15, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. United States Air Force, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images with his plane, the Enola Gay, in an undated photograph.
“The giant purple mushroom, which the tail-gunner had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,” he remembered.īrig. In his memoir “The Tibbets Story,” he told of “the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city.” A summary report by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey issued on July 1, 1946, estimated that 60,000 to 70,000 people had been killed and 50,000 injured.Īfter releasing the bomb, Colonel Tibbets executed a well-rehearsed diving turn to avoid the blast effect. Forty-three seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno that left tens of thousands dead and dying and turned much of Hiroshima, a city of some 250,000 at the time, into a scorched ruin.Įstimates for the dead and injured in the bombing have varied widely over the years. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy dropped free at an altitude of 31,000 feet.
