Michael Heyman, in office only four months at the time, scrapped the exhibit as requested, and promised to personally oversee a new display devoid of any historic context. Tibbets, the commander of the 509 th Composite Group, later named the bomber Enola Gay after his mother. It was first flown in 1942 and soon became popular in the Pacific theatre during World War II. The Enola Gay's History Lives On Seventy-five years ago, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, bringing an end to a long and devastating World War II and making the. Over the years it had been disassembled, spread. Air Force photograph The B-29 (also called Superfortress) was a four-engine heavy bomber that was built by Boeing. In the 1980s, the Smithsonian began restoring the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Institution's chief executive, Smithsonian Secretary I. Tibbets, Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Dated 20th Century The Boieing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic weapon on Hiroshima on the 6th August 1945. The Smithsonian tnstitution, of which the National Air and Space Museum is a part, is heavily dependent on congressional funding. Photograph of the Enola Gay plane, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, which was used to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan. Fifty years later, the National Air and Space Museum was in the final stages of preparing an exhibition on the Enola Gay's historic mission when eighty-one members of Congress angrily demanded cancellation of the planned display and the resignation or dismissal of the museum's director. At 8:15 AM on August 6, it dropped the atomic bomb. World War II was over and a nuclear arms race had begun. Receiving the report that the sky over the primary target was clear, the Enola Gay headed for Hiroshima.
No war had ever seen such instant devastation. There it exploded, destroying Hiroshima and eighty thousand of her citizens. For forty three seconds, the world's first atomic bomb plunged through six miles of clear air to its preset detonation altitude. At 8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay released her load.