I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

- Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb

August 6, 1945, 2:00 a.m., Tinian Island, the Central Pacific.

Bathed in floodlights, the B-29 Enola Gay awaits the start of it's historic mission; to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan. General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, had warned the Enola Gay's commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, to expect "a little publicity", but Tibbets and his crew are surprised by the scene of the tarmac. Movie cameramen and photographers surround the crew. Groves is determined that this moment in history will not go unrecorded. Soon, at 2:45 a.m., the aircraft takes off.

The beginning of the Enola Gay's mission was the culmination of over a year's work. The U.S. Army Air Forces had modified its most advanced bomber, the B-29, and had created a new, special military unit for delivering atomic bombs. This unit's mission was so secret that, with few exceptions, the nature of its weapons was concealed even from it's members.

A dense column of smoke rises more than 600,000 feet into the air over the Japanese port of Nagasaki, the result of an atomic bomb, the second ever used in warfare, dropped on the industrial center August 8, 1945, from a U.S. B-29 Superfortress.

"I don't believe anyone ever expected to look at a site quite like that. Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city."

Co-Pilot Capt. Bob Lewis

"A bright light filled the plane,"  wrote Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up, mushrooming." For a moment no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. "Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!" exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis, pounding on Tibbet's shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal. "My God, he asked himself, "what have we done?" (special report, "Hiroshima: August 6, 1945")

Note: Paul Tibbets was Colonel, not "Lt. Colonel" when he was the pilot of Enola Gay.

The A-Bombs used over Japan; Little Boy (left) and Fat Man (right), photo from A-Bomb WWW Project.

Just three days after the bomb was dropped to Hiroshima, the second atomic bomb called "Fat Man" was dropped to Nagasaki. Though the amount of energy generated by the bomb dropped to Nagasaki  was significantly larger than that of the Little Boy, the damage give to the city was slighter than that given to Hiroshima due to the geographic structure of the city. It is estimated that approximately 70,000 people died by the end of the year because of the bombing.