George Marquardt; saw Hiroshima blast

By Los Angeles Times, 8/24/2003

George Marquardt's memory of the atomic blast over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, never dimmed.

"It was like the sun had come out of the ground and just exploded," he often recalled.

Mr. Marquardt, the former Army-Air Force pilot whose B-29 was designated to photograph the historic bomb blast over the Japanese port city, died in a nursing home in Murray, Utah, on Aug. 15, a day after the 58th anniversary of the Japanese surrender that ended World War II. He was 84 and had Parkinson's disease.

As he flew toward Hiroshima from the island of Tinian, north of Guam, in the early morning of that Aug. 6, Mr. Marquardt's B-29 -- Necessary Evil -- was to the left and rear of Colonel Paul Tibbets's Enola Gay, the B-29 carrying the atomic bomb dubbed "Little Boy."

On the right and to the rear of the Enola Gay was Major Charles Sweeney's bomber, which carried blast-gauge instruments that would be dropped by parachute.

"You boys are making history today," a Manhattan Project scientist on Mr. Marquardt's plane had said that morning -- a morning that, as they neared Hiroshima, Mr. Marquardt would remember as being "the most beautiful day I've ever seen."

That changed soon after 8:15 a.m., when the Enola Gay's bombardier released "Little Boy."

Although Mr. Marquardt's B-29 remained at least 15 miles from Hiroshima, he later said the blast "felt as if a monster hand had slapped the side of the plane."

"I have never for one moment regretted my participating in the dropping of the A-bomb," Mr. Marquardt told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1995. "It ended a terrible war." Three days after the attack on Hiroshima, a B-29 piloted by Sweeney dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which prompted the Japanese surrender.