A final, midnight briefing was closed with a chaplain's prayer. Tibbets passed the time playing blackjack with the plane's bombardier, Tom Ferebee. The crew was told to get some sleep.īut who could? Instead, Mr. At an afternoon briefing, the primary target was announced: Hiroshima. van Kirk, who was a captain, got orders for the mission the previous day, and as navigator spent hours drawing up a flight plan. 'You just wanted to get in the airplane and get going,' he said in a telephone interview from his home in northern California. van Kirk, now 74, likened it to a Hollywood movie opening. When the 10-man crew had come out to the tarmac that night, they found the area around the bomber thronged with officers and scientists, the darkness repeatedly broken by photographers' flashbulbs and klieg lights. Five and a half hours earlier, the B-29 departed from Tinian, a small Pacific island captured by American forces from the Japanese in June 1944. The Enola Gay dropped the 8,900-pound bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy,' over Hiroshima at 8:15 A.M. 2, when you're fighting a war to win, you use every means at your disposal to do it.' Tibbets, 80, said in an interview in New York. 1, there is no morality in warfare - forget it,' Mr. Tibbets said they experienced in World War II. Moral objections raised in the 50 years since do not fit the situation that Mr. Both men said they believed that dropping the bomb saved lives by hastening the war's end.
