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It was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki being bombed instead.Īfter the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. The bomb, code-named " Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. I shall write peace upon your wings, and you shall fly around the world so that children will no longer have to die this way.Colonel Paul Tibbets waving from Enola Gay's cockpit before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima In one version, Sadako wrote a haiku that translates into English as: The tale of Sadako has been dramatized in many books and movies. Every year the statue is adorned with thousands of wreaths of a thousand origami cranes. While her effort could not extend her life, it moved her friends to make a granite statue of Sadako in the Hiroshima Peace Park: a young girl standing with her hand outstretched, a paper crane flying from her fingertips. She was buried with a wreath of 1,000 cranes to honor her dream.
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However, when she saw that the other children in her ward were dying, she realized that she would not survive and wished instead for world peace and an end to suffering.Ī popular version of the tale is that Sadako folded 644 cranes before she died her classmates then continued folding cranes in honor of their friend. Hearing the legend, she decided to fold one thousand origami cranes so that she could live. By the time she was twelve in 1955, she was dying of leukemia. She was then a hibakusha - an atom bomb survivor. Sadako was exposed to the radiation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as an infant, and it took its inevitable toll on her health. The origami crane has become a symbol of peace because of this legend, and because of a young Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki. Legend says that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their heart’s desire come true. In the museum you could read several letters related to the Manhattan Project, for example these two from brigadier general Leslie Groves (in charge of the project) and Albert Einstein:Īs I did in a post I wrote 3 years ago, in order to explain her story I will paste below an excerpt from Wikipedia‘s article on the history of origami (paper birds): Some parts of the museum are truly shocking. You can spend several hours in the museum: from reading about the life in Hiroshima prior to the war, during the war and before the bombing, about the Manhattan Project, learning from specific cases of victims of the bomb, several testimonies, replicas from wounded people, etc. There we visited the Hiroshima Peace Site, museum and park. Luca and I, together with some friends visited Japan during the summer of 2008. However, I thought of writing this post in order to connect several points related to the story, some of which I have only discovered quite recently…
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I guess you have had the chance to read about it in several places along the day. Today, August 6th, in 1945 the Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay” dropped over Hiroshima (Japan) the first nuclear bomb, “ Little Boy“, used in combat.