![enola gay bomber enola gay bomber](https://cdn.britannica.com/83/22983-138-ADD07B68/Japan-Hiroshima-B-29-Superfortress-Enola-Gay-dropping-August-6-1945.jpg)
The elder Lewis gave the artifacts on these pages to Steven they went up for sale last April at New York’s Bonhams auction house, where the collection brought in $112,000, and offered a revealing look at one man’s war story. Sweeney flew Bockscar on to Okinawa where it refuelled before continuing to Tinian island. “He would place items on the dining room table and then we would spend most of our day together discussing them in detail,” Lewis’s youngest son, Steven, recalled. The Fat Man atomic bomb exploded at 11.00am Nagasaki time. On August 6, 1945, during the final stages of World War II, piloted by Tibbets and navigated by Dutch Van Kirk, the Enola Gay became the first aircraft to drop an. The Enola Gay was named after Tibbets mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. Lewis, later a settled family man with five children, spent a lifetime reflecting on the mission. Superbly detailed Enola Gay B-29 Boeing super fortress bomber model signed by pilot, Paul Tibbetts, circa 2000s. Tibbets, selected Lewis to join him in a combat force-the 509th Composite Group-training in secret to use the bomber to deliver a weapon of unprecedented power. Enola Gay, the B-29bomber that was used by the United States on August 6, 1945, to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, the first time the explosive device. Another pilot in the B-29 program, Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Lewis had enlisted in the Army Air Corps early in the war electronics experience got him a gig testing weapons systems on a bomber under development, the B-29 Superfortress. In August 1945 the confident and rambunctious Lewis was 27, with sturdy, all-American good looks and a reputation as a skilled pilot and determined ladies’ man. Lewis wrote shortly after the B-29 he was copiloting, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. IF I LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS, I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind,” Robert A. Enola Gay: Pilot's-eye View | HistoryNet Close