Hiroshima - August 6

More fun facts .... the B-29 was made into several variants, from cargo planes to mid-air refueling stations. Even so, the original cost was way more expensive to put the B-29 into production - than the original A-bomb Manhattan Project - by more than a factor of 2. Even so, only 2 B-29's are now airworthy - after tons of donation dollars were poured into them.. Fifi & Doc. Ironically, now that our nation has gone in a different softer kinder direction, Doc was representative of one of the 7 dwarfs - Disney characters;


And if referencing someone as a dwarf is not enough of an irony, one of the original Rosie the riveters that actually worked on Doc - which, by the way was a multi-decade restoration project - dragging it out of mothballs & bringing it back to life .... in her 90's is actually older than doc.

She was one of the many that installed the rivets in Doc.
There's a book coming out about one of the B-29 crew that earned the Congressional Medal of Honor by keeping a B-29 in the air. A lead plane, not armed to bomb Japan, but drop white phosphorus so that the following b-29s would know where the factory was, the fuse was too short, and it went off inside the B-29. Even though 1,100 degrees. Blinded & missing a bunch of his face and one ear, he picked it up and carried it out one of the few windows. Burning through the flesh to his bones, they didn't expect him to live. At the time, most of the Congressional Medal of Honor recipients would be dead. They expected "Red" to die & so they gave it to him while he was still alive. But he lived anyway. He died just a few years ago.
Yes, it was a different time.
EDIT:
After working nearly four decades for Disney, one more fun fact. When you watch any Star Wars movie that has a millennial Falcon shot? Looking out into space, you might recognize that as the shape of the plexiglass from the B-29.
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From Wikipedia B-29:
"The $3 billion cost of design and production (equivalent to $43 billion today)—far exceeding the $1.9 billion cost of the Manhattan Project—made the B-29 program the most expensive of the war."

Manhattan:
"The project expenditure through 1 October 1945 was $1.845 billion, equivalent to less than nine days of wartime spending, and was $2.191 billion when the AEC assumed control on 1 January 1947. Total allocation was $2.4 billion. Over 90% of the cost was for building plants and producing the fissionable materials, and less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.

A total of four weapons (the Trinity gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man, and an unused Fat Man bomb) were produced by the end of 1945, making the average cost per bomb around $500 million in 1945 dollars. By comparison, the project's total cost by the end of 1945 was about 90% of the total spent on the production of US small arms (not including ammunition) and 34% of the total spent on US tanks during the same period. Overall, it was the second most expensive weapons project undertaken by the United States in World War II, behind only the design and production of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress."

These two programs built 3970 aircraft and 4 nuclear bombs.

 

I had a physics / math teacher in high school that was part of the Manhattan Project.

 

Did he know at the time that it was an atomic bomb project?

The Project's total employment exceeded 130,000 people, but the great majority of them didn't know what it was for until after.

 

I don't know if he did. He never talked to the students about it. I found out later from my Dad after high school he was on the project. It was also in his obit some years ago. You could tell he was a brilliant teacher. I had him for physics, calculus, math analysis. He was an imposing 6' 8" tall.

 

Famous Quote from Oak ridge.....

"what are you making?"
"...$75 a week."

Most of the people who were not living in Alamogordo (and getting their mail elsewhere) had no idea what they were working on.
Famously...the folks in Oak Ridge who were operating the gas centrifuge uranium enrichment gizmos were told just enough to 'keep the needles centered' and call a supervisor if there was a problem.
Many of these people (some, displaced by TVA and then again by Oak Ridge) went from making a small fraction of the national average salary to making more than double - and thus had a very powerful incentive to keep quiet.
Also interesting...since there was a net shortage of military age males this led to some women being able to rise out of both poverty and a fairly bleak social position.
This was of course true for the war in general.

'tis an ill wind......

The total cost of the Manhattan project was probably something like 3.5 billion dollars counting a significant slice of the B-29 project....which means that President Harry S Truman had zero "real" options about ending WW2.

If the bombs were not used and as little as 1/10 of the casualty estimates were realized (on both sides) during the invasions of Japan by the US and the Soviets, then people (ESPECIALLY Republicans, who had a majority in the House, IIRC) would have probably wondered where all the money went - and would have demanded P33's head on a pike!!!

.....and the 8th Nimitz class carrier would have a different name (USS Thomas Dewey?)

Fun Fact:
Many people (falsely) believe to this day that we only had three bombs ready to go in the summer of 1945 (counting Trinity.)
That's patently false, and there are surviving open source docs out there that suggest that there was a "delta" device being assembled in Titnan for a scheduled 19 August drop.
In 1946, ten months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. conducted nuclear tests in the Pacific, named Operation Crossroads with 'shots' starting at "alpha."

If memory serves......the famous "Demon Core" (originally named Rufus) was originally scheduled for shot "Charlie" in Crossroads - strongly suggesting at least that there were 2 other cores available besides it in August 1945.
"Some" surviving documents indicate that Rufus was going to be the third weapon deployed over Japan but the criticality accident in August made it unavailable for that deployment and they were going to use cores "E" and "D" instead (they probably would have eschewed 'Dog' and 'Easy" for something more snappy.)
I've heard rumors that there were as many as 12 cores ready in mid to late '45, and the number and frequency of nucular tests in 1946 lends strong credence to that estimate.

The much publicized dearth of usable weapons was probably contrived for Cold War purposes - or a little early history obfuscating.
Many of the documents back then were just THAT (physical documents) and these tended to be destroyed rather than retained, thus many aspects of this fast and loose time of early special weapons development will be lost to history, if not speculation.

My own farther rode one of these a few times...


...and was on one of THESE over the Pacific when they went from 4 operating engines to three.......NOT an unheard of event.


Fun times.....