The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Loading the bomb was delicate: the fit was tight. A ground crew towed the B-29 to a position beside the loading pit, running onto a turntable the main landing gear on the wing nearer the pit. Towing the aircraft around on the turntable through 180 degrees positioned it over the pit. The hydraulic lift raised Little Boy to a point directly below the open bomb doors. A plumb bob hung from the single bomb shackle for a point of reference and jacks built into the bomb cradle allowed the crew to line up the bomb eye. “The operation can be accomplished in 20 to 25 minutes,” a Boeing engineer commented in an August report, “but is a rather ticklish procedure, as there is very little clearance with the catwalks and, once installed, nothing holds the bomb but the single shackle and adjustable sway braces bearing on it.”2562 Though he flew it as his own, Robert Lewis had never named B-29 number 82. The day of the loading Tibbets consulted the officers in Lewis’ crew—but not Lewis—and did so. The 509th commander chose not pinups or puns but his mother’s given names, Enola Gay, because she had assured him he would not be killed flying when he fought out with his father his decision to become a pilot. “Through the years,” Tibbets told an interviewer once, “whenever I got in a tight spot in a plane I always remembered her calm assurance. It helped.