Like a child’s drawing, US pilot’s plan to drop the world’s first atom bomb
FOR a mission that changed the history of the world, the flightplan is remarkably simple.
In a hand- drawn diagram, the pilot of the plane that bombed Hiroshima was told to arrive at 30,000ft, drop the payload two miles short of the city, then veer away sharply at 28,500ft.
The previously unseen documents used to plan the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945, in a bid to end the Second World War have emerged for sale 70 years on.
They are among a £300,000 archive compiled by Captain Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay B29 bomber, which also includes his flight logs and report of the bombing raid.
One plan, drawn in pencil and coloured inks on a single sheet of blue graph paper, shows how the Enola Gay would approach Hiroshima, drop the atom bomb – nicknamed Little Boy – and then turn 150 degrees to the right to return.
The plan also shows the air burst at under half a mile up over the city and the subsequent shockwaves that the explosion would create.
A second plan, titled ‘ survival manoeuvres’, expands on the initial diagram to show the flight paths of support planes The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil. The diagram concludes with a handwritten note: ‘Caution – stay at least 2/3 miles away from the atomic cloud at all times.’
Auctioneer Bonhams expects the drawings to fetch £26,000 in two lots when they go under the hammer as part of Captain Lewis’s archive of material in New York on April 29.
The collection, being sold by his son Stephen, also includes a copy of Lewis’s unofficial eye-witness account of the Hiroshima mission, which he disguised as a letter to his parents, which alone could sell for £40,000.
Also for sale are Lewis’s two log books from the war noting flightplans, duration, type of plane, engines, and horsepower with a column for remarks. They are tipped to fetch £130,000.
An estimated 150,000 people died when the US bombed Hiroshima, obliterating as much as 70 per cent of the city. Three days later the US inflicted similar devastation on the industrial city of Nagasaki. The two missions brought about the Japanese surrender.
Unlike Enola Gay commander Captain Paul Tibbets and navigator Theodore Van Kirk, Captain Lewis, who died in 1983, chose not to cash in on his fame in the post-war years.
Only one item belonging to him has been sold before – his log from the return from Hiroshima in which he wrote: ‘My God, what have we done?’