Tubby
11-01-2007, 08:30 PM
Pilot of Hiroshima bomber
dies by Mira Oberman
The pilot of the plane that ushered in the age of atomic warfare with the first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, died Thursday at the age of 92, a spokesman said.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., whose B-29 bomber dubbed the Enola Gay dropped the 9,000-pound "Little Boy" bomb on August 6, 1945, died at his home in the midwest city of Columbus, Ohio.
He had been suffering from heart problems, manager and publisher Gerry Newhouse told AFP.
Tibbets was more than just the pilot. He was instrumental in redesigning and testing the plane used to carry the massive bomb and organizing and training the men needed to deliver it.
Tibbets never regretted the bombing that led to the end of World War II but at a horrific price: 140,000 dead immediately and 80,000 other Japanese succumbing in the aftermath, according to Hiroshima officials.
"That's what it took to end the war," he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003. "I went out to stop the killing all over."
Aware that not everyone agrees with his view of history, Tibbets asked his family to cremate him so his grave site would not be desecrated by detractors, Newhouse said.
Tibbets was just a 30-year-old lieutenant colonel when he piloted the plane named after his mother. Decades later, the memory of the first atomic bomb fired in war stayed vivid in his mind.
"If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified," Tibbets once said.
"The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire."
Though Tibbets saw little of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima, he would walk the streets of Nagasaki a few weeks after the second atom bomb was dropped there.
He went to sate "academic curiosity," he explained, buying a half dozen lacquered rice bowls and a few hand-carved wooden saucers from a street vendor before he left.
"A couple of the streets we walked had swelled," he told the Dispatch, as he described the buckling of the earth caused by the intensity of the blast. "Damnedest thing you've ever seen."
Tibbets stayed in the Air Force after the Japanese surrender, eventually making his way up to the rank of brigadier general before retiring in 1966 when he retired to fly private planes in Europe and then Ohio.
A highly decorated pilot who was the hero of the 1952 film Above and Beyond, he nonetheless endured a spate of urban legends that he had been imprisoned, institutionalized or committed suicide out of guilt.
"They said I was crazy," he groused in 2003, "said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions. At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon."
Born in Quincy, Illinois on February 23, 1915, Tibbets decided he wanted to be a pilot during his first flight at age 12 when he threw Baby Ruth candy bars to a crowd as an advertising stunt.
His parents wanted him to be a doctor, and Tibbets spent several years in medical school before he enlisted as a flying cadet in 1937 with the Army Air Corps.
He flew a number of bombing missions in Nazi occupied Europe and Algeria before returning to the United States in March 1943 to test the combat capability of the problem-plagued B-29.
He was briefed on the Manhattan Project -- the US wartime nuclear initiative -- in September 1944 and was told to organize and train a unit to deliver the bombs and supervise the modification of the B-29.
President Harry Truman gave his approval to drop the bomb in the afternoon of August 5, 1945.
Tibbets and his crew lifted off from a base on the Pacific island of Tinian at 2:45 am for an uneventful six and a half hour flight to Japan. They dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in combat at 9:15 plus 15 seconds (8:15 Hiroshima time) and returned to base at 2:58 pm.
He didn't tell the crew that the bomb they were going to drop was atomic until well into the flight.
"As the bomb left the airplane we took over manual control, made an extremely steep turn to try and put as much distance between us and the explosion as possible," he once said.
"After we felt the explosion hit the airplane, that is the concussion waves, we knew the bomb had exploded so we took a turn around to look at it. The sight that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected.
"We saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with its tremendous mushroom on top. Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima."
dies by Mira Oberman
The pilot of the plane that ushered in the age of atomic warfare with the first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, died Thursday at the age of 92, a spokesman said.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., whose B-29 bomber dubbed the Enola Gay dropped the 9,000-pound "Little Boy" bomb on August 6, 1945, died at his home in the midwest city of Columbus, Ohio.
He had been suffering from heart problems, manager and publisher Gerry Newhouse told AFP.
Tibbets was more than just the pilot. He was instrumental in redesigning and testing the plane used to carry the massive bomb and organizing and training the men needed to deliver it.
Tibbets never regretted the bombing that led to the end of World War II but at a horrific price: 140,000 dead immediately and 80,000 other Japanese succumbing in the aftermath, according to Hiroshima officials.
"That's what it took to end the war," he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003. "I went out to stop the killing all over."
Aware that not everyone agrees with his view of history, Tibbets asked his family to cremate him so his grave site would not be desecrated by detractors, Newhouse said.
Tibbets was just a 30-year-old lieutenant colonel when he piloted the plane named after his mother. Decades later, the memory of the first atomic bomb fired in war stayed vivid in his mind.
"If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified," Tibbets once said.
"The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire."
Though Tibbets saw little of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima, he would walk the streets of Nagasaki a few weeks after the second atom bomb was dropped there.
He went to sate "academic curiosity," he explained, buying a half dozen lacquered rice bowls and a few hand-carved wooden saucers from a street vendor before he left.
"A couple of the streets we walked had swelled," he told the Dispatch, as he described the buckling of the earth caused by the intensity of the blast. "Damnedest thing you've ever seen."
Tibbets stayed in the Air Force after the Japanese surrender, eventually making his way up to the rank of brigadier general before retiring in 1966 when he retired to fly private planes in Europe and then Ohio.
A highly decorated pilot who was the hero of the 1952 film Above and Beyond, he nonetheless endured a spate of urban legends that he had been imprisoned, institutionalized or committed suicide out of guilt.
"They said I was crazy," he groused in 2003, "said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions. At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon."
Born in Quincy, Illinois on February 23, 1915, Tibbets decided he wanted to be a pilot during his first flight at age 12 when he threw Baby Ruth candy bars to a crowd as an advertising stunt.
His parents wanted him to be a doctor, and Tibbets spent several years in medical school before he enlisted as a flying cadet in 1937 with the Army Air Corps.
He flew a number of bombing missions in Nazi occupied Europe and Algeria before returning to the United States in March 1943 to test the combat capability of the problem-plagued B-29.
He was briefed on the Manhattan Project -- the US wartime nuclear initiative -- in September 1944 and was told to organize and train a unit to deliver the bombs and supervise the modification of the B-29.
President Harry Truman gave his approval to drop the bomb in the afternoon of August 5, 1945.
Tibbets and his crew lifted off from a base on the Pacific island of Tinian at 2:45 am for an uneventful six and a half hour flight to Japan. They dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in combat at 9:15 plus 15 seconds (8:15 Hiroshima time) and returned to base at 2:58 pm.
He didn't tell the crew that the bomb they were going to drop was atomic until well into the flight.
"As the bomb left the airplane we took over manual control, made an extremely steep turn to try and put as much distance between us and the explosion as possible," he once said.
"After we felt the explosion hit the airplane, that is the concussion waves, we knew the bomb had exploded so we took a turn around to look at it. The sight that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected.
"We saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with its tremendous mushroom on top. Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima."