United States Army Air Corps Lt. Morris R. Jeppson was 23 when he made the trip from Tinian Island to Hiroshima. It was his first and only combat flight.
His death was announced by his wife, Molly.
When the Enola Gay lifted off from the island of Tinian in the South Pacific in the early hours of Aug. 6, 1945, Lieutenant Jeppson was making his first and only combat flight.
As the assistant to Capt. William S. Parsons of the Navy, the officer in overall control of the uranium bomb known as Little Boy, Lieutenant Jeppson checked its circuits, timing devices and radar components.
After a flawless six-and-a-half-hour flight, the bomb systems working perfectly, the Enola Gay’s pilot, Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., brought the four-engine B-29 Superfortress over Hiroshima. The bomb was dropped at 8:15 in the morning and exploded 43 seconds later, creating an inferno that left tens of thousands dead or dying.
When the Enola Gay returned to Tinian, Lieutenant Jeppson went to dinner.
“There were several Navy officers there,” he told Time magazine in 2005. “One of them turned to me and asked, ‘What did you do today?’ I’d heard a lot of their stories, so I thought I’d make just one remark. I said, ‘I think we ended the war today.’ ”
Three days after the Hiroshima raid, another B-29 dropped a plutonium bomb on the city of Nagasaki. On Aug. 15, Japan surrendered.
Morris Richard Jeppson was born on June 23, 1922, in Logan, Utah. After enlisting in the Army Air Forces in 1943 and undergoing basic training in Florida, he was among a group of airmen sent to leading universities for training in electronics.
After obtaining his commission as a second lieutenant, he was assigned to the base at Wendover, Utah, where the crews of the 509th Composite Group trained for the atomic bomb missions under extraordinary secrecy.
Lieutenant Jeppson was assigned to help the Manhattan Project scientists who were assembling the bomb at Los Alamos, N.M., to understand its electronic devices. He divided his time between Wendover and the New Mexico desert before departing for Tinian and the final preparations to drop the bomb.
When the bomb detonated above Hiroshima, the Enola Gay’s tailgunner was the only crewman who witnessed the explosion, Mr. Jeppson recalled. “The rest of us saw the billowing clouds and the mushroom cloud rising,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 2000.
Mr. Jeppson left military service in 1946. He worked on nuclear projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and later founded a company that manufactured high-power microwave heating systems for industrial use and food processing.
In June 2002, Mr. Jeppson sought to auction off Enola Gay souvenirs he had brought back with him: a green electronic plug designed to prevent an accidental detonation in flight, and a spare among the red plugs that armed the bomb and were destroyed when it exploded.
The Justice Department sought to block the auction on the grounds that the plugs were government property and perhaps contained secret data, but a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in favor of Mr. Jeppson. He sold the plugs for $167,500 to a retired physicist who collected military memorabilia.
Mr. Jeppson’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Mr. Jeppson is survived by their daughter, Sally Jeppson, of Gackle, N.D.; two daughters from his first marriage, Nancy Hoskins of Colorado Springs and Carol English of Medford, Ore.; his stepsons, Mike Sullivan of Pahrump, Nev., and John Sullivan of Lakeport, Calif., and a stepdaughter, Jane Ross, of Midland, Ontario; a brother, Lawrence, of Salt Lake City; 11 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Jeppson’s death leaves Theodore Van Kirk, 89, the Enola Gay’s navigator, as the plane’s last survivor.
RIP Mr. Jeppson
