With a B29 Wing on Guam -There is one B-29 out here that has made a name for itself. It has the best maintenance record in the wing, is lead ship and has never turned back from a mission in its 19 flights. Its name is the City of Omaha.

It flew for 380 hours without changing an engine. It survived the fire of 40 Jap destroyers, though it caught flak through both wings, one engine and the tail section. Before the destroyers scored any hits, the plane had dropped 98 per cent of its fire bombs in a one-thousand-foot circle.

Those are just a few reasons why the plane made at the Martin Plant at Fort Crook is considered quite a warrior in flying circles out here. The only member of the original crew who hailed from Omaha was Anthony Cappoccia who has since been given a medical discharge.

All of the crew were stationed near Omaha at one time or another and they still talk about week-end trips to the city.
"It's a soldiers town if there ever was one," a member of the crew said in explaining how they had named the ship. "We are all Middle West boys and the plane was made there decided to call it the City of Omaha."

Two of the present crew live in Iowa. They are Lieutenant Jensen, 23, of Manning, co-pilot and M. Sgt. Lyle Thomas of Boone, flight engineer.
Besides his missions, Sergeant Boone is sweating out the days until he can see his 17-month-old daughter, Virginia Lee. She and his wife, Jeanne, are awaiting his return at Boone.

Lieutenant Jensen is full of stories about the adventures of the ship.
"One of the roughest raids we had was over Tokyo the lieutenant said. "We had dropped our fire bombs couldn't see for smoke. We were down to about eight thousands feet when we hit a thermal heat wave and it pitched up to 12 thousand feet. I was supposed to be operating the ship and Mac, the pilot thought he had it and both on the controls. We came out of it without any trouble.

Eight of 11 ships were hit when the Omaha picked up those flak holes. Jensen said they had hit Osaka as jet, but they weren't bothered by flak until they were coming out and the Jap fleet sighted them over Kure.
The lieutenant's parents are Mr. and Mrs. Fred F. Jensen and they operate a farm near Manning.

Junior Division Paper
History Day project in 2000 --- 6th grade

After the attack of Pearl Harbor the U.S. had entered the second World War. The top scientists had been called together for a secret project called the Manhattan Project, also known as the Groves Project. It was a project to build the first atomic bomb.

The U.S. decided to build the bomb after Albert Einstein had written a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing him that German chancellor Adolf Hitler had his top scientists working on an atomic bomb. After the president had okayed the project in the year 1940, research and development began. The test bombs were ready on July 16, 1945, at 5:30 in the morning. In General Groves words, "For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion!"

The test was far more powerful than any had expected. Their guess was the bomb was equal to 20,000 tons of TNT.

General Groves, in a memorandum for the Secretary of War, wrote. "For a brief period there was a lightning effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lay for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over 1,000 feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso, and other points generally about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only a few windows were broken though one was some 125 miles away. A massive cloud was formed which surfaced and billowed upward with tremendous power, reaching the substatosphere at elevation of 41,000 feet 36,000 feet above the ground."

There was a 16-foot iron tower 1,500 feet away. It was set in concrete and strongly guyed ... the tower was never found. One half mile from the test site, there was a steel test cylinder. It weighed 220 pounds. It, too, was set in concrete. It was also strongly guyed. Around the cylinder was a steel tower over 70 feet high.

It was much stronger than what would normally be used in construction. The blast blew it off its foundation, twisted it, and ripped it to pieces. The temperature had reached 17,000 degrees. The bomb left a crater 1,200 feet across, and a bowl in the center 130 feet across and 6 feet deep.

Two B-29 bombers, Bocks Car and Enola Gay, took off from the U.S. and went to the Pacific island of Tinian. The bomb casings were brought in by air and the atomic cores were brought in by a U.S. cruiser called the Indianapolis.

