Crew of enola gay returns to japan hospitals
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The Japanese were initially uncertain as to what had happened. The cloud's surface was "nothing but a black boiling", recalled the aircraft commander Col Paul Tibbets, "like a barrel of tar." The crew watched as the radioactive cloud over Hiroshima ascended to the B29's altitude of 33,000 ft. It was not the greatest bombing devastation wreaked on a single city, but, the world had turned. More than 50 per cent of the area simply vanished. Of a population of 350,000, between 60,000 and 70,000 people died outright. The Hiroshima bomb had the explosive power of 12,500 tons of TNT explosives. It was a sunny day, just 17 seconds after 8.15 a.m., when Ferebee, Enola Gay's bombaimer - then only 26 years old - released the first A-bomb towards the Ota river bridge.
Some 17 days after Penney's seminar, Thomas Ferebee, who died on March 16th aged 81, was one of the handpicked crew on the Enola Gay, a US army air force (USAAF) B29 superfortress, flying five miles above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A city of 300,000400,000 people, he said, would be reduced to a sink for disaster relief, bandages and hospitals. On July 21st 1945, the physicist William Penney, a guiding light of the later British nuclear weapons programme, held a seminar at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were being assembled, to announce the results of his calculations on the impact of an A-bomb.