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Pilot 'Never Lost Sleep' After Atomic Bombing Of Hiroshima

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By ERIC MALNIC, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Published: November 2, 2007

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. never apologized for dropping the atomic bomb that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima, Japan, and immediately killed at least 80,000 people.

Millions of detractors considered the nuclear attack an example of man's inhumanity to man, an act that left the world teetering on the brink of self-annihilation. To him and millions of supporters, though, dropping the atomic bomb was a justifiable means of shortening World War II, preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen that military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.

"I never lost a night's sleep over it," Tibbets had said.

Tibbets, the Army Air Forces pilot whose bombing run over Hiroshima in 1945 introduced nuclear war, died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.
Tibbets suffered from a variety of ailments and died of heart failure, said Gerry Newhouse, his longtime friend.
Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the Enola Gay, the propeller-driven, four-engine bomber, named for his mother, that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Described by his commandant, Gen. H.H. "Hap" Arnold, as "the best damned pilot in the Army Air Force," Tibbets was handpicked to command the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit ever formed to wage nuclear war. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another plane from the 509th leveled much of Nagasaki with another nuclear bomb, prompting the Japanese surrender.
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.

He selected the combat veterans who manned the bombers. And he drove his men hard, weeding out those who fell short or talked too much about what they were doing.

Proud, prickly and a perfectionist, Tibbets never doubted he was the man for the job.

Flying Was His Life

Born in Quincy, Ill., on Feb. 23, 1915, he moved to Florida with his parents while still a child. His father, a candy distributor, hired a popular barnstormer, Doug Davis, to fly over the Hialeah racetrack as a promotional stunt. The 12-year-old Tibbets rode as a passenger, tossing handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to the crowd below.

"From that day on, I knew I had to fly," Tibbets said.

Tibbets' father, a believer in discipline, shipped his son off to Western Military Academy in Alton, Ill., the following year. Tibbets liked the military life, and despite subsequent premedical studies at the universities of Cincinnati and Florida, he enlisted as a cadet at the Army Air Corps Academy at Fort Thomas, Ky., in 1937.

By late summer 1942, nine months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust America into World War II, Tibbets was flying some of the first U.S. bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe. Two months later, he led the bombing runs supporting the American landings in North Africa.

In early 1943, Tibbets was recalled to the United States to begin testing a new superbomber, the B-29.

In September 1944, Lt. Col. Tibbets was summoned to a secret military conclave in Colorado, where he was told he had been selected over dozens of other candidates to head a unit called the 509th Composite Group.

"My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war," he wrote in his 1989 book, "Flight of the Enola Gay."

On June 18, 1945, President Truman approved military plans for the invasion of Japan. The initial assault, by 815,000 troops, would begin on the island of Kyushu on Nov. 1, followed five months later by an attack by 1.2 million troops on the island of Honshu. Gen. Douglas MacArthur said it could take 10 years to wipe out the last pockets of resistance, with total American losses reaching 1 million men.

Less than a month after Truman approved the invasion plans, the first atomic bomb was tested successfully at Alamogordo, N.M.

Outmaneuvering some top officers who sought to take over the bombing mission, Tibbets rallied support from Washington to retain his command of the 509th and announced he would be piloting the plane that dropped the first bomb.

Pacific War's Last Chapter

Several hours before dawn on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, lumbering under the load of the 9,700-pound bomb, struggled up off a runway on the island of Tinian for the flight north to Hiroshima. Two other B-29s accompanied the Enola Gay to monitor the event.

Seventeen seconds after 8:15 a.m., from an altitude of 26,000 feet, the bombardier, Maj. Thomas Ferebee, released the bomb. Tibbets, who carried poison pills for the crew in case the B-29 went down, put the plane into a sharp, diving turn to speed away from the imminent explosion.

At 8:16 a.m., 1,890 feet above the center of Hiroshima, the bomb detonated with a core temperature estimated at 50 million degrees.

The shock waves severely shook the retreating plane, but did not damage it.
Tibbets looked back to see an immense mushroom cloud.

"It had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive," he wrote in his book. "Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. Fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar."

Months later, Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about the criticisms over the bombing.

"It was my decision," Truman told him. "You didn't have any choice."
Tibbets said he wasn't proud of all the death and destruction and Hiroshima, but he was proud that he did his job well.

"I didn't start the war," he said. "I didn't do anything except what I was told to do; what I had sworn to do, years before, which is 'Fight for the defense of this country.' "

Because he feared giving protesters a place to demonstrate, Tibbets did not want a funeral or headstone, Newhouse said. He requested that his ashes be scattered over the North Atlantic Ocean.

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