My Favorite Airplane

On a recent visit to the San Diego Air & Space museum to check out their amazing collection of aircraft and aviation memorabilia, I struck up a conversation with another visitor, who asked me what my favorite aircraft was.  Not being a died-in-the-wool aviation buff myself, and not wanting to be a poser, my mind turned to humor.  Yes, my favorite aircraft was the last airplane I was in that didn’t crash.  But my brain got the better of me.  But how would I answer as a historian?  Because I’m always drawn to single artifacts that changed history, I wasn’t thinking aircraft type.  So I zeroed in on the one airplane that in my opinion, made the single most profound impact on world history.  And the hands down winner for that title is the Enola Gay.  Here are three reasons why.

            First, the Enola Gay indirectly saved over a million lives. The explosion killed an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people instantly, with tens of thousands dying of burns and radiation poisoning in the days, months, and even years after.  All told, the bomb killed about 135,000 people.  Nevertheless, proponents of the bombing argue that many more people would have died had the Allies been forced to invade the Japanese mainland to end the war.  Hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers, and several million Japanese soldiers and civilians would have perished.  They cite Japan’s fanatic soldiers, who routinely fought to the bitter end.  On Saipan where my father was stationed during the war, less than 1000 of the island’s 30,000 Japan’s soldiers were captured alive.  Critics respond that it’s comparing apples to oranges, because the deaths at Hiroshima were largely civilian.  Whatever side you are on in this ever-raging (and important) argument, you can’t disagree: the Enola Gay altered the course of world history by changing the fate of a million people.  What other plane has done that?

            Second, the Enola Gay ushered in the atomic age.  Had the mission failed for whatever reason, work on the Manhattan project would have slowed or stopped altogether, and World History would be different.  If you’ve ever gotten a CAT scan or used electricity from a nuclear reactor, you’ve benefitted from nuclear energy, to say nothing of pure science.  Now that I think of it, if you are alive today, either you or your parents survived the Cold War, and many argue that it was the presence of nuclear arsenals on both sides that kept the war “cold.”  The threat of nuclear war kept the Bay of Pigs crisis a crisis, and not the first battlefield of World War Three.  Of course, if you lived near Chernobyl in the 1980s, or lived in Hiroshima on August 6th, that argument doesn’t hold water.  But in a macro-sense, Nuclear energy has been a force for good, and the nuclear age wouldn’t be without the Enola Gay.

            Lastly, although the Enola Gay changed history, prior to August 6, 1945, it had no history.  Most people don’t know that it was only 3 months old.  Other than a couple of insignificant bombing runs, this infant plane’s sole mission in life was to become the first of two aircraft in human history to drop a Nuclear bomb.  Well, that’s if you ignore the nuclear bomb dropped accidentally by a clumsy flight navigator in 1958 into someone’s back yard in Mars Bluff, South Carolina.  Fortunately, the bomb didn’t go nuclear, because the core was not installed.  But I digress.  If you count the number of missions flown by one plane relative to the historic impact of each mission flown, the Enola Gay wins the day.