The aircraft that ended the Second World War in the Pacific, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, is not where most Americans believe it to be, and the story of what happened to her after she returned from Hiroshima is a saga of neglect, political warfare, and quiet exile that has never been fully told.
The plane that carried the first atomic bomb into combat on August 6, 1945, and whose name became synonymous with the dawn of the nuclear age, now sits fully assembled in a vast hangar in Chantilly, Virginia, roughly thirty miles from the National Mall, in a facility most visitors to Washington have never heard of.
The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, which opened in December 2003, is the Smithsonian’s annex for aircraft too large or too numerous to display at the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall. The Enola Gay is there now, all of her, restored as closely as possible to her condition on the morning she flew north toward Japan.
You can walk completely around her. You can stand underneath and look up at the bomb bay doors that were closed for the six-hour flight from Tinian Island and then opened over Hiroshima at 8:15 in the morning, local time, releasing the weapon the men who built it had named Little Boy.
The museum is free to enter and open almost every day of the year. Yet most people who have heard of the Enola Gay have never seen her. Most people who have visited the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall have no idea the aircraft is thirty miles away in a building in Virginia they have never heard of.
The story of how she got there is not what most people expect. It begins in the fall of 1944, when the United States Army chose a twenty-nine-year-old colonel named Paul Tibbets to command the most secret mission of the war. He had flown B-17s in the first American bombing raids over occupied Europe.
He had test flown the B-29 before it went into production. He was not chosen for his rank. He was chosen because the people making the decision believed he would get the job done and would not flinch.
He was given command of the 509th Composite Group and told to build it from the ground up.
He selected the best crews available. He trained them in the Utah desert at Wendover Field in a compound separate from everything else on the base. They practiced the hard turn immediately after bomb release until the maneuver was automatic, until every man on every crew could execute it without thinking.
The aircraft that would carry the first bomb was a B-29 Superfortress, four engines, built to hit targets from altitudes Japanese fighters struggled to reach. The night before the mission, Tibbets had the nose painted. He gave it a name, Enola Gay, his mother’s name.
Enola Gay Tibbets found out the way most of the world found out, when the news reached her. Her son had named the most consequential aircraft in history after her and did not tell her until it was done. He said in interviews that she was the person who believed in him when others had not.
When he told his father he wanted to fly, his father said it was a mistake. His mother told him to go. On the night of August 5, 1945, the bomb was loaded into the aircraft.
The men who built it had named it Little Boy. It was ten feet long and weighed just under ten thousand pounds.
The only previous nuclear detonation had been a controlled test in the New Mexico desert three weeks earlier. This one was going into the air over a city. They took off at 2:45 in the morning on August 6.
The flight north took six hours. The target was Hiroshima, a city of roughly 350,000 people.
At 8:15 in the morning, local time, the bombardier released the bomb. Tibbets executed the turn his crew had practiced hundreds of times, hard, fast, and away. The bomb fell for forty-three seconds.
Then it detonated 1,900 feet above the city.
The crew felt the shockwave hit the aircraft from fifteen miles away. The tail gunner looked back and described a column of smoke rising and mushrooming over what had been seconds before a city. He took photographs.
They are among the most reproduced images in history.
Robert Lewis, the co-pilot, was keeping a written log of the mission. He wrote one line that has been quoted in almost everything written about this moment in the eighty years since. He wrote, “My God, what have we done?”
Lewis later said people misread it.
He said it was not regret. It was a man who had just witnessed something with no words large enough for it, reaching for the closest ones available. Tibbets had a different response.
He said, across sixty years of interviews, that he never lost a night’s sleep.
He believed it ended the war and saved lives on both sides. He held that position without qualification until the last interview he ever gave. Both men were on the same aircraft, less than fifteen miles from the same explosion.
They landed back on Tinian that afternoon.
Generals were waiting on the runway. Tibbets was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on the spot. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
On August 15, Japan surrendered. Most people assume that is where this story ends. It is not.
After the surrender, the Enola Gay was flown to Roswell Army Airfield in New Mexico, the home base of the 509th. The unit was being dissolved. Men went home.
The mission that had defined the group for over a year collapsed almost immediately into the ordinary business of a military standing down.
In 1949, she was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, not put on display, not restored, but flown to Pyote Army Airfield in Texas and put into storage. She sat there for years. In 1953, she flew for the last time.
After that flight, her engines were shut down for good.
