Topics: Japan, US News, World War 2, History, Documentaries
WW2 is made up of terrible and heroic stories, and the pilot who dropped the first bomb on Japan recalled what happened in this pivotal moment during the war.
As time goes on, its easy to forget some of the most significant moments of human history.
World War 2 is one of the most fascinating and daunting time periods in recent history and is filled with world-defining and world-changing moments.
The atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan by the US are certainly one of the most frightening and intriguing moments of the entire conflict.
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The atomic bombing of the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains the first and only use of nuclear weapons in history to date.
Paul Tibbets was the aircraft captain of the Enola Gay B-29 plane that dropped the first bomb, the Little Boy, on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
In an interview from the British documentary The World at War, Tibbets recalled how the bombing went and detailed how he saw the mushroom cloud after dropping the bomb that killed an estimated 140,000 people.
He explained that just like most missions, there was some chatter among the crew on the plane, but eventually a quiet period settled in.
He noted that the bomb took around 53 seconds from being dropped to hitting the ground and exploding, giving the crew time enough to turn the plane around and actually see the explosion.
He said: “The day was clear, when we dropped that bomb, it was a clear sun shiny day.
“Visibility was unrestricted, so we came back around again facing the direction of Hiroshima.
“We saw this cloud coming up, the cloud by this time at 2 minutes was up at our altitude. We were 33,000 feet up at this time and this cloud was up there and continued to go right on up in a boiling fashion, it was rolling and boiling.
“The surface was nothing but a black boiling... like a barrel of tar, probably the best description I can give.
“This is exactly the way it looked down there, where before there had been a city, distinctive houses, buildings and everything you could see from our altitude.
“Now you couldn’t see anything except this black boiling debris down below.
“We took pictures as rapidly as we could, my immediate concern after that was that it was time to get out of here.”
The documentary also features accounts from Japanese citizens who lived through the bombing, as well as Tibbet’s testimony.
