It was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll.

After the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in Nagasaki being bombed instead. Enola Gay participated in the second atomic attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura.

The bomb, code-named 'Little Boy', was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused unprecedented destruction. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line.