A special lift was constructed that would bring the bomb up from a concrete pit over which the Superfortress had to be positioned for the bomb loading operation. With a weight of over 10.000 lbs and 10 ft long, it was a very complicated affair to get this monstrous machine inside the bomb bay of the B-29 “Enola Gay”. Photo above: The first Atomic bomb named “Little Boy” was not so little. That bomb under the name “Little Boy” was to be delivered by the now legendary Boeing B-29 Superfortress planned to take off from the Tinian Air Force Base for her flight out to the Japanese main islands. It was enriched Uranium for the first Atomic Bomb, planned to be dropped on Japan in early August.

It was a special mission as the battleship had an ultra-classified and dangerous cargo on board. Photo above: By mid-July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, the Flagship of the 5th Fleet, sailed out from the US mainland to Tinian, one of the Marianas Islands (a small group of islands southeast of Japan in the central Pacific Ocean, see map). To make things worse, the mighty battleship sank so fast that no SOS/ distress signal could be sent out or was not picked up, leaving nearly 900 sailors adrift for days in the shark infested waters of the mid-Pacific.

It all happened in the closing days of the Pacific war when the Heavy Cruiser USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58, causing the second largest US naval disaster after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. In this DAKOTA HUNTER Blog, you will read about some backgrounds of what is known as the largest Shark attack ever in naval history and the heroic role of a single PBY Catalina that arrived on the horror scene where hundreds of sailors were adrift in the open ocean for more than three days.

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