He also led the bombing runs supporting the American landings in North Africa. bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe. 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 in 1937.īy 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. Tibbets’ father, a believer in discipline, shipped his son off to Western Military Academy in Alton, Ill., the following year. “From that day on, I knew I had to fly,” Tibbets said. The 12-year-old Tibbets rode as a passenger, tossing handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to the crowd below. His father, a candy distributor, hired a popular barnstormer, Doug Davis, to fly over Hialeah racetrack as a promotional stunt. 23, 1915, he moved to Florida with his parents while still a child. And he drove his men hard, weeding out those who fell short or talked too much about what they were doing.īorn in Quincy, Ill., on Feb. Tibbets picked an isolated air base straddling the Nevada-Utah border where the men of the 509th trained for their 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 Force,” Tibbets was hand-picked to command the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit ever formed to wage nuclear war. 6, 1945.ĭescribed by his commandant, Gen. 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. “I made one great mistake in my life – when I signed a letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made,” said pioneering physicist Albert Einstein, one of the first to conceive of such a weapon. “I never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Tibbets had said.īut to millions of detractors, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was a cosmic 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, 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. The pilot never apologized for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and immediately killed at least 80,000 people. Tibbets suffered from a variety of ailments and died of heart failure, said Gerry Newhouse, his longtime friend.
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., the Army Air Forces pilot whose bombing run over Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 introduced nuclear war, died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio.