''If I live a hundred years, I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind,'' Captain Lewis said in his log of the Enola Gay's mission, written in pen and pencil on the back of War Department forms, on Aug. In 1923, his family moved to Hialeah, Florida. was chosen to command the B-29 to be used on the Hiroshima mission, he selected Captain Lewis, who had survived two crashes and had a reputation for remaining calm in moments of stress, as his co-pilot. was born in Quincy, Illinois, on February 23, 1915, the son of Paul Warfield Tibbets Sr. The blast, equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, destroyed a four square-mile area, and killing an estimated 70,000 people. He was then transferred to the West Coast to fly the B-29 on simulated attack missions. Tibbets (1915-2007) was the pilot of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, named after Tibbets' mother, that dropped the first atomic bomb (nicknamed 'Little Boy') on the city of Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. He was one of 12 servicemen with backgrounds in electronics who were chosen by the Army Air Corps to test the weapon systems on the B-29 Superfortress, then under development. The Enola Gay was 10 miles away when the blast. Lewis, a native of Brooklyn, volunteered to join the Army shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. pilot's seat of Enola Gay moments before takeoff on WWII air raid mission to drop 1st atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
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He was 65 years old and had lived in Smithfield, Va., for two years. We need to understand that this plane was a weapon that brought about the end of World. Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died of a heart attack Saturday in Riverside Hospital in Newport News, Va. The Enola Gay was the best aircraft of its era, but the development of that technology came with a price.