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.
The 12-year-old Tibbets rode as a passenger, tossing handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to the crowd. Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, didnt regret the fact that he dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during an interview. “Hap” Arnold as “the best damned pilot in the (Army) Air Forces,” Tibbets was hand-picked to command the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit ever formed to wage nuclear war. Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the Enola Gay. 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. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menuīut 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.
