The pilot also said he saw the mushroom cloud from the bomb through the aircraft's window. "If you can imagine yourself inside a tin building and somebody comes along on the outside and hits it with a hammer, you get the sound effect," he recalled. So I got this lead taste in my mouth and that was a big relief - I knew she had blown."Īfter dropping the bomb, the Enola Gay made a rapid evasive right turn but the shockwaves hit the fuselage, according to Tibbets. And this was because of the fillings in my teeth. Tibbets is quoted as saying in the records that at the moment of the explosion, "I got the brilliance, I tasted it. The "Little Boy" uranium bomb detonated at 8:15 a.m. 6, 1945 and made its way to the target - the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the Hiroshima city center. base on Tinian Island in the Pacific in the early hours of Aug. This indicates that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was indeed a highly confidential mission. When asked why the crew members carried handguns, Tibbets explained that they were for protection, and revealed that they had cyanide tablets, too, to kill themselves to avoid capture by the Imperial Japanese Army in case the aircraft crashed. 9, 1945, was also included.Īccording to the donated records, the interviewer asked in detail how the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A memoir written by Jacob Beser, who was aboard both the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. The tapes contain voices of five people, including Tibbets and Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier who pushed the button to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A memo left with the items suggests that they are copies of records made for the 1977 book "Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima" written by British authors Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. They were donated to the museum in June last year by the bereaved family of a Japanese person who had owned them. The records include 27 tapes spanning about 30 hours, and 570 pages of transcripts. Museum officials say the existence of those tapes and transcripts had never before been confirmed, adding that they are important as they depict in detail the situation inside the bomber and the psychological state of the crew. Tape recordings of testimonies by Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets and others are shown at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima's Naka Ward, on July 20, 2018.