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The Enola Gay didn’t end up in the water, of course, and it wasn’t until the planes were returning to Tinian that the crew heard an announcement from President Truman about the atomic bomb. “It was an easy mission, just circle around above that submarine.” “The theory was that if the Enola Gay had to land in the water, we’d fly over it and drop rafts and such,” Smith said. for a position off the Japanese coast about 350 miles from Hiroshima. In addition to Smith’s crew, the Enola Gay was accompanied by two other B-29s, one to take pictures and another to observe the bomb’s aftermath. “We weren’t scared on that one because nobody was shooting at us,” said Smith, 90. By comparison, his role on a support aircraft on the Enola Gay mission unfolded less dramatically. Missions ranged from dropping mines to disrupt Japanese shipping to unleashing 500-pound bombs on airfields, Smith recalled. “We had killed almost a million men, women and children before they dropped the bomb.” “We had been doing a lot of incendiary bombing,” Smith said, flipping through a photo album packed with war memorabilia, photos and commendations, including a Distinguished Flying Cross. From the war’s busiest airbase on Tinian in the Mariana Islands, B-29 “Superfortress” bombers had been pounding Japanese targets for months.Ī 20-year-old flyboy, three years out of New Smyrna Beach High School, Smith was a radar operator who battled frequent bouts of motion sickness to complete his duties. 6, 1945.Īll that the men of the Army Air Corps 504th Bomb Group knew was that the military had developed a new, secret “blockbuster” bomb that might hasten the end of World War II. He served in the squadron that provided air-sea rescue support for the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the world’s first atomic weapon on Aug.
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“We did not know what we were doing, except to circle above a submarine and stay there until we were told to do something else,” said Smith, a longtime New Smyrna Beach resident and World War II veteran. NEW SMYRNA BEACH – Even now, 70 years to the day since Russell Smith helped drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, he recalls the mission as routine.