509th Bomb Group – The Lucky Puppy

Take it from One,
Who Knows the Score,
The 509th,
Is Winning the War.

On August 6th, 1945, Hiroshima Japan became the first Atomic Target. The Atomic Bomb was developed by the United States by the super secret “Manhattan Project”.

The work was dangerous as well as time-consuming. One of the worst accidents involved Louis Slotin, a Canadian scientist in charge of monitoring plutonium chain reactions in a device known as the “guillotine.” One day the Slotin’s screwdriver got jammed in the guillotine, causing the plutonium to form a hypercritical mass capable of explosion. Immediately Slotin tore apart the two pieces of plutonium with his bare hands and in the process absorbed an enormous amount of radiation.

The event is accurately portrayed in the movie “Fat Man and Little Boy “.

The explosion was averted, but at the price of his life.

WHERE DID WE GET THE URANIUM TO BUILD THE BOMB?

The code words for the bombs were:

Little Boy– Hiroshima

Fat Man– – Nagasaki

Fat Man was the bomb used on Nagasaki. It used a detonation method that resulted in a larger explosion from a similar amount of radioactive material. It resulted in large amounts of radioactive fallout. It exploded with the force of 21 Kilotonnes of TNT. It had a blast radius of about 5 kilometers. It missed its target zone, but still managed to wipe out 70% of the industrial zone. Little Boy. Little Boy was the bomb used on Hiroshima. It used a different detonation method, that did not result in large amounts of radioactive fallout. It exploded with a force of 16 Kilotonnes (16,000 tonnes) of TNT. Or the equivilant of 200 bombing runs. The blast radius was about 3 kilometers wide and had an impact which caused fires 6 and a half kilometres away. It was regarded as being inefficient and not powerful enough.

But the first bomb detonated as a test in New Mexico was named “Gadget”.

The first nuclear weapon detonated by the Soviet Union was named “First Lightning“.

The first Hydrogen Bomb was detonated in 1951 by the Americans. Code named “Ivy Mike“, the scientists called it “Sausage“. It was the size of a small factory and weighed a mere 56 metric TONS. When detonated, it vaporized the island of Elugelab where it was constructed. See the Proof.

This is Ivy-Mike.

Operation Hurricane was the test of the first British atomic device on 3 October 1952

Gerboise Bleue (“blue jerboa” or Blue Rat) was the name of the first French nuclear test. It was an atomic bomb detonated in the middle of the Algerian Sahara desert on 13 February 1960, during the Algerian War (1954–62)

The first Chinese bomb was detonated in 1964 and was named “596“.

“Born Inside Box 1663” – Box 1663, Santa Fe, NM was the “blind” address used for all correspondence to and from Los Alamos. The actual name Los Alamos was prohibited from showing up on any letters or parcels – coming or going! The address shown on the birth certificates of the children born at the Los Alamos Engineers Hospital during the war years indicated a simple “Box 1663”.

Some weeks after Germany had surrendered, a German U-boat (#U-234) pulled into the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Virginia. The crew promptly surrendered themselves and their cargo – 10 cases of uranium ore being transported to Japan.

Edward Teller, whom history would later dub the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb made a bet that the Trinity Test (Gadget) might cause a chain reaction that would ignite the whole of the Earth’s atmosphere, killing every living thing on the planet. While most viewed that outcome as all but impossible, there was sufficient “wiggle room” in the calculations used to predict the bomb’s output that the Manhattan Project scientists actually started a small betting pool on the suspected force of the atomic blast. Physicist I. I. Rabi won the pool, having predicted an 18-kiloton blast, which most closely met the observed Trinity output of 18.6 kilotons.

The B-29’s that participated in the first Atomic Mission (Hiroshima)were:

Enola Gay– Carrying the Bomb (Little Boy).

The Great Artiste– Carrying Instruments and Cameras.

Aircraft No. 91 (later named Necessary Evil)-Carrying Instruments and Cameras.

Straight Flush– Weather Plane (Hiroshima).

Full House– Weather Plane (Nagasaki, secondary target).

Jabbitt III– Weather Plane (Kokura, tertiary target).

Top Secret– Flying Spare Aircraft.

The Crew of the Enola Gay were:

Flight Crew:

Navy Capt. William “Deak” Parsons, Manhattan Project Scientist

Sgt. Joseph S. Stiborik, radar operator

S/Sgt. George R. Caron, tail gunner

Pfc. Richard H. Nelson, radio operator

Sgt. Robert H. Shumard, assistant engineer

S/Sgt. Wyatt E. Duzenbury, flight engineer

Capt. Theodore J. Van Kirk, navigator

Maj. Thomas W. Ferebee, bombardier

Col. Paul W. Tibbets, 509th Group CO and pilot

Capt. Robert A. Lewis, co-pilot

Lt. Jacob Beser, radar countermeasure officer

Lt. Morris R. Jeppson, bomb electronics test officer

Ground Crew:

Technical Sgt. Walter F. McCaleb, crew chief

Sgt. Leonard W. Markley

Sgt. Jean S. Cooper

Cpl. Frank D. Duffy

Cpl. John E. Jackson

Cpl. Harold R. Olson

Pfc. John J. Lesniewski

Lt. Col. John Porter, ground maintenance officer

Capt. Robert A. Lewis, co-pilot of The Enola Gay was keeping a diary of the mission. as they started the bomb run he wrote:

“There’ll be a short intermission while we bomb the target.”

After the explosion he wrote:

“MY GOD!”

Political correctness has revised his quote to read:

“OH MY GOD! What have we done? If I live 100 years I will never forget this moment.”

In interviews, Lewis has said all he wrote was “OH MY GOD!”. He says that was the only thing he could think of.