Enola Gay

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. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki being bombed instead.

After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. 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. 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.

Enola Gay (song)

"Enola Gay" is an anti-war song by the British synthpop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). It was the only single from the band's 1980 album, Organisation.

Written by Andy McCluskey, it addresses the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, and directly mentions three components of the attack: the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, which dropped the nuclear weapon Little Boy on Hiroshima at "8:15".

"Enola Gay" has come to be regarded as one of the great pop songs. Critic Ned Raggett in AllMusic lauded the track as "astounding...a flat-out pop classic – clever, heartfelt, thrilling, and confident, not to mention catchy and arranged brilliantly"; colleague Dave Thompson called it a "perfect synth-dance-pop extravaganza." It featured in MusicRadar's "The 40 Greatest Synth Tracks Ever" in 2009, who noted that the song "includes some of the biggest synth hooks of all time." In 2012, NME listed the track among the "100 Best Songs of the 1980s", describing McCluskey's vocal as "brilliantly quizzical" and the song as a "pop classic". It was selected by the BBC for use during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.