After returning to Tinian, Tibbets was greeted on the tarmac by Gen. It had been an exhausting 12-hour mission. More than 78,000 of the city’s total population of 348,000 were killed an estimated 51,000 were injured or missing. That single bomb, weighing 8,900 pounds, wiped out nearly five square miles of Hiroshima - 60 percent of the city. Operating from Tinian Island in the Marianas, then considered the largest air base in the world, he and his crew had made a picture-perfect 2,900-mile flight, and had dropped the uranium bomb called “Little Boy” squarely on target. Tibbets, then a colonel in charge of the 509th Composite Group, had honed his unit of 15 B-29 Superfortresses into one of the finest Air Force bombardment outfits ever assembled.
