A Wisconsin Dells native whose loss of a coin flip kept him off the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima has died in Albuquerque, N.M., at the age of 92.
Leon D. Smith left UW-Madison as a student and was drafted into the Army in 1943. Two years later, he was an electrical engineer and one of three "weaponeers" on the Pacific island of Tinian preparing the atomic bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" for delivery.
He played an integral part in assembling the bombs that ended the war, having transferred from the Army to the Army Air Force after suffering extensive hearing loss. The transfer and his UW-Madison background in electrical engineering placed him on the Manhattan Project, where he was assigned to the Army Air Force's 509th Composite Group, specifically training to deliver the atomic bomb.
That sent him to Yale, Harvard and finally to the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, according to news obituaries published this week in the Albuquerque Journal and a Sandia National Laboratories bulletin.
Smith would tell the story many times: After a series of secret tests dropping bomb cases, he and two other weaponeers were relocated to the Pacific. For the Aug. 6 mission, Smith and Morris Jeppson flipped a coin to decide who would travel on the B-29 Enola Gay to Hiroshima.
The three men flipped coins to decide who would monitor the first atomic bombs on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Jeppson flew on the Enola Gay for the Hiroshima mission, Phil Barnes rode in Bockscar for the Nagasaki mission and Smith flew to Iwo Jima as backup for those missions in case one of the others could not perform his task. A weaponeer was required to go on the flights to connect the bomb to the aircraft wiring system and move it from safe to armed.
Smith designed and built the highly complex electronic flight test box units that monitored the bombs inside the planes. The next year, post-war, Smith flew inside Dave's Dream and armed the atomic bomb that was dropped on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific as part of Operation Crossroads.
(That B-29 was piloted by another Wisconsin native and UW-Madison student, Maj. Woodrow Swancutt. Swancutt was well known on campus as the winner of two NCAA boxing championships.)
According to UW-Madison registrar records, Smith left the university in August 1942 and returned for the fall 1946 semester. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering in March 1947. Smith went to Sandia National Laboratories in 1947 as an engineer of a bomb fuzing group. He was promoted to director in 1961.
— The Baraboo News Republic contributed to this report.
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