Over the years, others in the squadron have returned to the Mariana Islands for reunions, but Smith has never joined them. “There were 11 of us on the crew and there may be one other than me still alive now.” “Mostly, I think about how lucky I was to come out alive,” Smith said. On the 70th anniversary, he expects to ponder his good fortune. “The atomic bombings arguably contributed to the rise of the United States as a superpower and the dominant power in the world today, the start of the Cold War and the transformation of … Japan into an economic powerhouse and a key American ally,” Seah said by email.įor Smith, not a day passes that his mind doesn’t turn to that mission, if only for a moment. That opinion is validated by Leander Seah, history professor and director of the Asian Studies Program at Stetson University in DeLand. “I consider it the most significant event of the 20th century." “I never would have dreamed what it did when it exploded,” said Smith, who later flew missions to observe the bomb’s destruction.
The Enola Gay didn’t end up in the water, of course, and it wasn’t until the planes were returning to Tinian that the crew heard an announcement from President Truman about the atomic bomb. “It was an easy mission, just circle around above that submarine.” “The theory was that if the Enola Gay had to land in the water, we’d fly over it and drop rafts and such,” Smith said. for a position off the Japanese coast about 350 miles from Hiroshima. In addition to Smith’s crew, the Enola Gay was accompanied by two other B-29s, one to take pictures and another to observe the bomb’s aftermath. “We weren’t scared on that one because nobody was shooting at us,” said Smith, 90. By comparison, his role on a support aircraft on the Enola Gay mission unfolded less dramatically. Missions ranged from dropping mines to disrupt Japanese shipping to unleashing 500-pound bombs on airfields, Smith recalled. “We had killed almost a million men, women and children before they dropped the bomb.” “We had been doing a lot of incendiary bombing,” Smith said, flipping through a photo album packed with war memorabilia, photos and commendations, including a Distinguished Flying Cross. From the war’s busiest airbase on Tinian in the Mariana Islands, B-29 “Superfortress” bombers had been pounding Japanese targets for months.Ī 20-year-old flyboy, three years out of New Smyrna Beach High School, Smith was a radar operator who battled frequent bouts of motion sickness to complete his duties. 6, 1945.Īll that the men of the Army Air Corps 504th Bomb Group knew was that the military had developed a new, secret “blockbuster” bomb that might hasten the end of World War II.
He served in the squadron that provided air-sea rescue support for the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the world’s first atomic weapon on Aug.
“We did not know what we were doing, except to circle above a submarine and stay there until we were told to do something else,” said Smith, a longtime New Smyrna Beach resident and World War II veteran. NEW SMYRNA BEACH – Even now, 70 years to the day since Russell Smith helped drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, he recalls the mission as routine.