“Our objective,” said Bernie Poppert, a onetime aircraft mechanic who has been one of the leaders of the effort, “is to preserve the history of the technology, so people can look at it 250 years from now and see exactly how it was done.” Five years after that blinding flash, the weapon was estimated to have caused 200,000 fatalities.įor nearly a decade now, technicians have been at work restoring the bomber, perhaps the most famed artifact of World War II, to mint condition. The next day, the 30-year-old colonel and the airplane he named for his mother became one of the significant and enduringly controversial figures in the history of warfare: They dropped the first atomic bomb. Shortly thereafter, a young Army Air Corps enlisted man, pulled away from a softball game, carefully inscribed the name “Enola Gay” in foot-high letters beneath the pilot’s window. 5, 1945, after the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima was loaded in the bomb bay of B-29 Superfortress No.
