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No one connected the name, Enola Gay, with Tinker after news accounts identified it as the first atom bomber. Then planes, crewmen and officers flew away, leaving the story of what they had done untold, just one of many security mysteries that occurred at Tinker during World War II. "They worked six or eight people at a time 24 hours a day until the job was done," Lord said. Lord says a general came with the crew and that a lieutenant colonel supervised the work. The two B-29s were put under 24-hour armed guard, he said, and a crew of technicians was flown to Tinker from Wright Field, Ohio, to do the work. They didn't say what they had come in for." "We were to see that they were expedited and that all security measures would be taken. "I went into production control one morning and the major in charge said two planes had come in for modification and we were to give them first priority," Lord said.
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Lord recalls two B-29s which arrived at Tinker in the spring of 1945 for special modification. Lord, formerly of the Royal Flying Corps, was chief of maintenance at Tinker in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force. One Oklahoma City resident was in a position to find out as quickly as anyone. And, he says, you can't ignore the written record. Plenty of workers who were at Tinker during the war say they remember the Enola Gay's being there.īut the plane's official maintenance log makes no mention of Tinker during 1945.Ĭould the Army have kept such a secret modification at Tinker out of the record as a security measure?īrewer says that's possible. "We have conflicting stories," says Tom Brewer, Tinker Air Force Base historian. The first public acknowledgment that Tinker had a part in the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb came eight months later in April 1946 when the base public relations office released the story.Īt the time the announcement was made, the Enola Gay was at Tinker where workers were preparing it as one of the fleet of bombers which would take part in the postwar Crossroads atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.īut had the Enola Gay been at Tinker to prepare for the Hiroshima drop? Udvar-Hazy Center in December 2003.The Little Boy bomb missed its aiming point but that made little difference to Hiroshima when the fireball illuminated the city like a second sunrise and the mushroom cloud punctuated Ground Zero like an exclamation point. While this exhibit is now closed, Museum specialists continued to restore the remaining components of the airplane, and after an additional nine years the fully assembled Enola Gay went on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. The exhibition text summarized the history and development of the Boeing B-29 fleet used in bombing raids against Japan.Īnother portion of the exhibit detailed the painstaking efforts of Smithsonian aircraft restoration specialists who had spent more than a decade restoring parts of the Enola Gay for this exhibition. The components on display included two engines, the vertical stabilizer, an aileron, propellers, and the forward fuselage that contains the bomb bay.Ī video presentation about the Enola Gay's mission included interviews with the crew before and after the mission including mission pilot Col. It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender.