Here in this quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., at a hangar-like restoration facility operated by the Smithsonian Institution, lies a primitive but extremely evocative symbol of the nuclear age. It is a 45-year-old airplane that bears on its nose, in black, rounded script, the name Enola Gay. As yet wingless, it lies dismembered in two great sections set side by side on steel supports in the antiseptic glare of overhead fluorescent lighting.
For years, skilled craftsmen have been bringing this most significant of airplanes back to life with painstaking care. Their electric tools buzz and whir and crackle in a space that is otherwise eerily quiet.
One is reminded of Dr. Frankenstein and his assistants in their careful labors over the prone, disconnected form of quite another kind of monster.
It`s not an exaggerated analogy, this reference to an uncontrollable creation rising malevolently from good intentions. This airplane came into being as just another B-29 Superfortress: United States Army Air Force Aircraft No. 44-86292.
But as the Enola Gay, this flying machine, in its own terrible way, has become as famous and important as the Wright Brothers` first flier, which is enshrined in the huge entrance hall of Washington`s Air and Space Museum, and Charles Lindbergh`s Spirit of St. Louis, which hangs there, too.
The silver-gray paint on the fuselage is now far more gray than silver, but by the cockpit, in fading black, stenciled letters one can still see a row of names, descending, like a stack of falling bombs:
Col Paul W. Tibbets Jr.
Capt Robert W. Lewis
Maj Theodore ”Dutch” van Kirk
Maj Thomas W. Ferebee
MSgt Wyatt Duzenbury
TSgt George R. ”Bob” Caron
SSgt Joseph A. Stiborik
SSgt Richard ”Dick” Nelson
Sgt Robert ”Bob” Shumard
Capt ”Deak” Parsons
This is the crew of the Enola Gay. These fliers, joined for this special mission by radar officers Lt. Jacob Beser and Lt. Morris R. Jeppson, are the men who did it.
One of them depressed a small metal switch. Moments later-after the 43 seconds required for a 12-foot-long, 9,000-pound steel casing loaded with the terrifying explosive to drop from 31,600 feet to a detonation altitude of 1,890 feet-there was a hellish, incandescent flash, a violent shuddering of the air, and 60,175 people instantly died.
Peering through the Plexiglas nose of the Enola Gay, one can see the highly utilitarian place where Ferebee sat as the bombardier on the mission, and the grim little boxlike device that was his weapon. The other men were his confederates, their every effort dedicated to bringing him to the point in the sky over Hiroshima, Japan, where at 9:15 a.m. on a hazy summer morning in August 1945, he was to do his work.
What happened when he depressed that little switch stunned all aboard.
In his book, ”Enola Gay,” dedicated to his mother, for whom the airplane was named, pilot Tibbets noted that several members of the crew thought they`d weathered a near-hit from an exploding anti-aircraft shell. When they had lumbered a few miles beyond the impact site and were beginning a turn to look at what they had done, they became aware of what had happened. Tibbets, a much-decorated veteran pilot who went on to become a brigadier general, felt that so significant an occasion deserved a few words.
”Fellows,” he said, clicking on his intercom, ”you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”
As he spoke, crew members stared at a monstrous purple cloud that already had boiled three miles into the sky above them.
”It was a frightening sight,” Tibbets wrote. ”Even though we were several miles away, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us.”
Beneath them, the city of Hiroshima had vanished in a vast, black smudge. Years later, historian Samuel Eliot Morison described the act of these men-and the generals and government officials who commanded them-as something perfectly explicable and rational. The United States was desperately trying to end a global war that had threatened all of civilization. The Germans, defeated in the field, had bowed to the inevitable. But the Japanese, regarding their emperor as a god and warfare as a divine calling, still had more than 2 million ground troops under arms and 5,000 aircraft with trained kamikaze pilots.
No regrets
For the rest of his life, Tibbets has continued to be asked if he has any regrets over what was done by his bomb.
”I quickly reply,” he has said, ” `Not in the least.` ”
The death toll from Hiroshima eventually reached 78,150. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing about 36,000 more Japanese. In terms of the mind-numbing enormity of the slaughter of that war, the casualty count from both cities seems almost an insignificant statistic. Far more people, many of them dying in far more horrible ways, perished in the mass, allied firebombings of Hamburg and the refugee center that was Dresden. The Soviet Union lost 20 million people in the war.
But from the instant Ferebee touched that switch, nothing was ever the same.
A number of the fliers involved in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions are now dead. Some, notably Maj. Claude Eatherly, pilot of the reconnaissance aircraft that gave the go-ahead to Tibbets, went on to troubled lives. Others have simply become old men.
The Enola Gay remained operational for another year, and then was placed in storage in Arizona. In 1949, Tibbets flew it to a military airfield at Park Ridge, Ill.-which subsequently became O`Hare Airport-and it was turned over to the Smithsonian.
It was subsequently flown to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington and disassembled, its components taken to Silver Hill for storage.
After the opening of the National Air and Space Museum-now the most visited museum in the world-the Smithsonian decided to move ahead with efforts to bring the old aircraft back to life, and restoration work began Dec. 5, 1984.
My first encounter with the plane was three years later, in the fall of 1987, when I first visited the Enola Gay here.
