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- On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
- It was the first atomic-bomb attack and destroyed the city, killing 80,000 people instantly.
- Toward the end of his life, Enola Gay's pilot was unrepentant saying they saved "a lot of lives."
Early in the morning of August 6, 1945, a US Air Force B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, took off from its base in Tinian, near Guam, and headed for the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan.
It was carrying a 9,700-pound top-secret bomb named Little Boy. Its pilot was Paul W. Tibbets Jr., who led a crew of 12 men on a mission that would change the history of the world. Tibbets had named the plane after his mother.
Hiroshima had already been woken by several air-raid sirens that morning, which had proved to be false alarms.