Taped recordings and transcripts of interviews with the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay have been donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, 40 years after they were apparently lost and 73 years after the aircraft dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on the city.

The 27 tapes cover 30 hours of interviews and are accompanied by 570 pages of typed transcripts that were collected by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts before the publication of their book, “Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima”, in 1977. Officials of the museum told the Mainichi newspaper that it had been feared that the recordings had been subsequently lost.

They added that the recordings and documents are historically important to the overall story of the attack on Hiroshima because they reveal what was happening inside the aircraft during the mission as well as the feelings of the crew.

The transcript records Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 Superfortress, stating that the mission was shrouded in secrecy and that the crew had been issued with handguns and cyanide tablets in case they were shot down.