It has a name the Enola Gay but they were not allowed to mention it by name. It was just unclassified that their base had done the changes before he died. So it was always called THE PLANE in our home. We do not now or then see any humor in it.
Humble gunner posted a picture of the little guy saying “THE PLANE” after hoosiermama posted a comment with that phrase.
Hoosier mama explained:
It has a name the Enola Gay but they were not allowed to mention it by name. It was just unclassified that their base had done the changes before he died. So it was always called THE PLANE in our home. We do not now or then see any humor in it.
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I’m glad you explained what you meant by “The Plane” - I did not follow that at all in your original comment. It makes sense to me now. At the risk of speaking for humble gunner, I don’t think he meant to ridicule what is now seen as a significant family and American story.
My dad worked on the Enola Gay, Bockscar, and some of the chase planes for both missions. One of his crewmen forgot the ground rules they'd been told and picked up a rag in one of the chase planes that had flown through the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki and wiped his hands with it and years later developed tumors all over his hands. He lived on our block. . . he was retired on a medical from his civilian job with the Air Force at full pay the day he told his supervisors he had tumors on his hands.
The tumors turned out to be benign, but his hands were almost unusable for him. He lived to about 85 or so. . . the same as my dad.
My dad also worked on all of Jimmy Doolittle's B25s before the Tokyo Raid. . . and is even mentioned in the book "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," but not by name. He was the civilian crew chief that earned Lt. Ted Lawson's ire for over-revving his beloved Ruptured Duck's engines while it was tied down.
Dad had to rev those engines. He was charged with assuring those engines would operate at 115% of their rating smoothly because they needed them to accelerate to high speed to take off from the Hornet in a VERY short distance. If he couldn't get them to do that, the engine (which was already fairly new) was pulled and they'd put a new one in and tune that one to the nth degree. When told what the take-off load was supposed to be, fuel, bombs, and men, Dad didn't think even with 115% over spec would get them off the ground in the distance they told him the planes had to be in the air. He drove his crew to get every bit of extra power out of those engines.
My dad finally made the suggestion they put water injection systems in the carburetor system like they used in fighter planes to boost horsepower. It worked. Got the extra boost they needed. The water injection increased the surface area of the fuel to burn because it coated the water droplets. . . and the water droplets flashed over into very high pressure steam.
This water injection concept had come out of noticing that cars and planes had slightly better performance in higher humidity air. . . it beat the hell out of the engines though. It's not a good practice. But, then, they didn't think they were going to be using these engines for an extended time, and they'd only need to use the water injection during takeoff.