Product Review

It was quite probably the most important event of World War II. Its consequences were greater than those of any other event of the war. Yet the story of the bombing of Hiroshima, the momentous flight into the future of the B29 Enola Gay, has never before been revealed from firsthand sources. Award winning writers Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts separate myth from reality as they retrace the steps that led the world into the atomic age. The authors talked to each surviving crew member and to the scientists and soldiers whose war effort pointed in one direction, toward August 6, 1945, when the first aerial drop of a uranium bomb wiped out most of a city but, ironically, did not stop the war. In addition to their extensive interviews with participants, both American and Japanese, the authors have had access to private diaries and memoirs and government documents until recently classified "top secret." From these, they have reconstructed the unmatched drama of men racing to perfect and others learning to safely drop the untested and most feared bomb in the world; while in Japan, the Imperial Army planned a defense, centered in Hiroshima, that would take an estimated million Allied lives.