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>>/589494/ At 02.45 am, on 6 August 1945, a B-29 of the USAAF’s 509th Composite Group took off from Tinian bound for Japan . The pilot on the 1,570-mile flight was the unit’s commanding officer, Colonel Paul Tibbets, and the Superfortress was named ‘Enola Gay’ after his mother. The aircraft had ben specially modified to carry a uranium ‘gun-type’ fission bomb, codenamed ‘Little Boy’, and its destination was the city of Hiroshima. Enola Gay arrived over the target, and at 08.15 am, Major Thomas Ferebee, Tibbet’s bombardier, flipped the release switch dropping the device. Little Boy detonated 1,890 feet above Hiroshima; and in an instant 90 per cent of the city was destroyed, and the first of 140,000 people died. Two days later, the Soviet Union responded to news of the attack by invading Manchuria, dashing Japanese hopes of a negotiated peace. On Tinian, meanwhile, preparations went ahead for a second atomic strike. In the early hours of 9 August, B-29 ‘Bock’s Car’, flown by Major Charles Sweeney, began the long journey from Tinian to Kokura. The aircraft was armed with a plutonium implosion-type bomb codenamed ‘Fat Man.’ Finding the city obscured by cloud, Sweeney set course for the secondary target, the port of Nagasaki, and dropped the bomb at 11.02am. Cheshire, aboard the camera plane ’Big Stink’, witnessed the explosion from 50 miles away https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/blog/cheshire-and-the-bomb/