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, which was named after Colonel Tibbets' mother, was loaded with the atomic bomb and had a crew of 11. The plane was heading straight for Japan with the Little Boy in her bomb hold. The Enola Gay neared the city of Hiroshima and dropped the bomb over the estimated center of the city. At 8:16 a.m. the Little Boy exploded 1,900 feet above the building currently called the Atomic Bomb Dome. It missed its target by 800 feet.

Colonel Tibbets later wrote in his journal, "A bright light filled the plane. We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud... boiling up, mushrooming. For a moment no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. 'Look At That! Look at That! Looook At thaat!' exclaimed copilot Robert Lewis. Lewis also said, `I could taste atomic fission, it tasted like lead."' Colonel Tibbets also wrote, "My God, what have we done?"

The bomb was so powerful that an eye witness, First Lieutenant Glen Jensen, of Manning, Iowa, thought that the whole American fleet had attacked and destroyed the city. He didn't know it, but if the Enola Gay crew couldn't drop the bomb, he would have been the pilot to drop the bomb with his plane, The City of Omaha. Since this was a top secret mission, he had no idea what was going on. He found out what had happened a couple days later. He said, "There was a red glow under a cloud and everything under the cloud was as bright as day. But we couldn't see anything for the cloud. I couldn't believe that one bomb did all that."

Inside Hiroshima the people weren't expecting anything. B-29s had been flying over the city, so some people were still just coming out of a bomb shelter when the bomb was dropped. After the bomb was dropped eye-witnesses said that it looked like "a thousand suns filled the sky, a blue white light, a bright red ball of fire, a thousand flashbulbs had gone off at once, all at once the windowpanes seemed to have been painted yellow." Then the people were knocked flat on their backs. Reports of up to 200,000 people were killed instantly, or from bomb-related causes. The only safe place was the water. One report told of a man who had jumped into a pool before the blast wave hit, and destroyed the building he was in. He had no health problems even to this day.

A Japanese book describes the situation at a school like this:
A young high school girl shivering with cold in the black rain declined a blanket, saying, "I'll be all right. You take it, teacher."
Teachers died trying to protect their students.
A student from Southeast Asia running back and forth to a broken water pipe to carry water to the injured.
An elementary school girl fleeing the disaster offering her lunch, saying, "I'm going to die; give this to your little girl."
A mother taking care of someone's injured child as if it were her own.

Three days later, on August 9, 1945, the second atomic bomb was assembled and loaded onto a second B-29, the Bocks Cars. The Fat Man was taken to the city of Nagasaki, Japan. The plane reached the city and the bomb was dropped.
Inside Nagasaki, it was also a peaceful morning. Then at 11:01 a.m. the Fat Man was dropped. The bomb missed its target by a mile and a half. The people were not expecting it, not even after the attack of Hiroshima. Many were killed but still not as many as in Hiroshima. The city was turned from a peaceful morning to a chaotic mess. It was an "every man for himself" situation. An example of this comes from one of the survivors: After the bomb was dropped her family was heading to an aunt's house out of the city. They saw a lady who had gotten her leg trapped under a fallen pole and she was pleading with everyone who walked by. Then the girl's father stopped and took a rusty saw and amputated the leg.

After the bombs were dropped the cities lay in ruins. Many people were instantly killed, while others were dying a slow, agonizing death.

The few people who didn't get hurt spent their time helping people to the hospitals outside of the city, or the ones that were still left.

The injured had to endure a lot of pain. They had to put up with burnt skin that was bubbling, and in some cases people's skin had fallen off. Some bodies even vaporized.

The radiation also affected the soil, and in the future it took a while for plants to begin to grow again. The radiation also caused deformed babies, miscarriages, and some people couldn't even have babies.

In the 1950's the U.S. tested the effects of the bomb on American soldiers. One such person was a man named Roy Schilling, from Aspinwall, Iowa. In a way he was a human guinea pig. He was involved in Operation Smoky, which took place in Mercury, Nevada. The soldiers lived in tents a few miles away away from the test sites. They were there for about 6 months, and went through 10 to 12 tests.

