Today's 40th anniversary of the last wartime dropping of an atomic bomb is the background of a mystery about the part played by Oklahoma City in introducing atomic weapons into the arsenal of modern warfare.
[On] this date in 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress [bomber] named Bock's Car released a plutonium ["Fat] Man" implosion bomb over Nagasaki, Japan.
[The] bomb convinced Japanese warlords they had [lost] the war. They surrendered five days later.
Bock's Car now is an exhibit in the Air Force Museum at Dayton, Ohio. It's more-famous sister [?], the Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan Aug. 6, 1945, is among the Smithsonian Institution's collection of historic aircraft.
[For] years it has been common knowledge that the Enola Gay was modified to carry the atomic bomb at Tinker Field, as Tinker Air Force Base was called in the days when the Air Force was part of the Army.
[However,] a check of official records shows no written acknowledgment that the Enola Gay ever was at Tinker in 1945.
The Enola Gay, a B-29G, was accepted by the [Army] Air Force at Glenn L. Martin manufacturing plant at Omaha, Neb., May 18, 1945.
[It] remained in Omaha until it was delivered to [Wend]over Field, Utah, the following June 14.
The plane left the U.S. from San Francisco on [June] 29 and was based at Tinian Island Aug. 6 when it began the flight to Japan at an altitude usually used by weather reconnaissance planes.
The Little Boy bomb missed its aiming point but made little difference to Hiroshima when the [fireba]ll illuminated the city like a second sunrise. The mushroom cloud punctuated Ground Zero like an exclamation point.
The first public acknowledgment that Tinker had a part in the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb came eight months later in April 1946 when the base public relations officer released the story.
At the time the announcement was made, the Enola Gay was at tinker where workers were preparing it as one of the fleet of bombers which would take part in the postwar Crossroads atomic bomb tests at Bikini atoll in the Pacific.
But had the Enola Gay been at Tinker to prepare for the Hiroshima drop?
"We have conflicting stories," says Tom Brewer, Tinker Air Force Base Historian.
Plenty of workers who were at Tinker during the war say they remember the Enola Gay's being there.
But the plane's official maintenance loge makes no mention of Tinker during 1945.
Could the Army have kept such a secret modification at tinker out of the records as a security measure?
Brewer says that's possible. But that's also speculation. And, he says, you can't ignore the written record.
One Oklahoma City resident was in a position to find out as quickly as anyone. English-born Douglas G. R. Lord, formerly of the Royal Flying Corps, was chief of maintenance at Tinker in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force.
Lord recalls two B-29s which arrived at Tinker in the spring of 1945 for special modification.
"I went into production control one morning and the major in charge said two planes had come in for modification and we were to give them first priority," Lord said.
"We were to see that they were expedited and that all security measures would be taken. They didn't say what they had come in for."
The two B-29s were put under 24-hour armed guard, he said, and a crew of technicians was flown to tinker from Wright Field, Ohio, to do the work.
"The worked six or eight people at a time 24 hours a day until the job was done," Lord said.
Then planes, crewmen and officers flew away, leaving the story of what they had done untold, just one of the many security mysteries that occurred at Tinker during World War II.
No one connected the name, Enola Gay, with tinker after news accounts identified it as the first atom bomber. But the name wasn't painted on the nose of the modified B-29 until the day it left on its mission to Hiroshima.
"It wasn't until after the bomb was dropped that I learned from someone high up at Wright Field what that had been about," Lord said. "He said, 'Remember those two planes that went through that special rush modification? Those were the ones being modified to drop the A-Bomb'".
"The Enola Gay is shown at Tinker Air Force Base in 1949 prior to being turned over to the Smithsonian Institution's air museum. In front of the B-29 are Capt. O.W. MacFarland, airdrome officer at Tinker; Col. P.W. Tibbetts, Pilot of the Enola Gay when it dropped the first atomic bomb; and Maj. Tom Ferebee, the bombardier on the historic flight over Hiroshima."