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“In fact, he was leery about getting married, because he didn’t think he was coming back. “He couldn’t tell me where he was going,” his widow said this week. On June 6, 1945, Marquardt said goodbye to Bernece, his wife of one week, in their hotel room near the airfield. He received his wings at Kelly Field in Texas and in 1943 was assigned to the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, which became part of the 509th Composite Group at Wendover Field in Utah.įifteen crews were being trained there to drop a large, unnamed bomb for the top-secret mission that they knew only would “shorten the war.” He was studying at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington in March 1941 when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces. “He was a sound individual, had good judgment and could handle the airplane and crew real well.”īorn July 14, 1919, in Princeton, Ky., Marquardt grew up in the small Ohio River town of Golconda, Ill. “We had 15 aircraft commanders, and George was certainly one of the better ones” in the 509th, Van Kirk said. Ted “Dutch” Van Kirk, the Enola Gay’s navigator, echoed Tibbets’ sentiments. Marquardt’s enlisted men, Tibbets added, “liked him and wanted to fly with him. “I watched George closely, and I can say he was most trustworthy, and he was good at his business: He ran a good crew and flew a good airplane.” “He was very good,” said Tibbets, commanding officer of the top-secret 509th Composite Group, which had trained at a remote airfield in Utah. Tibbets, a retired brigadier general, told The Times this week that if a third bomb had been necessary, he would probably have chosen Marquardt to drop it. Three days after the attack on Hiroshima, a B-29 piloted by Sweeney dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which prompted the Japanese surrender. “I have never for one moment regretted my participating in the dropping of the A-bomb,” Marquardt told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1995. The bomb, which destroyed about five square miles of Hiroshima, killed 70,000 to 100,000 people. In defiance of orders, however, a crew member had sneaked a camera on board and took a picture of the explosion. But in his excitement, Waldman forgot to open the camera shutter, and none of the film was exposed.
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The light from the 9,700-pound uranium bomb with the destructive force of 20,000 tons of TNT was so intense that Marquardt could not even see his co-pilot, Jim Anderson.īernard Waldman, the Manhattan Project scientist on Marquardt’s plane, was equipped with a special high-speed movie camera loaded with six seconds of film to record the blast. Charles Sweeney’s bomber, which carried blast-gauge instruments that would be dropped by parachute. On the right and to the rear of the Enola Gay was Maj. Paul Tibbets’ Enola Gay, the B-29 carrying the atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy.”
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6, Marquardt’s B-29 - Necessary Evil - was to the left and rear of Col. He was 84 and had Parkinson’s disease.Īs he flew toward Hiroshima from the island of Tinian, north of Guam, in the early morning of that Aug.
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15, a day after the 58th anniversary of the Japanese surrender that ended World War II. Marquardt, the former Army Air Forces pilot whose B-29 was designated to photograph the historic bomb blast over the Japanese port city, died in a nursing home in Murray, Utah, on Aug. He said that Waldman operated the camera properly, but that the data on the film was lost in processing. Agnew, a scientist on another plane that measured the bomb’s yield. That is incorrect, according to Harold M. 23, stated that Manhattan Project scientist Bernard Waldman forgot to open the shutter on the high-speed camera and that none of the film of the blast was exposed. Los Angeles Times Saturday AugHome Edition Main News Part A National Desk 2 inches 95 words Type of Material: CorrectionĪ-bomb filming - An obituary of George Marquardt, the B-29 pilot whose plane carried photographic equipment to record the atomic blast over Hiroshima, which appeared in the California section Aug.