After the United States entered World War II, he flew B-17 sorties over North Africa, led daylight B-17 raids over Europe and was an early test pilot of the B-29. He attended the University of Florida and the University of Cincinnati and joined the Army Air Corps in 1937. took a ride with a barnstorming pilot and dropped candy bars on Hialeah racetrack in a promotional stunt for the Curtiss Candy Co. To promote Baby Ruth candy bars, 12-year-old Paul Tibbets Jr. Tibbets was born in Quincy, Ill., and grew up mostly in Miami, where his father opened a confectionary that set in motion his son's aviation career. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war. Three days later, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire." The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. He later said of the blast: "If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified. But he said he had no clear idea of the bomb's potential besides the description that it would explode with the force of 20,000 tons of dynamite, a concept he could only vaguely grasp. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists and military leaders working on the Manhattan Project. Leading up to the bombing, he met with J. Tibbets was selected for the top-secret mission, the culmination of the Manhattan Project, because of the piloting skill he showed early in the war during bombing runs over Europe and North Africa. "It's a horrible weapon, but war is pretty horrible, too."
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It was a presidential decision, and he was an officer that carried out his duty," Glenn said.
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Tibbets failed to recognize that an allied invasion of Japan, which the bomb helped avert, would have resulted in the deaths of several million people. John Glenn, who was a Marine fighter pilot, said people who criticized Gen. He said he practiced at great altitudes and eventually was able to turn the large aircraft in about 40 seconds.įormer U.S. Because of the bomb's force, he was told he could not fly straight ahead after it exploded but would have to turn 159 degrees to the expanding shock wave and leave the area fast. Tibbets executed a well-rehearsed diving turn to avoid the blast effect. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy exploded in a nuclear inferno on the city. Tibbets, then a colonel in the Army Air Forces, guided the four-engine plane he named in honor of his mother toward the Aioi Bridge in central Hiroshima, a city of 250,000 chosen because it was a military center and had no prisoner-of-war camps.Īt 8:15 a.m. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off carrying a uranium atomic bomb assembled under extraordinary secrecy. But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not.Before dawn on Aug. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel.
He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.