Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961.
It was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. On the morning of 6 August 1945 an American B-29 bomber, the 'Enola Gay', dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki being bombed instead. Most of the bombs victims were women, children, the elderly. Many others were scarred and injured for life. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. The blast, fire and radiation killed 140,000 people.
The bomb, code-named 'Little Boy', was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line.
