Battles went on for months and were often fought hand-to-hand, with rifles, knives and flame throwers. One air battle was so lopsided in favor of the Americans that it was called a turkey shoot. Japanese suicide pilots crashed their planes into American vessels. Huge ships went to the bottom with their crews. Naval and air battles had been sudden, brief and deadly. The fighting on land, at sea and in the air had been savage. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, an average of 5,000 were still dying each week. More than 100,000 American soldiers, sailors and Marines had already been killed in the Pacific since Japan’s attack on the U.S. (Matt McLain/The Washington Post) A shortened war, a dreadful cost This week, commemorations are scheduled across the country, with socially distanced candlelight vigils and the tolling of bells, and because of the covid-19, ceremonies and remembrances have moved online. It would be the start of a frightful era of weapons that could defy control and menace civilization.īut as “Dimples Eight Two” picked up speed that morning, its mission was born of its time: deliver a blow that the United States hoped might finally end the global butchery of World War II. Tens of thousands more would die the same way at Nagasaki a few days later, and the world would subsequently be hearing about megatons, mutual assured destruction, proliferation, nuclear winter, meltdowns and dirty bombs. It was an important enemy military site with a wartime population about 280,000, according to the historians Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts.Īlmost half of them were about to be incinerated, crushed, and irradiated by the crude atomic weapon named “Little Boy” that the Enola Gay carried. (AP)įifteen hundred miles to the north-northwest, under a waning crescent moon, lay a 400-year-old Japanese city most Americans probably had never heard of but whose name was about to be etched into the pages of history. Shumard, assistant engineer and Staff Sgt. Jacob Besser, radar countermeasures officer. Tibbets, 509th Composite Group commanding officer and pilot Capt. John Porter, ground maintenance officer Capt. It can be found here.This undated photo includes most members of 12-man crew of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima posing in the Mariana Islands in 1945 during World War II. (I wrote a September 11th hack of this game called ’11’. Start with the player on the Commander’s left and go clockwise. On the way back from the mission, each character can say one sentence. If time runs out and no clear decision is made about the mission, the bomb is dropped. What the other characters do with this order is up to them. Once there’s 1 minute left on the timer, if he hasn’t already, the Commander must give a direct order about the mission, one way or the other. If two characters are in agreement about what they want to do, it happens and cannot be stopped. Then pointedly look at the player you want to back you up. Say what you’re trying to do: what you’re stopping and how. If you want to stop another character from doing something, you can, but you have to get the third character to back you up, to unite with you in what you’re trying to stop.
Commander, keep your eye on the timer.Įveryone, play according to the rules of the game mentioned above, plus two more rules:Ĥ. The Commander goes last, and the answer to his last question (“How did he find out?”) will set the scene, like a movie, for what happens. Next, everyone reads the answers to their questions out loud. It has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people. It is vastly more powerful than any other weapon you have ever seen. No weapon like this has ever been used in warfare. When dropped, it will explode with the power of 18,000 tons of TNT. The bomb you’re carrying on this mission is an atomic weapon. Now the Commander reads the excerpt on the Atom Bomb out loud. The other crew member wasn’t supposed to know, but he just found out.One of your crew members knew about the nature of today’s bombing mission from the beginning.Write down your answers to the questions, as well. Now, each person choose a character and write them on your card. Whenever you describe what your character is doing, that’s what he does. Whenever you speak as your character, that’s what your character says.ģ. The game will last 7 minutes, and at the end we’ll know: Did you follow your orders and drop the bomb, or didn’t you?Ģ. In this game, you play the 3-man crew of the Enola Gay, deep in the midst of your mission to drop the Atom bomb on Hiroshima. A 7-minute story game of speculative history