A stint administering shots at venereal-disease clinics led him to quit college and, in 1937, join the Army Air Corps. He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati with the intention of studying medicine - mostly at his father's behest. He attached tiny parachutes to candy pieces and tossed them overboard to people below. To promote Baby Ruth candy bars, Paul Tibbets Jr., then 12, went aloft over the beaches and racetracks of Miami in an open-cockpit biplane. He grew up mostly in Miami, where his father opened a confectionary that set in motion his son's aviation career. The first target, Kokura, was fogged in, so they went for Nagasaki, an alternative target, and dropped a bomb nicknamed "Fat Man." The Japanese announced their surrender Aug. Sweeney, a Massachusetts resident, and his crew made a run over Japan in a B-29 Superfortress named the Bockscar. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire."Īfter the Enola Gay flight, the Japanese did not lay down arms. The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. He later said of the blast: "If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified. But he said he had no clear idea of the bomb's potential other than the description that it would explode with the force of 20,000 tons of dynamite, a concept he could only vaguely grasp. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists and military leaders working on the Manhattan Project. Leading up to the bombing, General Tibbets had meetings with J. The crew carried an atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" and its target was Hiroshima, a city chosen because it was a military center and had no prisoner-of-war camps. The Enola Gay, named after his mother, took off from Tinian Island, near the Pacific island of Guam, in the predawn hours of Aug. In late 1944, Tibbets, then a colonel, was selected for the top-secret bombing mission over Japan, the culmination of the Manhattan Project. "It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die," he said. In a public television documentary, "The Men Who Brought the Dawn," which aired on the 50th anniversary of the bombings, General Tibbets said the bomb "saved more lives than we took" because an alternative would have been an invasion of Japan's home islands. In rarely granted interviews, he expressed little remorse over the more than 100,000 Japanese killed or injured at Hiroshima and said he slept easily knowing of his role. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, a historical turning point of the last century.
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General Tibbets became a military celebrity with the Aug. He was 92 and reportedly had suffered strokes in recent years. Tibbets Jr., who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb in combat in an attack that helped end World War II and usher in the atomic age, died yesterday at his home in Columbus, Ohio.