William Sterling Parsons
William Sterling Parsons was an American naval officer who worked as an ordnance expert on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He is best known for being the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. He was awarded the Silver Star for his part in the mission. After the war, Parsons was promoted to the rank of rear admiral without ever having commanded a ship. He died of a heart attack on 5 December 1953, at the age of 48, in Annapolis, Maryland.
About William Sterling Parsons in brief
William Sterling Parsons was an American naval officer who worked as an ordnance expert on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He is best known for being the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. He was awarded the Silver Star for his part in the mission. After the war, Parsons was promoted to the rank of rear admiral without ever having commanded a ship. In 1947, he became deputy commander of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. He died of a heart attack on 5 December 1953, at the age of 48, in Annapolis, Maryland. His last name was ‘Deak’, a play on his last name, which he used to play with his friends on the battleship USSIdaho in the 1930s and 1940s. His family moved from Chicago to Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 1909, where he learned to speak fluent Spanish. His mother was the granddaughter of James Rood Doolittle, who served as US Senator from Wisconsin between 1857 and 1869, and of Joel Aldrich Matteson, Governor of Illinois from 1853 to 1857. His father was Harry Robert Parsons, a lawyer, and his wife Clara, née Doolitt, was a former US Secretary of the Navy. In 1917 Parsons travelled to New Mexico to take the United States Naval Academy exam for one of the appointments by Senator Andrieus A. Jones. He entered the Naval Academy in 1918, and eventually graduated 48th out of 4839th class in the class of 1922, in which Hyman G. Rickover was the class valedictorian.
At the time, it was customary for midshipmen to acquire nicknames, and Parsons was called ‘Deacon’, which he kept until he became a lieutenant. He became friends with Jack Crenshaw, a fellow officer attending the Naval Postgraduate School, who later became a fellow lieutenant. In May 1927, Parsons became a Lieutenant Crenhaw, attending the same Post Graduate School as his friends. In July 1933, he was commissioned as an ensign and placed in charge of one of one the 14-inch gun turrets of the battleships USS Idaho. He later became liaison officer between the Bureau of Ordnance and the Naval Research Laboratory. In September 1940, Parsons and Merle Tuve of the National Defense Research Committee began work on the development of the proximity fuze, an invention that was provided to US by the UK Tizard Mission, a radar-triggered fuze that would explode a shell in the proximity of the target. Parsons was on hand to watch the cruiser USS Helena shoot down the first enemy aircraft with a VT fuze in the Solomon Islands in January 1943. In June 1943, Parsons joined the. Manhattan Project as Associate Director at the research laboratory at Los Alamos, New New Mexico under J. Robert Oppenheimer. In a reorganization in 1944, he lost responsibility for the implosion-type fission weapon, but retained that for the design and development. He watched the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29. He was also responsible for the delivery program, codenamed Project Alberta.
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