Enola Gay’s Hiroshima Logbook and Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks Lyrics Lead RR Auction Sale

Captain Robert A. Lewis’s mission-used flight logbook from the Enola Gay containing 25 handwritten pages including an eight-page account written aboard the aircraft as the August 1945 Hiroshima mission unfolded leads RR Auction’s September Remarkable Rarities sale.

Lewis, the Enola Gay’s co-pilot, began his diary with the preflight briefing and takeoff from Tinian and continued recording events as the aircraft approached its target. He ran out of ink during the flight and continued in pencil. After the bomb was released, Lewis described the flash, the impact felt aboard the aircraft and the cloud rising over Hiroshima.

A later inserted page records his reaction after news of the destruction began to emerge: “I honestly have the feeling of groping for words to explain this or I might say My God what have we done.” Lewis added, “If I live a hundred years I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.”

Also going under the hammer is a single double-sided manuscript in Dylan’s hand with working lyrics for his Blood on the Tracks album tracks Idiot Wind on one side and You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go on the other, a working draft that retains the earlier title You’re Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go and includes an additional verse omitted from the released recording.

Accompanying the manuscript is a handwritten transcription by Ellen Bernstein, now Ellen Ziffren, who was director of West Coast A&R for Columbia Records in San Francisco in 1974. Ziffren consigned the archive directly. Her transcription was written on a leaf she tore from one of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks notebooks after Dylan first played the song for her.

Other highights include:

• Pierre de Coubertin’s four-page handwritten Proposal of an Athletic Exhibition in 1900 dated January 30, 1894, laying out ideas for races, games and wrestling, along with classifications for fencing, hunting, ice sports and cycling, plus his views on amateur athletics and what he described as the “moral direction” of the project
• Winston Churchill’s April 1944 letter to General Bernard Montgomery, written on 10 Downing Street letterhead and marked “Most Secret” concerning Montgomery’s memorandum on the air requirements for the coming Allied invasion
• an early German military Enigma I cipher machine, serial number A1317, ordered circa 1931-1932 and likely delivered to the German military in 1933

Remarkable Rarities will conclude on September 24.