Nagasaki, a port city located about 100 miles from Kokura was the third choice. American intelligence was well aware of this, yet despite this knowledge, the city had not been targeted during the conventional bombing campaign. One of the largest ordnance factories that the Japanese operated was located in the city manufacturing, among others, chemical weapons. Kokura was a city of 130,000 people on the island of Kyushu. Initially, that dubious distinction had fallen to the cities of Hiroshima and Kokura. The city of Nagasaki wasn’t at first one of the cities selected by the Targeting Committee set up by the Truman administration. Eighty thousand people died in the blast immediately with thousands more dying from radiation poisoning in the following days. Little Boy unleashed the equivalent of 15,000 pounds of TNT and immediately reduced four square miles of the city to ruins. Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Fearing that a crash upon takeoff would result in a nuclear explosion, Tibbetts had the engineers modify the Little Boy bomb design to incorporate a removable breech plug that would permit the bomb to be armed in flight. By early August, the components for the bomb were coming together. The components for the bomb were delivered by the USS Indianapolis to Tinian on July 26. created the 509th Composite Group, commanded by Colonel Paul Tibbetts, to conduct the drops. The plutonium bomb “Fat Man” is loaded on a trailer before being dropped on Nagasaki.
![enola gay crew radiation enola gay crew radiation](https://www.iconicauctions.com/ItemImages/000083/83865a_lg.jpeg)
![enola gay crew radiation enola gay crew radiation](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bd/7f/fb/bd7ffb2e86ade7d59a37073697c880e5.jpg)
Nevertheless, there were still some doubts about whether the bombs would even work. Proposals of using poison gas on the Japanese or dropping the atomic bomb with a warning in an unpopulated area were rejected. casualties and millions of Japanese, the decision by President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan was not made lightly. A Difficult Decision and the Choice of Targetsįearing that an invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of thousands of U.S. Nevertheless, Japan wasn’t yet defeated and the Japanese were rushing troops back from China and creating more homeland divisions. Further, since the battle of the Philippine Sea, Japanese suicide pilots (kamikaze) had also been taking a toll on American warships and lives. Whereas Japanese casualties had been five to six times that of Americans earlier in the war, by the time Okinawa was finally secured in June 1945, the ratio had dropped to two to one as Japanese troops would rather fight to the death than surrender. Yet, those American victories had been very costly. B-29 bombers could now hit Japanese cities and were also close enough to have fighter cover all the way to Japan and back. Yet, their forces there were mostly cut off and had no hope of coming to the assistance of the Japanese islands.Īfter defeats in bloody, terrible fighting in the Philippines, the Marshall Islands, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa the U.S.
![enola gay crew radiation enola gay crew radiation](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/UV8AAOSwCDxdnTdF/s-l300.jpg)
They still controlled parts of New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, and Indochina where they had massive numbers of troops. The Japanese had been pushed all the way across the Pacific their war industry had been smashed and they were starving. In August of 1945, the American military was preparing plans for the upcoming invasion of mainland Japan.