CHICAGO, Nov 1: The pilot of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, devastating Hiroshima during World War II, died on Thursday in his Ohio home, a spokesman said.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. flew a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay which dropped the 9,000 pound bomb dubbed “Little Boy” on Aug 6, 1945.
“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.” Tibbets was just 30 when he piloted the plane named after his mother.
Decades later, he said he never regretted dropping the bomb despite the devastating toll.
“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.” Though Tibbets saw little of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima — he turned the plane too quickly to even see the first flash — 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, 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 Centre 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 became squadron commander of the 340th Bomb Squadron in February 1942 and flew 25 missions in the first American Flying Fortress raids against occupied Europe.
He returned to the United States in March 1943 to test the combat capability of the problem-plagued B-29 and became the plane’s most experienced pilot after flying about 400 hours of tests.
He was brief on the Manhattan Project in September 1944 and was told to organise and train a unit to deliver the bombs and supervise the modification of the B-29 so it could deliver the massive bombs.
President Harry Truman gave his approval to drop the bomb in the afternoon of Aug 5, 1945.
Tibbets and his crew lifted off at 2:45 am for an uneventful six-hour flight to Japan. They dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat at 9:15 plus 15 seconds and returned to base at 2:58 p.m.
Tibbets, who was 92 when he died, had been suffering from heart problems, manager and publisher Gerry Newhouse said.
CHICAGO, Nov 1: The pilot of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, devastating Hiroshima during World War II, died on Thursday in his Ohio home, a spokesman said.
