As the plane’s engines roared and its propellers spun, Tibbets looked out an open window at the crowd amassed on the runway. In the early-morning darkness of that historic day 75 years ago, Colonel Tibbets and his 11-man crew boarded the plane and began their preflight preparations. It was all leading to one day that would help end years of bloodshed and change the world forever. Even years before that, development of this revolutionary cargo began in secrecy under the direction of a physicist and an Army general in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. and his crew had practiced dropping dummy concrete bombs on targets in Wendover, Utah. And months before that, pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. Preparations on the tiny Pacific island-about 1,500 miles southeast of the plane’s intended target in Japan-had begun months before on April 3. Hours before the sun would rise over Tinian island on the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 airplane was positioned above a specially built bomb-loading pit, as crews readied the aircraft with cargo unlike anything the world had ever known.