At the time, work on the forward half of the fuselage was well advanced. Restorer Richard Horigan, now foreman of the facility, explained that the goal was not to return the B-29 to the pristine condition in which it first emerged from the factory, but to restore it to what it was on the morning Tibbets and his crew guided it off the runway at Tinian.
All the parts going into the restoration are either drawn from the original aircraft, borrowed from one just like it or manufactured employing 1945 methods from materials used at the time. A number of parts have been reclaimed from junk yards or attic collections of World War II souvenirs. Seat cushions look worn. Feet have rubbed the olive-drab paint from the rudder pedals. Back in the radar compartment, next to the place where the restored in-flight toilet will go, is a roll of World War II style military-issue toilet tissue.
Since work was still under way on the cockpit when I first visited the Enola, I was allowed to climb inside and examine it. I sat in Tibbets` seat, put my hands on the control wheel and feet upon the rudder pedals. I imagined myself putting the ship into a slow turn, and tried to imagine myself as Tibbets. Looking out the Plexiglas windows, I saw not tool benches and fluorescent lighting but a hazy Japanese sky. What came next was an urge to get out of his seat.
I moved forward, into Ferebee`s place. With fascination, I leaned over his bombsight and the macabre little box. I put finger to the bomb release switch, wondering what it would feel like to exert the tiny force required and to hear the little click.
I could not bring myself to do it.
Returning to the Enola Gay a few days ago, I found the work on the forward end of the craft complete and the cockpit sealed off. Only Smithsonian personnel and very special guests, notably members of the original crew, are allowed to enter it now.
The aft section is still open-tail gunner`s position (the only place where the Enola Gay carried guns on the mission), oxygen tanks, radar and radio operator`s positions, crawl space and bomb bay. One can stand and touch the steel rack that held the 9,000 pounds of history-and move the strong steel hook the three inches required for the load it held in place to fall. Restorer Bernie Poppert demonstrated its workings. It, too, moves with a click. As with the switch up front, one is struck by the irrevocability of the movement.
Something new has been added to the work area. Laid in front of the Enola Gay`s nose, as if before an altar, is an atomic bomb-a ”Little Boy” casing just like the one dropped on Hiroshima-lacking only its nuclear components. Poppert invited me to touch it.
There is a famous poem written by a now-dead Air Force pilot about the joys of flight through ”footless halls of air.” It concludes with the line, ”I reached out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
I reached out my hand, and, touching the cold, dark steel of that weapon, felt, not God, but something not of this Earth.
Men like Horigan and Poppert and co-worker Dave Peterson got into their restoration work-and go about it on the Enola Gay with such gentle care-because they have an obsessive love of airplanes.
Saving history
Horigan is also a sailplane pilot and, as an Air Force enlisted man, flew in the Black Bird C-130 special-mission aircraft used by the 1st Air Commando Wing in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia in the late 1960s. Poppert is a Navy reservist assigned to P-3 Orion patrol craft and has done Cold War duty with U.S. forces deployed against Soviet submarines at the American base at Keflavik, Iceland. They know the Enola Gay as intimately as Tibbets` crew, if not more so.
Poppert can tell you how uncomfortable it was for the tail gunner, hunched over his twin .50-caliber machine guns on the long flight from Tinian, and understands the workings of the then-top secret devices arrayed on the table before the radar operator.
Horigan notes that the radio operator inscribed his name on the aircraft`s metal.
”Otherwise, there are no crew mementos,” he says. ”They didn`t take anything with them. The enemy was not to find out who they were.”
But, for all their knowledge, they make no judgments.
”Two hundred years from now,” says Horigan, ”researchers are going to want to know everything there is to know about the Enola Gay. How did it function? How did it work? Our job is to save the technology, save the history. It`s not our position to judge.”
Stalled in committee
The restoration of the Enola Gay is to be completed by 1995. The Smithsonian plans to display it in a new complex of hangar-sized exhibition buildings to be erected at Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia at a cost of $305 million. The Enola Gay`s quarters would be devoted to a history of strategic bombing. It would be the centerpiece of an exhibit featuring a large number of artifacts and a video on the development and deployment of the atomic bomb.
Other structures would house the space shuttle Enterprise and other aircraft and memorabilia too large for the Air and Space Museum on the capital Mall.
Legislation to bring the new aerial museum into being-sponsored by Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah), a one-mission shuttle astronaut-has passed the U.S. Senate and is pending in the House of Representatives, where it has been held up in committee by Rep. Sidney Yates, the Illinois Democrat. He says he questions the need for such a large expenditure, almost twice as much as the federal government spends on the arts in the United States in a year.
Yates notes that the Smithsonian has received an offer to build the new facility at Denver`s Stapleton Airport for something like half the amount it would cost at Dulles. Hearings on the issue have been scheduled for next month.
But the city of Washington-including the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives and the Library of Congress-has become the principal repository of important pieces of American history: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Old Glory, Lincoln`s Emancipation
Proclamation, John F. Kennedy`s presidential aircraft, wife Jacqueline`s inaugural gown.
Surely the instrument with which the United States became the first and only nation to wage nuclear war should be a part of that.
Like those of us who lived through it, future generations may find it impossible to comprehend how this could ever have come to pass. But it helps profoundly to stand before this now-aged airplane, to look within its shadowy confines and realize that the act was done by ordinary, decent and courageous men, an American air crew like any other-by human beings, not monsters.
