Seeing the “Beginning” and “end” photos of this thread reminded me of a book I had read many years ago by Stanley Weintraub it was called ” Long Day’s Journey into War: December 7, 1941 ” I recommend anyone to read it as it covers the events “48 total hours” of in that whole day all around the world. It contained what I thought at the time was a ‘full circle’ moment
Anyway… On page 655 he has this passage about 6th August 1945
“In the Great Artiste, an accompanying B-28 that carried no explosives other than defensive hardware, some of the crew needed no explanation. They were scientists monitoring the equipment that would photograph and measure the effects of the explosion. . At eight-fifteen and seventeen seconds the morning, Japan time, the bomb-bay doors of the Enola Gay opened. From The Great Artiste an instrument package drifted down from a parachute.
Forty-three seconds later, with the Enola gay at 31,600 feet in a 155-degree diving turn to the right racing away from the impact “Little Boy” erupted 1,890 feet over Hiroshima like a thousand rising suns. The plane lurched upward on lightening its load; it shuddered again in the shock wave, then trembled in the echo effect. “I think this is the end of the war,” Tibbets observed to Bob Lewis, his copilot. “Bingo!” the Enola Gay radioed to Tinian.
Monitoring the instruments in The Great Artiste was Luis Alvarez, later a Nobel Prize winner in physics. On December 7, 1941, he had been working at the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory on radar. Now he saw a bright flash illuminate the crew compartment, “the light from the explosion reflecting off the clouds in front of us … I looked in vain for the city that had been our target”
On Page 666 is the following section
“Captain Mitsuo Fuchida (leader of the first wave of carrier planes over Pearl Harbor, rescued later from a ditched plane during the Battle of Midway. Fuchida was a survivor. As Air Operations Officer for the Navy, he had been at a conference at Hiroshima on the defense of Kyushu; it had ended just the day before. Leaving his assistant, Lieutenant Toshio Hashizume, at their hotel in Hiroshima, the Yamato (since obliterated by the bomb), he had flown to Nara to troubleshoot a problem at the new underground naval headquarters being built remote from Tokyo. The headquarters would lack a navy. The fuel-starved home fleet was down to one battleship, four small carriers, four cruisers, and twenty-eight destroyers. Many were damaged and barely operable. Could the essentialFuchida return urgently to Hiroshima to explore the whereabouts of a second, apparently unexploded, bomb? Witnesses had seen a second B-29 drop something by parachute. If Fuchida could find it, the secret of the awesome explosive might be solved. He flew back, circling over the smoking rubble that had been that had been Hiroshima Near the river, at what seemed the blast center, the charred
skeleton of a domed building somehow stood. Little else remained the fires were going out. There was nothing left to burn. With Captain Yasukado Yasui, Fuchida flew about the nearby hillsuntil darkness, spotting nothing resembling a crumpled parachute. At dawn the pair began, searching likely sites in a truck from Kure.
Up a mountain road, five miles north of Hiroshima, they saw what appeared to be white silk billowing in the wind. Stopping, they climbed out and cautiously followed the parachute cords down to a metal cylinder, three feet long and about a foot wide. It did not look like a bomb, but it was clearly what observers had described. Tugging at a metal ring, they dislodged the contents — instruments connected by wires, including a thermometer and a radio transmitter. They had found Luis Alvarez’s scientific package, which had measured and reported the performance of the bomb. To Yasui, Fuchida explained the likely purpose of the contents, adding, “Whatever made us think we could beat America?” Gingerly, they pushed the wires and instruments back into the cylinder, loaded it into their truck, and left the hills from which they could still see the horror of Hiroshima. “
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