I'm in the midst of listening to the r/AskHistorians podcast on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I'm struck by the apparent lack of centralized, top-down guidance that went into various aspects of the decision to bomb. It's unclear, for example, how much Truman, of all people, understood about the weapon and the choice of targets prior to deployment.
This got me thinking, if Truman wasn't completely aware, what about the flight crews? Are their any records of their opinions of their actions (pride, remorse) after the fact? Did they seem to be aware of the potential scale of their actions prior?
Kind of a different question, but this popped up as I was typing this out--was anything "special" about them? Were they specially chosen for any characteristics or were they simply just two flight crews who happened to be in the right place at the right (wrong?) time?
Edit: Thanks to whoever messaged me and notified me of my autocorrect typo from "Enola" to "Ebola"...deleted original post.
The pilot of the Enola Gay definitely knew what they were doing — Paul Tibbets was a key member of the Manhattan Project and was charged with many details about bomb delivery. The others on his crews, while they knew they were training for something special (they were their own little division and crew, not just random airmen in the Pacific), weren't told its full ramifications. But by their own accounts they pieced a lot of it together (their training involved dropping single, very heavy bombs and a lot of secrecy — the idea of "atomic bombs" as a science fiction trope was very well known at that time, and many of them put two and two together).
As for whether they really knew what the scale of the damage was; even in Tibbets' case it was going to be something of a surprise, though he was told about the Trinity test. It is hard to imagine the others having a good notion of such things, which are even today hard for people to visualize.
As for their after the fact actions, nearly all of them were defenders of the action. And hey, you can understand it: if you're given the choice between believing you did something really terrible or believing that you ended the worst war in modern history, which are you going to find more of an affinity for? Tibbets defended the use of the bomb until his last days of life.
There is only one crew member, of a weather plane that took part in the Hiroshima mission, that later expressed something like regret, but his story is rather clouded.
As for the crews — Tibbets was specially chosen and the group had been otherwise segregated from other airmen as part of their own Composite Group, but I don't know if there was anything else special about them. They trained for this mission specifically, though; their planes were specially modified (Silverplate) B-29s, and the delivery procedure was tricky because there was risk that they could blow themselves out of the sky (they had to execute a tricky 155º turn after dropping the bomb).