Lewis: We had confidence in what we were doing. Interviewer: Did you have any fears yourself that the Enola Gay might be destroyed in the explosion? And we made reference to it jokingly in most cases that we hoped that we would be able to get rid of it safely from our point of view anyway and hoping it would do the job it was expected to do. Lewis: Well we always knew very well that we had this huge monster in the belly of the ship. Interviewer: Is there anything that comes to your mind now or anything that stuck in your mind? Interviewer: Was there much conversation in the plane on the way to the target? This again was the first time this bomb, a bomb like this had ever been dropped by an airplane. In other words, there were so many things that could go wrong. Lewis: In relation to other bombing missions, from the aspect of the flight itself no, but the unknown quantity that was detached to this flight was the all-important part as far as we were concerned. Interviewer: From a point of view of a comeback mission, was this a difficult flight? It took a lot of runway to get us airborne. This bomb was ten thousand pounds and had a lot of gas in it. Lewis: No, I had no doubts, we used a lot of runway because of the very heavy taking off we had. You were at the controls did you have any doubts that you were going to get off the ground with the bomb? Interviewer: One of the officers who was watching the take-off of the Enola Gay said that he never saw a B-29 use so much runway. Lewis: No, this was all too new to us and we were more a test outfit than we were anything else because no one had any experience in dropping such a bomb. Interviewer: Did any of the men at that time discuss the implications of atomic warfare? As you know, more destruction was to come from the bomb than was anticipated. And the way we had this planned tis bomb was to detonate at eighteen hundred feet above the surface of the earth and as a result of this high altitude explosion the center force of the bomb would as had been expected, was supposed to just take care of this Army Headquarters. Lewis: I do not believe so at the time because the simple fact was that our target was the center of the city, which housed the Second Imperial Army Headquarters. Interviewer: Did any of the men show any qualms about using the weapon of that type? Robert Lewis: Well there was quite some discussion-perhaps the most important points that we are interested in is the safety and the resulting turning we were to make to avoid the results of this detonation. Did the men and the crew discuss this among themselves?
#ENOLA GAY PILOT QUOTE BEFORE TAKEOFF MOVIE#
He is married and the father of five children all born since 1945.Ī few days before the Hiroshima mission, the crew of the Enola Gay were shown movie films of the first atomic explosion, the detonation of a plutonium bomb in a New Mexico desert. Today, Robert Lewis is an executive of a candy-manufacturing firm in New Jersey. Captain Lewis flew as copilot on that mission. In the raid on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay was flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets Commanding Officer of the group. In 1945, Robert Lewis was a Captain in the 509 th Composite Bomb Group. Today, I am talking with men who were aboard the Enola Gay and the Great Artiste on those missions. Three days later on August ninth, the B-29 Great Artiste dropped the plutonium atomic bomb, called the Fat Man, on Nagasaki. Puny by today’s one hundred megaton standards, but powerful enough to kill seventy-eight thousand one hundred and fifty people. The Gimmick, also known as Little Boy, was a uranium atomic bomb with the explosive power of twenty thousand tons of TNT. The time was fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds past 8:00 AM, just seventeen seconds behind schedule. Aboard the plane were thirteen men a thing called “the Gimmick.” Some fourteen hundred miles and six hours later, the Enola Gay reached her appointment with history. Interviewer: At two forty-five in the morning of August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay took off from North field on Tinian.