That single bomb, weighing 8,900 pounds, wiped out nearly five square miles of Hiroshima - 60 percent of the city.
Operating from Tinian Island in the Marianas, then considered the largest air base in the world, he and his crew had made a picture-perfect 2,900-mile flight, and had dropped the uranium bomb called “Little Boy” squarely on target. Tibbets, then a colonel in charge of the 509th Composite Group, had honed his unit of 15 B-29 Superfortresses into one of the finest Air Force bombardment outfits ever assembled.
