The View from the Enola Gay

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, a flash that one witness called a "sheet of sun" opened over Hiroshima. On the ground it registered as a noiseless, blinding light followed by a pressure that crushed buildings and spirit alike. From the cockpit of the B-29 Superfortress, the same instant was clinical and detached. Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew had trained for months on a mission they understood only in fragments, and when the four-ton uranium slug finally cleared the bay, their first sensation was not historical weight but physical relief. The lightened aircraft surged upward—a mechanical gasp—before the shockwaves caught the fuselage with the force of a nearby artillery blast.

The bomb was the payoff of the Manhattan Project, a two-billion-dollar gamble that had distilled the fundamental energy of the universe into a weapon. To the men in the air, the "original child bomb" rose as a roiling tower of dust and fission fragments miles into the sky, later shedding condensed moisture as black, marble-sized drops of rain. From that altitude the fan-shaped city, split by the seven estuarial rivers of the Ota, simply disappeared beneath a thick, dreadful miasma. There was no sound of an explosion in the plane—only the visual evidence of a civilization reduced to a pattern of residue.

Below, a quiet endurance took hold among the survivors, the disposition the Japanese call shikata ga nai—it cannot be helped. For the aviators the day stayed a matter of professional execution. They had been told a new kind of power was being unleashed, one that erased the distinction between soldier and civilian in the crucible of total war. As they turned the Enola Gay back toward Tinian, the crew looked down on a reddish-brown scar where a commercial center had stood minutes earlier—the first men to see the flattened horizon of the atomic age, and to catch the "electric smell" of a split atom, long before the rest of the world would argue over its cost.