''Every time I flew, I had a camera, and I did that here,'' he said. Gackenbach had his own camera on the Hiroshima mission, an Agfa 620, and he took two surviving photographs of the fireball. Gackenbach, a second lieutenant at the time, said he did not know the nature of the technical problem. Gackenbach, said on Thursday from his home in Melbourne, Fla., that the crew had been told the film could not be developed.
''It felt as if a monster hand had slapped the side of the plane.''įor the Hiroshima mission, scientists from the Manhattan Project, which built the bombs, put sophisticated photography equipment aboard Major Marquardt's plane to capture images of the fireball and record ground damage.īut the plane's navigator, Russell E. ''Smoke boiled around the flash as it rose,'' he said. ''It seemed as if the sun had come out of the earth and exploded,'' he told The Salt Lake Tribune. Marquardt attended a reunion of the 509th at the New Mexico site where the atomic bomb was tested in July 1945, and he recalled the moment of the Hiroshima blast.
On the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima attack, Mr. George William Marquardt, a native of Princeton, Ky., and the son of a veterinarian, left Illinois Wesleyan University in March 1941 to enter the military and later joined the 509th Composite Group, which trained for the atomic bomb missions under extraordinary secrecy at Wendover Field, Utah. Japan surrendered five days later, ending World War II. Sweeney's plane, Bock's Car, diverted to Nagasaki and dropped the second bomb. When smoke from previous bombing obscured that city, Major Charles W.