Tibbets picked an isolated air base straddling the Nevada-Utah border where the men of the 509th trained for their ultra-secret mission. Many of the crewmen were personal friends who had flown missions with him over Nazi-occupied Western Europe and North Africa. He selected the combat veterans who manned the bombers. Tibbets chose the planes that flew those missions - specially reconfigured B-29s, then the largest operational aircraft on Earth, stripped of armament and armor plating to lighten them for their extended journeys. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another plane from the 509th leveled much of Nagasaki with another nuclear bomb, prompting the Japanese surrender. “Hap” Arnold, as “the best damned pilot” in the Army Air Forces, Tibbets was hand-picked to lead the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit formed to wage nuclear war. Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the propeller-driven, four-engine bomber that made the historic mission.ĭescribed by his commandant, Gen. “But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.” We knew it was going to kill people right and left,” Tibbets said.
“We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. On the 60th anniversary of the bombing, Tibbets told the Columbus Dispatch that he knew when he got the assignment “it was going to be an emotional thing.” Months after authorizing the attack, President Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about the criticism over dropping the bomb. He was 92 and, according to his longtime friend Gerry Newhouse, had been in declining health over the last few years and died of heart failure. The Army Air Forces officer died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio.
“I never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Tibbets said of the Aug. believed that dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a justifiable means of shortening World War II and preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen who military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.įor Tibbets, the pilot whose bombing run unleashed the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled two-thirds of the city and killed at least 80,000 people, there was never any need to apologize. To the end of his days, Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. Oh, and by the way, “Enola Gay” was the name of Tibbets’ mother: We need another Truman in the White House and anothe Paul Tibbets leading the attack. The first three sentences say it all, and I wish we would heed it about Iran (and perhaps some of the other choice Muslim countries in the Mid-East). Here is an inspiring, extensive set of excerpts from the fantastic obit/article about this great American from today’s Los Angeles Times. Because he did not want to give left-wing anti-war protestors any opportunities to use his death for their cause, he will have no funeral or headstone and his ashes will be scattered over the North Atlantic. “Our young people don’t know anything about what happened because nobody taught them and now their minds are being filled up with things that aren’t true.”īut even after death, he’s got the last laugh. The new wave of controversy about Hiroshima “got me roused up,” Tibbets told the Palm Beach Post in 2001. He had it right on America’s schools and distorted history:Īmerican Hero Paul Tibbets After Historic Hiroshima Mission And the military apologized to the Japanese after Tibbets re-enacted his important flight. Sadly, in later life, the State Department treated him with dishonor when India criticized his role in saving the world from Axis forces. He was bright and had just the right amount of bravado to save America. And he flew some of the first bombing missions against the Nazis and their allies.
And he wasn’t just the pilot–he basically planned the whole mission. He saved the Western world and his life had meaning for all of us, even though most do not know his name. Standing, from left to right: Commander Thomas W.Ferebee (bomber), Commander Theodore Van Kirk (navigator), Colonel Paul Tibbetts (Pilot and Commander of the 509th Group), Captain Robert A.Retired Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, Jr.–the heroic American serviceman who did to Hiroshima what we should have already done to Tehran–died, yesterday, at the age of 92 in Ohio. Duzenbury, aviator Richard H.Nelson and the Sergeant Robert H.Shurard. Description Second World War (1939-1945): Tinian (Mariana Islands) SeptemThe crew of Colonel Paul Tibbets's B29 bomber “Enola Gay” who dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy”” on Hiroshima (Japan) - First row, from left to right: Sergeants George R.Caron, Joe S.