The Enola Gay had reached its target and returned home without complication an announcement sent out under President Harry Truman’s name had trumpeted its success.
That attack had been textbook-“operationally routine,” as a classified Army history later put it. Already things were not going as smoothly as they had three days earlier, in the run over Hiroshima. Operation Centerboard II, the mission to drop the second atomic bomb on a Japanese city, had begun. on August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress took off from the American airbase on the island of Tinian, in the North Pacific Ocean.
