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"They let me pick my own people," Tibbets says. The bomb that exploded over Hiroshima and killed approximately 113,000 people was usually known as "Little Boy," though Tibbets and his crew also referred to it as "Thin Man" and "The Gimmick." He was in a world of his own most times." "Oppenheimer was the most nervous man I've ever known, constantly chain-smoking. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief architect of the project. Someone told him, "Tibbets, you'll either end up a hero or in prison." He would soon meet J.
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On Tinian, he learned about the Manhattan Project. A veteran combat pilot in the European theater, Tibbets was "happily testing B29s" when he was told to go to Tinian Island. The mission began for Tibbets one September morning in 1944. "Besides, why sign it? I knew nobody would read it." "That wasn't really my style," says Tibbets. Farrell is writing a message to the Japanese emperor on the bomb with a grease pencil: "To Hirohito With Love and Kisses." Other military personnel who worked on the project on the island of Tinian near Guam also "signed" the "Little Boy" before it was hoisted into the bomb bay of the Enola Gay. The anniversary has attracted attention like nothing I'd ever imagined." In the last several years, though, people want to know what it was like. And during the Korea and Vietnam periods nobody was too interested in the military. "Of course, immediately after the war there was a lot of interest, but I was really restricted in what I had to say. With the 40th anniversary of that event approaching, he says, "I've been getting it from all sides. Despite his status as the pilot and military coordinator of the mission that ended the war in the Pacific, surprisingly few people bothered him about his place in history. Since he retired from the military in 1966 - "They wouldn't let me fly anymore and I'm no desk man" - Tibbets has worked for, and now runs, Executive Jet Aviation, which leases Lear jets out of Columbus, Ohio. "I was young once."Īnd there he is in a desk chair, watching, hearing aids in both ears, his hair gray, his stubby hands darkened by age and the summer sun. There he is on the screen with curly hair, brilliant, light eyes and wearing GI-issued khakis. Tibbets continues watching through thick bifocals. He sees the soundless images of himself at age 29, smiling and waving from the cockpit of his plane, the Enola Gay. Tibbets sits before a television monitor and watches rare footage of the flight crew just hours before its mission. Retired brigadier general Tibbets' answer is unclouded by doubt or 40 years of debate: What did he feel when he saw the "bluish pink reflection" in the sky, what sense of fear or relief might have overcome him before he turned the plane away from the "black boiling mass" of destruction below him and headed for his home base? They want to talk about his emotions when he dropped the first atomic bomb in battle. Everyone around the table has questions about him and the morning of Aug. He orders quiche.īut he hardly has time to take a bite. It was about that time that Tibbets turned the airplane around, so that everybody could get a look at it.Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B29 that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, sits down to lunch. Flames in different spots would be springing up. "And fires, I could see fires spring up through this undercast, or whatever you would call it, that was covering the city. It looked like bubbling molasses, let's say, spreading out and running up into the foothills, just covering the whole city." I could see the city, and it was being covered with this low, bubbling mass. "As we got further away, I could see the city then, not just the mushroom, coming up. I think that's how I described it on the intercom," Caron said years later in an interview. Well, it was white on the outside and it was sort of a purplish black towards the interior, and it had a fiery red core, and it just kept boiling up. I described the mushroom cloud as it grows. Paul Tibbets, who named the B-29 the "Enola Gay" after his mother, told Caron to describe what he saw to the crew over the intercom. An aerial view of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.