The first test bomb was dropped from a blimp, and even though the soldiers were about 15 miles away the blast wave still knocked them down. In the last test they were only 2 miles away. The bomb used on Hiroshima was equal to 20,000 tons of TNT, while the biggest bomb used in Operation Smoky was equal to 85,000 tons of TNT.

Mr. Schilling said, "The tower that was used to test the bomb was as high as a 3 story building. It had an elevator to take the bombs to the top. A light on top that when red meant to prepare because the bomb was about to be dropped."

The force shook the ground so much that they were given a shovel to dig out the person next to them. The flash was so great that it would burn a camera lens.

The tests were always held when the wind was blowing to the northeast, because there weren't any major cities in that area, and that is the reason why atomic radiation had floated in the form of clouds to Iowa.

The bombs were tested on everything including new trucks, air compressors, caterpillars, dummies, tanks, and cars. The army even built apartment-like buildings and set the tables in them. They put these things in a circle around the test area. They also built an interstate bridge out of cement. "The first time the bridge was completely gone; the second time they put it farther out and it just fell on its side. The power even blew the skin off horses," Mr. Schilling said.

He also said, "The blast was in a cone shape and it had a ring of fire, that always turned clockwise. As it rose up it picked up a lot of dust."

Three days after the test the soldiers would have to go back in to pick up dud mines. The mines were there because the officers in charge wanted everything to be exactly like war. To do this the soldiers had to "army crawl" in and pick them up. They were given a Geiger counter that counted how much radiation; if it counted too much radiation then the soldier had to get out of there FAST!!

When Mr. Schilling got back to camp he had a machine run over him to count how much radiation was on him. If there was too much him, he had take off his clothes and put them in an incinerator. Then he took a shower. And finally he was issued new clothes. Many people had health problems from these tests. Roy is one of the lucky few that never had problems from this. After the testing had ended a man had children and all of his children had skin problems. Another man went to turn his kitchen door handle and broke all of his back ribs. He lived a slow death day by day, and the army never even gave his wife any money to live off. John Wayne also filmed a movie in the test area and claimed he got cancer from being there and rolling in the sand.

After the army found out about all this they started having anyone involved in the tests go to a VA hospital. Mr. Schilling went there many times but the doctors never found anything. This testing affected some but didn't affect others.

SOUVENIR
from
THE B-29 "CITY OF OMAHA"
... Tokyo to Omaha ...

This souvenir has been dropped to you by the crew of the "City of Omaha," the gallant super-fortress that, completed 32 bombing missions over Japan and is now arriving in Omaha to participate in the Victory War Bond drive.
One of its most historic flights was made over the city of Ogaki when leaflets were dropped warning the people to leave the city and avoid a blasting from the air.
(Okagi was one of two other Japanese cities that were targets if Japan did not surender after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
Shortly after you receive this souvenir, the "City of Omaha" will land at Offutt Field, Ft. Crook. Here is a personal message from, its commander and pilot:

Greetings --- Good People of Omaha!
All the members of our crew have considered it a great privilege to man the splendid B-29 "City of Omaha" built by your own citizens in the Martin-Nebraska plant.
We've seen and experienced the wonderful morale-building work done by the USO, not only in the entertainment field at home and abroad, but also in thousands of acts of kindness by USO workers located near hospitals and camps. The full scope of their work may not be realized by the average civilian but the veterans know and appreciate the value of the USO and other public financed war agencies. Your money has been well invested.

We also know that there are many thousands of returned veterans who still need aid; that right in your city there are veteran's families -little children and the aged-who now need your help. That help will come from your local Victory Fund and Community Chest drive. The members of our crew urge you to give all you can to this worthwhile and very vital cause.

(Signed) Major Howard McClelland, Commanding Officer.

These leaflets donated by radio station WOW, whose war correspondent, Ray Clark, is a passenger on this B-29 the "City of Omaha".

Three years' duty in the Pacific Theatre as a pilot of a B-29. That's the military career of Glen Jensen, partner of the J & S Feed Service that was launched in March 1955.