Part IV - Tibbets and the Enola Gay ride into history...

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot

            Hiroshima was a city of approximately 350 to 400,000 people in August of 1945; it was also headquarters to the Imperial 2nd General Army. When the Atomic bomb detonated, the fireball from "Little Boy" was 6 football fields wide; and, at its core, the heat matched that of the surface of the sun. Within the area on the ground directly under the epicenter (called the hypocenter) everything was vaporized. Literally, people burned like tissue paper; nothing was left. There was no pain; there was no dying process for these people; they simply ceased to exist. There were no charred remains, no bones, no teeth or dental remains, nothing.  This is the primary reason there remains - and will always remain - such a wide gap in the estimated total of deaths at Hiroshima... at the hypocenter, very near the heart of the city, there simply was nothing left to count.

 

Part IV - Tibbets and the Enola Gay ride into history...