She was towed to a storage area at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. No hangar. She sat outside on the flight line đźđđčđžđŒđźđ to the weather, rain, heat.
The slow work of time on aluminum skin and rubber seals and wiring that nobody was maintaining.
In 1960, the decision was made to dismantle her. The fuselage was sectioned, wings separated from the body. The aircraft that had changed the course of the war was reduced to components and moved indoors in pieces.
Tibbets followed it from a distance.
He said in interviews he knew where the aircraft was and what was happening to it. What was happening to it in those years was very little. By the mid-1980s, with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II approaching, the Smithsonian began planning something significant.
The museum on the National Mall was one of the most visited in the world. Displaying the aircraft that ended the Pacific War was the obvious move. The question of how to display her was not simple.
Restoration work had already begun in 1984.
Three hundred thousand work hours went into putting her back together. The team worked from wartime photographs and technical documents to return her as closely as possible to the condition she had been in on August 6, 1945. The exhibit they designed around her was called The Last Act.
The restored forward fuselage would sit at the center, surrounded by historical context about the final months of the war, Japanese perspectives, photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and sections examining the debate among historians about whether the bombing had been necessary to end the war.
The script ran to over five hundred pages. In 1994, before the exhibit opened, a draft of the script was obtained by a veterans organization with significant influence in Washington. They read what the Smithsonian planned to put on the walls next to the Enola Gay.
They concluded that it was anti-American, that it dishonored veterans, that it gave too much weight to Japanese suffering and not enough to why the bomb was dropped. They said so publicly and told every member of Congress they could reach. Other veterans groups joined.
Congressional hearings were held. Members of Congress wrote letters demanding changes. Some called openly for the museum director to resign.
The Smithsonian revised the exhibit. The groups rejected the revision. They revised it again, rejected again.
Section after section disappeared.
The historical debate was cut. The photographs from Hiroshima were cut. The Japanese perspectives were cut.
The five-hundred-page exhibit became something barely recognizable. Martin Harwit, the director of the National Air and Space Museum, had spent months trying to find a version that satisfied both his historians and the veterans groups.
He could not find one. In May of 1995, he resigned. The aircraft that ended the war in the Pacific had now ended a man’s career and it still was not properly on display.
What opened in June 1995 was the forward fuselage in a large gallery with a placard giving the basic facts.
The placard listed the mission, the crew, the date, the target, nothing else. The fuselage stayed until January 1998. Then it was packed up and returned to storage.
The Enola Gay had been at the center of one of the most explosive arguments in the history of American public memory.
The outcome was that almost nothing was said about her. The completed aircraft moved to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia when that facility opened in December 2003.
The Udvar-Hazy Center sits near Dulles Airport, roughly thirty miles outside Washington.
It is the Smithsonian’s facility for aircraft too large or too numerous to display on the Mall. The Enola Gay is there now, all of her, restored as closely as possible to what she was on the morning of August 6, 1945. You can walk completely around her.
Paul Tibbets lived until November 2007. He was ninety-two when he died in Columbus, Ohio. He gave interviews for more than sixty years and was asked the same question every time.
Did he regret it? Did he lose sleep? Did he think about the people in Hiroshima?
He always gave the same answer, no. He believed it ended the war. He held that position without qualification or apology for every decade anyone asked.
Before he died, he made one specific request. No funeral service, no ceremony, no grave marker of any kind.
No headstone, no plaque with his name anywhere a person could stand and find. He was afraid that a grave would become a destination for protesters, that people who believed what he had done was wrong would come to wherever he was buried and his grave would become the permanent site of an argument beside his name.
His ashes were scattered over the English Channel, the water below the routes that American bombers had flown to Germany in the early years of the war, the skies he had known before the Pacific, before Tinian, before the morning of August 6, 1945. He has no grave.
There is nowhere to go to stand next to him. The aircraft is in Chantilly, Virginia, in a building you can walk into for free, restored as closely as possible to what she was on the morning she flew north toward Japan. A name on her nose that belonged to a woman who told her son to go and fly when everyone else told him not to.
Paul Tibbets has no headstone. The plane that carried him has an address. The Enola Gay sits in a climate-controlled hangar, fully assembled, her bomb bay doors closed, her nose bearing the name of a mother who believed in her son.
She is thirty miles from the Mall, in a building most tourists never visit, waiting for people who have heard of her to come and see her for themselves.