opped over Hiroshima. The atomic bomb was named "Little Boy." The Enola Gay carried the "Little Boy" and 7,600 gallons of fuel that made it very heavy. No one was sure if the Enola Gay could be able to lift of the ground, so the final assembly of the bomb was done in the air. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 31,600 feet and detonated at 1,800 feet above the center of the city. The copilot of the Enola Gay recalled: "I don’t believe anyone ever expected to look at a sight quite like that. Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountain." The atomic bomb wiped out 4.1 square miles of Hiroshima. That is about sixty percent of the city. The atomic bomb crashed with the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT. The explosion from the bomb was indescribably loud. There was a tremendous fireball of white light. This fireball was a hundred times brighter than the sun and was 250 feet in diameter. The fireball sucked up millions of tons of dust and debris and formed a mushroom cloud that rained radioactive material on the city. The smoke cloud was visible as much as 160 miles at sea and hung over the city for at least four hours. Eighty percent of all buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed and the rest were severely damaged. All means of communication were gone. Eighty percent of the firefighting personnel could not respond to alarms and most of the firefighters were killed or wounded. Seventy percent of the firefighting equipment was destroyed. Water mains broke and pipes melted in the heat. Of Hiroshima’s forty-five hospitals only three were standing. The city burned for three days. No one knows exactly how many people were killed in the initial blast, because thousands disappeared without a trace. The official estimates vary between seventy thousand and eighty thousand. Many more were injured. Thousands died after days, m...
