On August 4, two days before the Hiroshima mission, four B-29s crashed on takeoff at airfields throughout the Marianas. The accidents dramatized the necessity of leaving the atomic bombs unassembled until the planes carrying them were safely aloft. That meant sending assembly teams up with the aircrews. Colonel Tibbets would pilot the B-29 that would drop the uranium bomb. Model number B-29–45-MO was better known as the Enola Gay; Tibbets had named the aircraft for his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. Two 509th Superforts would fly in company with the Enola Gay as observers, and would drop various
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