"My God!"

The run was short and straight. At 9 : 1 5 a.m. Major Thomas Ferebee pressed the toggle and the single bomb was away, down through the substratosphere. Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, the pilot, took back the controls and ten pairs of eyes strained at the plexiglass windows as Tibbets turned the plane broadside to Hiroshima. It took less than 60 seconds. Then the brilliant morning sunlight was slashed by a more brilliant white flash. It was so strong that the crew of the Superfortress Enola Gay felt a "visual shock," although all wore sun glasses.

The first atomic bomb had been dropped. A few seconds after the flash, the shock wave from the blast reached the Enola Gay, several miles away, and rocked it like a giant burst of flak. From the men who had rung up the curtain on a new era in history burst nothing more original than an awed "My God!"

Under a Pall. Hiroshima had once harbored 344.000 people, thousands more in the adjacent quartermaster depot.

A Jap corporal, attached to headquarters of the Central Army District, was in a hotel and put his head out the window when he heard the drone of engines overhead. "I looked up," he said in a Tokyo radio interview, "and simultaneously a lightning-like flash covered the whole sky, blinding my eyes. Unconsciously, I dived for cover and a torn quilt miraculously was blown over me, which I hugged to myself for dear life.

"Several minutes later I was outside. All around, I found dead and wounded. Some were bloated and scorched--such an awesome sight, their legs and bodies stripped of clothes and burned with a huge blister. All green vegetation, from grasses to trees, perished in that period."

For hours--after Tibbets had been decorated for his deed--Hiroshima was covered with a giant, mushrooming cloud of smoke and dust. When reconnaissance photographs were at last obtained, they showed 4.1 square miles--60% of the city's built-up area--destroyed by fire and blast. There was no crater in which the blast effect would have been largely wasted; the bomb had exploded well above ground. How many tens of thousands of Hiroshima's people had perished was not yet and might never be known.

Improved Model. Three days later, the Superfort Great Artiste was out on a similar mission. Major Charles W. Sweeney had a rough trip to Japan in bad weather; his primary target was socked in. Over the second-choice target, Nagasaki, he had just enough gas left for one run. It was begun on instruments, and then there was a hole in the clouds so that the bombardier, Captain Kermit K. Beahan, was able to bomb visually.

This bomb was more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima; in ways that could not be revealed, it was also, said Army & Navy officers, so much of an improvement that the first bomb was obsolete. It exploded on or near the ground, blasted a ghastly crater. It destroyed only one square mile of the Kyushu seaport, but spokesmen said that it had been more devastating than the first.

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