At 7:30 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Capt. Robert A. Lewis recorded that the bomb carried inside the Enola Gay was “now alive.”
“And it’s a funny feeling knowing it’s right in back of you,” he wrote as the B-29 approached Japan.
Lewis, the aircraft’s co-pilot, preserved his account in an 8-by-10.5-inch notebook. Behind the crew was Tinian, the Pacific island from which the Enola Gay had departed before dawn. Ahead was Hiroshima.
The notebook follows the mission as it unfolded. Lewis recorded the starting of the engines at 2:27 a.m. and the aircraft’s takeoff at exactly 2:45. He noted the crew’s mood, the changing conditions outside the aircraft and the unsettling proximity of the weapon. Approaching the target, he observed that “everyone has a big hopeful look on his face” before writing an almost disarmingly understated sentence: “There’ll be a short intermission while we bomb our target.”
Much of the account was written in near darkness. Halfway through, Lewis’s ink ran out. He marked the moment in the notebook—“out of ink”—and continued in pencil.
That transition remains visible on the page. It is a small physical detail, but one that gives the manuscript much of its immediacy. The change from ink to graphite was not made for posterity or dramatic effect. It was simply the practical response of a man attempting to continue his account aboard a moving aircraft, during a mission whose consequences no one aboard could yet fully understand.
The in-flight account originated with a last-minute request from William Laurence, science editor of The New York Times. According to Lewis’s signed statement on the inside front cover, dated August 8, 1945, Laurence had been ordered to accompany the mission but arrived at Tinian too late. He asked Lewis to keep notes in his absence.
Lewis recorded the circumstances plainly: “A great deal of the notes were written in almost complete darkness. Half way through I ran out of ink.”
The statement bears revisions in a second hand, described in the catalog as ostensibly Laurence’s, as well as Laurence’s signed attestation regarding pencil corrections made to the eight-page in-flight account. These editorial traces add another layer to the notebook’s history. It was at once a personal record, a working document and an eyewitness account shaped while the event remained close at hand.
Lewis titled his narrative “Little Boy Mission #1 / First Atomic Bomb / August 6th 1945 / Target Hit.” What follows is neither an official aircraft log nor a retrospective memoir polished by decades of interpretation. It is a contemporaneous record of anticipation, procedure and shock.
After Maj. Thomas Ferebee released the bomb, Lewis wrote that for the next minute no one knew what to expect. Then came the flash, followed by what he described as “two very distinct slaps on the ship.” When the crew turned to observe the result, Lewis struggled to measure what he saw. Hiroshima was largely obscured by smoke, while a vast column of cloud rose above the city. He estimated its height at 50,000 feet.
The physical event could be described through altitude, color, force and scale. Its human meaning was more difficult.
A page inserted later into the account preserves Lewis’s reflections after news of Hiroshima’s destruction had begun to emerge. This chronology matters: the passage was not part of the entries written as the bomb fell. It represents a later attempt to comprehend what the mission had done.
Lewis wrote that the experience seemed beyond anything human beings had imagined possible. He wondered how many people had been killed and confessed that he was “groping for words.” Then came the sentence that would remain associated with him: “My God what have we done.”
The force of those words lies partly in their uncertainty. They are not an argument or a settled judgment. They record a moment when technical accomplishment collided with consequence—when the scale of the event exceeded the language available to describe it.
Lewis observed that Capt. Parsons appeared as confounded as the rest of the crew, even though he was supposed to have known what to expect. On the return flight, Lewis wrote that everyone aboard was “actually dumbstruck.” The crew felt, in his phrase, like “Buck Rodgers 25 Century warriors,” figures displaced into a future that had abruptly become real.
His mission account concludes without ceremony: “Love to all, ‘Bud’ R. A. Lewis.”
The notebook continued after the Enola Gay returned to Tinian. Beginning on August 10, Lewis wrote a 14-page history of the 509th Composite Group, tracing its formation under Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. at Alamogordo through crew selection, training, aircraft preparation and deployment to the Pacific.
In these pages, the organization behind the mission comes into view. Lewis recalled telling Tibbets that he had “the best ship and finest crew in the Pacific” before being selected to accompany him on the atomic mission. His account of that selection ends simply: “The rest is History.”
Three additional manuscript pages contain later notes and verse, including a short account of the Potsdam ultimatum and a two-page morale song associated with the 509th Composite Group. Together with the mission account and unit history, they bring the notebook to 25 handwritten pages.
The covers carry their own record. On the front, Lewis titled the volume “Bombing of Hiroshima,” dated it August 6, 1945 and signed it as a captain in the United States Army Air Forces. He identified the aircraft by serial number—“Ship #44-27292 ‘Enola Gay’”—recorded its radio call sign, “Dimples ‘12,’” and listed the complete crew. He also added the instruction “Hold for Top Secret Clearance.”
On the back cover, Lewis drew the mushroom cloud in pencil. He annotated the sketch with “Various Colors,” “40,000 Ft Plus,” and the time and date: “09:30 8/6/45.” Unlike an official photograph or scientific diagram, the drawing records what one crew member attempted to preserve with the limited materials at hand. It belongs to the same act of witnessing as the handwritten pages within.
The notebook remained with Lewis before entering the auction record at Sotheby’s in New York in November 1971. It appeared again at Sotheby’s in 1978, when it was acquired by Malcolm Forbes. In 2002, it was offered at Christie’s as part of the Malcolm Forbes Collection, and in 2022 it appeared at Heritage Auctions.
Accompanying the notebook is the July 29, 1985, special “The Atomic Age” edition of Time magazine. Published for the mission’s 40th anniversary, its cover prominently featured the reflection associated with Lewis and his account: “My God, what have we done?”
More than eight decades after the mission, the notebook resists being reduced to a single sentence. Its significance rests in the progression of its pages: operational confidence giving way to uncertainty; ink giving way to pencil; observation giving way to reflection. It records not only what Lewis saw, but the limits of his ability to understand it while history was still unfolding around him.
AUCTION INFORMATION
The mission-used flight logbook is being offered as part of RR Auction’s Remarkable Rarities sale. The auction opened August 21 and is scheduled to conclude September 24, 2026. Additional information is available at www.rrauction.com.
