Certain passages from the novel have been labelled ‘prophetic’, such as the quatrain that prefaces the novel proper: ‘Enola’ seems to have been a name invented by Ridenbaugh it is simply the word ‘alone’ in reverse. On August 5, 1945, knowing the mission that lay ahead, Paul Tibbets had named the Enola Gay after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets ( nee Haggard), who in turn had been named after the heroine of Enola or, Her fatal mistake, a novel by Mary Young Ridenbaugh. This would lead to contamination of soil, plants and animals, and genetic mutations. Little was known about radioactive fallout in 1945, but by the ’50s, scientists realized that wind, rain and waterways would have spread radioactive particles beyond the blast area and across the landscape. There were also considerable ecological impacts. The bomb obliterated the city and its infrastructure, destroying 60,000 buildings. Approximately 80,000 people were killed immediately by the blast, while over the coming months, thousands more would die due to burns, radiation sickness and cancer, with malnutrition also contributing to the number of fatalities. Most were civilians, although there was a military garrison in the city. The city of Hiroshima has estimated the bomb and its after-effects caused the deaths of 237,000 people.
According to Caron, ‘it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city.’
Tail gunner Robert Caron described the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima as ‘a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke’, which ‘had a red core in it’ and ‘everything was burning inside’. Seconds later there was an intense flash of light, followed by two shockwaves that rocked the plane as it set course back to its base on the Pacific island of Tinian. Paul Tibbets then forced the plane into a sharp banking dive away from the detonation point. Weighing 4,400 kg (9,700 pounds), the bomb was so heavy that after it was released, the aircraft’s nose lurched up dramatically. The Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, becomes the first aircraft in history to drop an atomic bomb. And that 40 years later, the song has lost none of its charm, and consolidated its place in the pantheon of popular music…Ī fateful moment: 8.15am Japan Standard Time on Monday, August 6, 1945. Or perhaps equally baffling: that an irresistible, dancefloor-filling, almost gleeful song about this infamous plane, and one of history’s darkest days, could top the charts. But also the fact that, the day before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the aircraft’s pilot and commanding officer, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr, had named the Enola Gay after his mother. The devastating power of nuclear weapons, for instance. It therefore seems an appropriate moment to reconsider, through the lens of OMD’s song, how we might begin to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible. The Enola Gay, the United States Army Air Forces plane that dropped the bomb, inspired Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) to write a synth-pop song of the same name, which reaches its fortieth anniversary this year. Seventy-five years have passed since an atomic bomb known as ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima.