Crew of the enola gay

Paul W. Tibbets Jr****. He died in 1983.

Sergeant George ‘Bob’ Caron, the tail gunner, was the only crew member to witness the blast directly through a rear-facing window. Each member’s role was carefully defined, creating a highly skilled unit ready for their historic task. The exhibit was eventually revised, displaying the aircraft without a strong interpretive stance.

While many of the men maintained personal pride in their military professionalism, few glorified the destruction itself.

Beser passed away in 1992.

Several crew members chose to step away from public life entirely. Major Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk handled directional duties, and Major Thomas Ferebee operated as the bombardier.

Captain William “Deak” Parsons worked as the weaponeer, with Second Lieutenant Morris Jeppson as his assistant.

Their mission was history’s turning point, but also their personal burden. Parsons died in 1953, before the larger public reckoning with the bomb’s legacy fully unfolded.

Ensign Morris Jeppson, Parsons’ assistant, was the man who removed the bomb’s safety plugs mid-flight, allowing it to arm. According to Van Kirk, who was sitting behind the co-pilot, as they gazed at the giant mushroom cloud enveloping the heart of Hiroshima, Lewis exclaimed: ‘Look at that son of a bitch go!’.

Lewis, a civilian airline pilot before and after the war, wrestled with the event privately.

You’ll find that their preparation reached its peak when they conducted a critical rehearsal flight on July 31, 1945, fine-tuning their coordination and timing.

While the crew honed their skills, the Little Boy atomic bomb made its way to Tinian via the USS Indianapolis in late July 1945.

The world had been at war, really, from the '30s in China, continuously, and millions and millions of people had been killed. It was just too much to express in words, I guess. The explosion over Hiroshima ushered in the atomic age, marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War, and created a moral legacy that haunted and defined the lives of those aboard.

Some defended their actions unapologetically; others expressed private doubts or lingering sorrow

The men of the Enola Gay were highly trained and mission-focused, yet none could fully comprehend the historic and human weight of the operation they had executed.

He maintained that the bombing, tragic though it was, had likely prevented an even greater catastrophe. How did the thirteen men aboard the Enola Gay – the US aircraft that delivered the bomb that killed at least 150,000 people – live with the knowledge of what they had done?

The morning of 6 August 1945 began like any other on the Pacific island of Tinian.

So, no, I had no problem with it. Fifty years later, he had no regrets about his part in the mission, according to the Riverside (California) Press-Enterprise:

"War is a terrible thing ... Colonel Paul W. Tibbets handpicked both his Boeing B-29 Superfortress and his elite crew, including Thomas Ferebee, Theodore Van Kirk, and Jacob Beser, to guarantee optimum performance.

He had requested cremation and no physical memorial, because it would become a pilgrimage site for nuclear protesters.

This post originally appeared in 2010. I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it, and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be, because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times.

"On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made.

Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot who led the mission to drop the gun-type fission weapon, continued his Army Air Forces career until 1966, when he retired as a Brigadier General.

The crew’s navigator, Major Thomas W. Van Kirk, plunged into the private sector, where he found success as a business executive.

Just how many did we kill? It just seems impossible to comprehend.