Pre-Owned Enola Gay (Paperback) 0671425951 9780671425951

It was quite probably the most important event of World War II. Yet the story of the bombing of Hiroshima, the momentous flight into the future of the B-29 Enola Gay, was never before revealed from firsthand sources.

Award-winning writers Thomas and Witts separate myth from reality as they retrace the steps that led the world into the atomic age. Maj. Claude Eatherly, believed by so many to be the Hiroshima pilot who later went insane out of remorse, wasn't aboard the Enola Gay. The real pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets, was said to be unwilling to talk. He talked to the authors of this book for fifty hours. The authors then talked to each surviving crew member, to the scientists and soldiers whose war effort pointed in one direction, toward August 6, 1945, when the first aerial drop of a uranium bomb wiped out most of a city but, ironically, did not stop the war.

Counterpointed against the Americans' experiences, we get the firsthand story of the Japanese on the ground: Lt. Yokoyama, the zealous young officer whose antiaircraft battery protected Hiroshima from aerial attack; Mayor Awaya of Hiroshima, who brought his family from the dangers of Tokyo to the safety of Hiroshima; Gen. Hata of the Second Area Army, who regarded Hiroshima as the center of the vast network of defenses against the expected Allied invasion; Prof. Asada, the world-renowned scientist who thought he was perfecting a weapon even more terrifying than the atomic bomb; Dr. Shima, whose hospital was at ground zero.

In addition to their extensive interviews with participants on both sides, the authors had access to previously classified private diaries and government documents. From these, they reconstructed the unmatched drama of men racing to perfect -- and others learning to safely drop -- the untested and most feared bomb in the world, while in Japan, the Imperial Army planned a defense, centered in Hiroshima, that would take an estimated million Allied lives.