The Legacy of Paul Tibbets,The Enola Gay & Separating the Warrior From the War

Thunder is good. Thunder is impressive. But it is lightning that does the work.

--MARK TWAIN

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., the man who piloted the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II, did not want a funeral or a gravestone when he died.

To the end of his days, Tibbets acknowledged that the bomb that hurtled from the bowels of his Enola Gay -- killing 80,000 people outright and almost as many from radiation poisoning and other associated effects – had plunged the world into a terrifying new age where Armageddon was just the push of a button away.

But Tibbets also believed that using the bomb was a justifiable way to shorten World War II and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese homeland.

"I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did . . . I sleep clearly every night," Tibbets said of the August 6, 1945, attack. “If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I'd do it again."

But Tibbets knew that his unnuanced and unapologetic views would make his death and burial place a magnet for protesters who saw him as the personification of man's inhumanity to man, and it is not surprising that his Wikipedia entry has had to be disabled because of attempts by people who tried to hack into it in order to portray him as a war criminal.

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World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1,200 a day. So when Paul Tibbets left this mortal coil at age 92 last Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, he was in the company of, among others, a Navy seaman who survived the Pearl Harbor attack, an Army infantryman who charged onto Omaha Beach on D-Day, and a Marine who helped liberate a Japanese POW camp in New Guinea.

Tibbets, of course, had a fame and notoriety that the other 1,999 vets manifested for their eternal reward on his final day did not. But all had one thing in common: They had a job to do and did it with valor and, for the most part, without complaint.

Tibbets was on some of the first bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe and later flew bombing runs in North Africa before he was recalled to the U.S. to test the new B-29, the first intercontinental bomber.

In September 1944, the then lieutenant colonel was summoned to a secret base in Colorado where General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold chose him to lead the 509th Composite Group, the first military unit formed to wage nuclear war, because Arnold believed that he was “the best damned pilot” in the Army Air Forces.

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

Tibbets looked for the perfect airfield to train his men and settled on a remote strip in Wendover, Utah. Arriving crewmen were told nothing about their mission.

"Don't ask what the job is," Tibbets told them. "Stop being curious. . . . Never mention this base to anybody. That means your wives, girlfriends, sisters, family."

Tibbets granted his men Christmas leave in December 1944. What they didn't know was that it was a ploy to test security. As the men of the 509th headed home, they were met at the Salt Lake City railroad station by undercover operatives posing as solicitous civilians and friendly servicemen.

Two men from the 509th answered the questions of a friendly "officer," and both men were soon banished to a remote island off the coast of Alaska.

Tibbets' bomber crews made hundreds of practice runs using test bombs that were mock-ups of the real thing -- the uranium-filled "Little Boy" that would doom Hiroshima and the plutonium cored "Fat Man" that would hit Nagasaki.

Most of the mock-ups were filled with concrete, but some contained everything but the nuclear components and included conventional explosives in the triggering mechanisms.

On June 18, 1945, President Truman approved plans for the invasion of Japan, and on July 16 the first atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Believing that the Japanese should have one last chance to avoid the devastating power of the bomb, Truman issued an ultimatum that they surrender unconditionally or face "prompt and utter destruction." The Japanese ignored the demand, which did not include mention of nuclear weapons.

Tibbets himself decided to fly the B-29 that would drop the Hiroshima bomb. He named the plane the Enola Gay after his mother, who unlike his father who had wanted him to become a doctor, supported him in pursuing a career as a pilot. (The top photo shows Tibbets, at center, with bomber's ground crew.)

Several hours before dawn on August 6, the Enola Gay struggled up off a runway on the island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas for the 1,700-mile flight to Hiroshima. Two other B-29s accompanied the lead plane to monitor the event.

In a 2002 interview, Tibbets told Studs Terkel that "After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, 'You know what we're doing today?' They said, 'Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission.' I said, 'Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special.' My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, 'Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?' I said, 'Bob, you've got it just exactly right.' "

Seventeen seconds after 8:15 a.m., from an altitude of 26,000 feet, Tibbets' bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, released the 9,700-pound Little Boy. Tibbets put the Enola Gay into a sharp, oft practiced diving turn to get away from the imminent explosion.

The bomb detonated at 1,890 feet above the center of Hiroshima with a core temperature estimated at 50 million degrees. In a micro-second, the city ceased to exist.

"My God, what have we done?" co-pilot Captain Robert A. Lewis wrote in his logbook.

Caron described the view from his seat in the rear turret as "a peep into hell."

Tibbets wrote that he 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."

Three days later, a second and even more powerful bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, taking about 74,000 lives. Kyoto, the original target of the first bomb, was spared. As desperate as high ranking government officials and generals were to end the war, they were sensitive of its cultural significance.

A third atomic bomb was being readied, but by August 15 the conciliators in the Japanese government had won out over hard-line militarists who had had the tacit backing of Emperor Hirohito, who was not the pitifully manipulated figurehead the Japanese claim, and indeed is the villain of this story, not Tibbets.

Japan capitulated and World War II finally was over after some 234,874 Americans had lost their lives in the Pacific theater alone.

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I have wrestled for years with whether dropping the atomic bombs were justified.

Using the bombs did end the war months sooner and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, as well as saved from starvation hundreds of thousands of POWs and millions of people under Japanese occupation.

Yet I understand those who believe that the bombings were immoral and, in a contemporary context, were acts of terrorism. I also feel for the Japanese people, having lived in Japan, visited Hiroshima and known an atomic bomb survivor.

But it would never have occurred to me to blame Tibbets, let alone the other members of the Enola Gay's crew.

After the war, Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about criticism directed at him over dropping the bomb.

"It was my decision," Truman told him. "You didn't have a choice."

Tibbets, who retired a brigadier general, spoke out for eliminating war, but he could be prickly and sometimes seemed appallingly unsympathetic to what he had wrought. He re-enacted the bombing at an air show in Texas in 1976, complete with mushroom cloud. He said it was not meant as an insult, but the U.S. government apologized after the Japanese government and mayor of Hiroshima complained.

The notion of separating the warriors from the war has taken a beating in the Iraq war, which despite President Bush's comparisons could not be more different than Tibbets' war.

There are few greater obscenities than Bush exploiting the troops that he has sent into a quagmire for political gain, but it is just as awful to use these troops as a cudgel in opposing the war.

Tibbets was to tell an interviewer three years ago on the 60th anniversary of the bombing (bottom photo), that when he got the assignment he knew "it was going to be an emotional thing."

"We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible."

And for that I thank Paul Tibbetts. May he rest in peace.

Based in part on an article from The Los Angeles Times