Did any of them ever explain it in detail?
Yes, many of them had biographies and autobiographies written about them. There were 12 crewmen aboard the Enola Gay on its Aug. 6, 1945 mission:
Col. Tibbets, memoir The Tibbets Story:
“The giant purple mushroom, which the tail-gunner had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,” he remembered.
“I was anxious to do it,” he told an interviewer for a documentary, “The Men Who Brought the Dawn,” marking the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. “I wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan. I wanted to kill the bastards. That was the attitude of the United States in those years.” “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took,” he said, referring to both American and Japanese casualties from an invasion of Japan. “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”
Capt. Lewis, handwritten untitled log:
''Everyone on the ship is actually dumbstruck even though we had expected something fierce. It was the actual sight that we saw that caused the crew to feel that they were part of Buck Rodgers' 25th century warriors.''
''I'm convinced that the bombing saved many lives by ending the war." (Newsweek, 1970)
Capt. Van Kirk, biography My True Course:
Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, had just one thought at the time, he said in numerous interviews: "The war's over." "Do I regret what we did that day? No sir, I do not," he told the Sunday Mirror, a British newspaper, in 2010. "I have never apologized for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will."
Capt. Parsons, biography Target Hiroshima - Deak Parsons and the Creation of the Atomic Bomb:
Dear Dad, this will be a short note to say that you have lived to see atomic weapons used and that your son was the "weaponeer" and also delivered the first one to the Japanese! ... Then the flash, followed seconds later by the shock to the airplane, and when we turned each crew member said "My God! Hiroshima was at the base of a cloud already twenty thousand feet high. The base of the cloud looked like boiling dark colored dust and it covered the city proper.
1st Lt. Beser, autobiography Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited:
I wasn't watching the radar screen. I had my own instrumentation I was concerned with. I saw the fuse come on after the bomb separated from the aircraft, fixed time delay of about 10 seconds, give it time to clear. I saw the fuse come on to get the whole thing rolling and then the thing disappeared. At the same time it disappeared there was this big flash which illuminated the inside of the airplane. I couldn't wear the goggles like they were supposed to. I was busy analyzing the environment making sure there was nothing [unplanned] happening. I was looking for the presence of signals.
When I got to the window two, three minutes later, the cloud was already up there, the mushroom that you see. It was still boiling and changing colors and I looked out and couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like -- you get down here at Ocean City and you get about two feet out in the water and you start stirring up the sand and how it billows? Well, it was like the whole goddamned ground was doing it. And I could see new fires breaking on the periphery all the time. I never saw the cities in either place.
2nd Lt. Jeppson and this 2008 interview:
When the Enola Gay returned to Tinian, Lieutenant Jeppson went to dinner. “There were several Navy officers there,” he told Time magazine in 2005. “One of them turned to me and asked, ‘What did you do today?’ I’d heard a lot of their stories, so I thought I’d make just one remark. I said, ‘I think we ended the war today.’ ”
TSgt. Caron
"Holy Moses, what a mess!" (Target Hiroshima)
"Personally, I feel that if we hadn't dropped that bomb, and the other crew hadn't dropped its bomb on Nagasaki, it would have cost thousand of US soldiers' lives establishing a beach head for the invasion of Japan."
Sgt. Stiborik (“Only Texas Crew Member Recalls Hiroshima Bombing,” Dallas Morning News, Aug. 6, 1956)
Joe Stiborik remembered the crew sitting in stunned silence on the return flight. The only words he recollected hearing were Lewis’s “My God, what have we done.” He explained, “I was dumbfounded. Remember, nobody had ever seen what an A-bomb could do before. Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered with fires and smoke.” “There was almost no talk I can remember on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to bring an end to the war and we tried to look at it that way.”
Sgt. Shumard
Nobody actually wants to cause the destruction we caused. But it was through a necessity rather than a wanton type of destruction. It was something that had to be done. As much as a man has gangrene in his leg, and they have to cut it off. It's something that has to be done. It was a cancer in the world situation that had to be removed, that's all.
''War is a terrible thing,'' he told The Riverside Press-Enterprise on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. ''It takes and it destroys. Anyone feels sorry for people who are killed. We are all human beings. But I don't feel sorry I participated in it. If I had known the results of the mission beforehand, I would have flown it anyway.''
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