by the United States.

And it is that mission and the code words that never came to abort a strike on the Marifu Railroad Yards at Iwakuni, Japan, that emerged when memory failed his aging father.

“I could go to my dad and ask him ‘Daddy what did you have for breakfast yesterday?’” Wilson said. “He couldn’t remember.”

But if he asked him about a special code used on that last mission, the response was always there, even at the end of his life.

“Daddy, you also told me about that code …” Wilson would begin.

“Break, Utah, Utah, Utah, Break,” his father would respond.

Even though the bombings stopped soon after the atomic weapons were employed, other missions continued. Cpl. Wallace Gake, 94, served on a ground crew and arrived on the island right after the bomb. Many crews went home to leave the Army and start new lives. The rest of the unit was sent to the Philippines.

But planes still had to fly, deliver supplies, transport people. And Gake was there for months after, keeping planes running with other maintenance crews.

Army Air Corps Cpl. Wallace Gake served on Tinian at the end of World War II in a B-29 ground crew (Gake Family)

“A lot of times the ground crews get forgotten. We don’t drop any bombs and we don’t shoot enemy fighters,” he said.

But for him not much changed. A very noisy life, planes continued to buzz off the island day and night.

It was one of those post-combat missions that remain Koser’s lasting memory, 75 years later.

“One of the first things I remember is seeing the Great Wall of China,” he recounted.

Inside his plane, the bomb bays were chock full of food, medicine, even bicycles. All of that with one destination — POW camps that still held Allied prisoners who hadn’t yet been reached by ground forces in China.

He still remembers flying low, maybe 500 feet off the ground, opening the first bomb bay to drop parachute-rigged supplies. Then circling the camp to see cheering survivors before dropping the second load.

“It was a wonderful time,” Koser said.

B29 bombers such as "Here's Lucky" helped pave the way for the final blows that sped up the end of World War II — the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (6th Bomb Group Association)

Source:

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)


THE PATRIOT

 "FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY"

and is protected speech pursuant to the "unalienable rights" of all men, and the First (and Second) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, In God we trust

Stand Up To Government Corruption and Hypocrisy

Knowledge Is Power And Information is Liberating: The FRIENDS OF LIBERTY BLOG GROUPS are non-profit blogs dedicated to bringing as much truth as possible to the readers.

NEVER FORGET THE SACRIFICES

BY OUR VETERANS 

Note: We at The Patriot cannot make any warranties about the completeness, reliability, and accuracy of this information.

The Patriot is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with the mission to Educate, protect and defend individual freedoms and individual rights.

Support the Trump Presidency and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter.

COMPLAINTS ABOUT OUR GOVERNMENT REGISTERED HERE WHERE THE BUCK STOPS!

GUEST POSTING: WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE PUBLISHED ... DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING ON YOUR MIND?

WOULD YOU LIKE TO A BE PUBLISHED AUTHOR 

THEN WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!

Knowledge Is Power - Information Is Liberating: The Patriot Welcome is a non-profit blog dedicated to bringing as much truth as possible to the readers.

Big Tech has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share with your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you

Please share… Like many other fact-oriented bloggers, we've been exiled from Facebook as well as other "mainstream" social sites. 

We will continue to search for alternative sites, some of which have already been compromised, in order to deliver our message and urge all of those who want facts, not spin and/or censorship, to do so as well.

Keep on seeking the truth, rally your friends and family and expose as much corruption as you can… every little bit helps add pressure on the powers that are no more.

WHERE YOU CAN FIND US

 "FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY"

     IN THE LIGHT OF TRUTH

"Yet, while denial might placate those who do not prefer to confront unpleasant facts, truth does not mold itself to the wishes and desires of the willfully ignorant." Unknown  

Those Who Don't Know The True Value Of Loyalty Can Never Appreciate The Cost Of Betrayal.