Operations Order No. 35 was an order issued by the 509th Composite Group on August 5, 1945 for the atomic bombing mission on Hiroshima, Japan, during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. The Order was signed by Operations Officer Major James I. Hopkins, Jr. who would later fly ''Big Stink'' in the August 9, 1945 atomic bombing raid on Nagasaki, Japan, under the call sign "Dimples 90".

History

Pursuant to the terms of Operations Order No. 35, at 02:45 on August 6, 1945, the ''

Enola Gay The ''Enola Gay'' () is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel (United States), Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the Atomi ...

'', a

Boeing B-29 Superfortress The Boeing B-29 Superfortress is a retired American four-engined propeller-driven heavy bomber, designed by Boeing and flown primarily by the United States during World War II and the Korean War. Named in allusion to its predecessor, the Bo ...

bomber A bomber is a military combat aircraft that utilizes air-to-ground weaponry to drop bombs, launch aerial torpedo, torpedoes, or deploy air-launched cruise missiles. There are two major classifications of bomber: strategic and tactical. Strateg ...

, departed North Field, Tinian, for Hiroshima, Japan, with Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr. at the controls.

Tinian Tinian () is one of the three principal islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Together with uninhabited neighboring Aguiguan, it forms Tinian Municipality, one of the four constituent municipalities of the Northern ...

was approximately away from

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

, so it took six hours to reach the target at Hiroshima. The

Little Boy Little Boy was a type of atomic bomb created by the Manhattan Project during World War II. The name is also often used to describe the specific bomb (L-11) used in the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress ...

atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima at 08:15 local time. Tibbets recalled that a tall

mushroom cloud A mushroom cloud is a distinctive mushroom-shaped flammagenitus cloud of debris, smoke, and usually condensed water vapour resulting from a large explosion. The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but any sufficiently e ...

covered the city after the bomb was dropped.

Notes

Comments

^† ''Big Stink'' was a backup aircraft for the Hiroshima bombing; it was used for strike observation and photographic purposes for the Nagasaki bombing.

References

* * Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 1945 documents {{Nuclear-warfare-stub