'My god, what have we done': The 2 US pilots who dropped atomic bombs on Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Eighty years ago, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, wiping out the entire city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, a US Air Force B-29 Superfortress dropped a uranium bomb called “Little Boy” on the Japanese city, killing more than a lakh people.

Three days later, a more powerful atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki. With this, Japan surrendered and the war came to an end. However, the death and destruction caused by the US attacks have raised questions about the necessity of these bombings.

What did the pilots who flew the planes carrying the atomic bombs think? We take a look.

How the US bombed Hiroshima, Nagasaki

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the first city to witness an atomic bomb attack. A US B-29 bomber, dubbed the Enola Gay, dropped a 9,700-pound top-secret bomb on the Japanese city around 8:15 am.

The bomb detonated, triggering temperatures as hot as the sun and destroying the whole city.

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Around 90 per cent of the 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima were damaged, burned or reduced to rubble. The atomic bombing killed an estimated 80,000 people.

Tens of thousands of casualties were later reported due to radiation sickness and injuries. A total of 140,000 people are believed to have died by the end of the year.

On August 9, 1945, a more powerful atomic bomb detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. A US B-29 bomber, Bockscar, dropped a plutonium bomb dubbed “Fat Man” on the city, killing nearly 40,000 people instantly. Another 40,000 later died from injuries and radiation sickness.

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The two atomic bombings killed about 200,000 people in Japan and possibly more.

Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, ravaged by the nuclear attacks and a Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Japan surrendered. This marked the end of the Second World War.

Pilot who flew Enola Gay

Paul Tibbets flew the Enola Gay that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, a city with a population of about 350,000. He led a crew of 12 men on the mission, naming the bomb-carrying B-29 plane after his mother. Eighty years ago, the plane took off from its base in Tinian, near Guam, in the early morning and headed for Hiroshima in southern Japan.

About 80 km out of Tinian, William “Deak” Parsons, a naval captain, and Morris Jeppson, an electronics specialist, climbed into the bomb bay to arm Little Boy. The process involved putting four bags of cordite, a form of gunpowder, into the bomb’s breech plug, The Guardian reported, citing an excerpt from Stephen Walker’s book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima.

Just over an hour from the Japanese coast, Jeppson returned to the bomb bay to replace Little Boy’s three green safety plugs with three red arming plugs. “He double-checked the red plugs were correctly set, gave the third one a final twist – “That was a moment,” he remembered – and left. He was the last person to touch or see the bomb. Enola Gay’s co-pilot, Bob Lewis, pencilled in his log: “The bomb is now live. It’s a funny feeling knowing it’s in back of you. Knock wood,”” wrote Walker.

On the morning of that ill-fated day, several air-raid sirens had already been heard in Hiroshima. By the time the siren sounded when the Enola Gay approached, it was too late.

The Enola Gay was about 16 km away when the atomic bomb detonated. However, the plane still felt the shockwaves, with the crew recalling the jolt from the force of the explosion, reported Business Insider.

They saw the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima. “The city wasn’t there. There was just nothing there. That dust cloud covered the whole city,” Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who flew another B-29, The Great Artiste, filled with blast‑measuring instruments, said, as per the book.

Addressing the crew, Tibbets said: “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”

“You just can’t imagine something that big. We couldn’t see how the Japanese could continue the war. Nobody said anything about the people on the ground. That wasn’t mentioned at all,” Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the navigator of the Enola Gay, told Walker in 2004.

Tibbets and other crew members continued to defend the bombing until their deaths.

“I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we’d be doing that I thought, yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives,” Tibbets told the writer Studs Terkel in a 2002 interview. “We won’t have to invade [Japan].”

Tibbets, who died in 2007, did not express remorse over the loss of civilian lives. “You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people,” he told Terkel.

“If the newspapers would just cut out the s—: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.”

Nagasaki was not the target

Nagasaki was not the original target of the US after the Hiroshima bombing. The mission’s primary target was the industrial city of Kokura, now called Kitakyushu.

The bomb “Fat Man” that destroyed the Japanese city was onboard the B-29 bomber Bockscar, piloted by Charles “Chuck” Sweeney.

The plane had fuel problems and thick smoke and clouds blanketing Kokura prevented the city’s bombing. After several attempts, the crew decided to abandon their primary target and dropped the five-tonne atomic bomb on Nagasaki instead.

“Suddenly the entire horizon burst into a super-brilliant white with an intense flash – more intense than Hiroshima. The light was blinding,” Sweeney said in his 1997 book, War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission.

As per Walker’s book, Fat Man exploded nearly directly over the factory that once produced torpedoes used in Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor .

Bockscar did not have much fuel to return to its starting base on Tinian Island. Sweeney then directed the plane to Okinawa, the closest American airbase. By the time it landed, the plane had only a minute’s fuel left in the tanks.

Sweeney did not regret bombing Nagasaki. “I looked upon it as a duty. I just wanted the war to be over, so we could get back home to our loved ones,” he told the Patriot Ledger newspaper of Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1995. “I hope my missions were the last ones of their kind that will ever be flown.”

Sweeney’s co-pilot on the mission, Fred Olivi, remarked in 1995: “While thousands died, I feel sure the bomb had to be dropped because, if the Americans had been forced to invade Japan, it would have been a bloodbath.”

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Did they ever feel regret?

The devastation in Japan’s two cities has led to reflection among the crew that carried out the missions.

“You don’t brag about wiping out 60‑70,000,” Robert Shumard, a flight engineer on Enola Gay, who died in 1967, said. George “Bob” Caron, the plane’s tail gunner, admitted “a partial feeling of guilt” when he saw images of burned children from Hiroshima. “I wish I hadn’t seen them,” he said, as per Walker’s book.

Jeppson once indicated that the bomb might have been demonstrated “without the need for destroying a city”. He wrote to Walker about his “sorrow” at Hiroshima’s “great tragedy”.

“My God, what have we done? If I live for 100 years I will never get these few minutes out of my mind," wrote Enola Gay’s co-pilot Lewis in his logbook.

Sweeney remained an outspoken defender of the bombings until his death, but knew that history should not be repeated. “As the man who commanded the last atomic mission,” he had said in the 1997 book, “I pray that I retain that singular distinction.”

“I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life,” Kirk, Enola Gay’s navigator, said in an interview in 2005. “We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will never be another.”

He added: “I pray that we have learned a lesson for all time. But I’m not sure that we have.”

With inputs from agencies