“If I live a hundred years, I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my life,” Robert Lewis, the Enola Gay’s co-pilot, wrote in his journal. The weapon dropped away from the Enola Gay and then nosed down. The Uranium 235 bomb exploded at 08:16:02 Hiroshima time with the force of 12,500 tons of TNT, some 1900 feet above the city.Įven at 30,000 feet and 11 miles from ground zero, as Walker notes, the Enola Gay was hit by two strong shock waves that bounced it around and made a noise as one crewmember recalled, “like a piece of sheet metal snapping.”
