Enola Gay’s Co-Pilot Flight Logs Don’t Sell at Auction

The personal flight logs of the co-pilot of the U.S. warplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 70 years ago didn’t sell at an auction of World War II artifacts.

Bonhams says bidding Wednesday for the two log books belonging to Enola Gay co-pilot Capt. Robert Lewis didn’t meet the reserve price.

Lewis, who died in 1983, filled the logs with his handwritten entries detailing every flight he made while in the Air Force. They were part of his extensive wartime archive handed down to his son Steven.

The entry for the Aug. 6, 1945, flight to drop the bomb on Hiroshima reads: “No#1 Atomic bomb a huge success.”

In the official log, he wrote the words, “My G-d, what have we done?”

Of the 12 men who flew aboard the Enola Gay that day, none knew the four-engine bomber better than Lewis. The 27-year-old logged a total of 36 flights aboard the plane, much more than Col. Paul Tibbets did, although the latter was the only one to become a household name at the time.

This article appeared in print on page 4 of the May 1st, 2015 edition of Hamodia.