Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II. Here's where the plane is now.
Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II, is now a museum exhibit.
On August 6, 1945, Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, carried out a historic mission by dropping the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II. This monumental event took place at 8:15 a.m. local time, and the plane, named after pilot Paul Tibbets' mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, was commissioned by the Army Air Forces' 509th Composite Group.
The 137,500-pound, 141-foot-long aircraft lacked defensive armament to reduce weight and was unpainted, saving 850 pounds. Following the Hiroshima bombing, another B-29 Superfortress, Bockscar, dropped "Fat Man" on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The two bombings resulted in approximately 70,000 immediate deaths, and the death toll may have exceeded 200,000 by five years later, according to the US Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources.
Enola Gay was initially stored but later restored at the Smithsonian Institution through 300,000 hours of work. The fully assembled bomber is too large for the museum's flagship location on the National Mall, so it now rests at the museum's larger Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Since 1995, Enola Gay has sparked intense debates about the legacy of the atomic bomb and the role it played in World War II.
Written by urgent.news from Business Insider's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
