Brig. General Paul Tibbets R.I.P.
#1

I saw on the news yesterday that Paul Tibbets, pilot of The Enola Gay had died. It said per his wishes there was to be no funeral or memorial service , lest it be cause for protests and demonstrations by his detractors. How very sad that an American Hero like General Tibbets had to request this, but graveside protests by nut cases has become another unfortunate sign of our times. I personally know of one handsome young sailor , age 18 and serving in the Pacific in the summer of 1945 who was awful happy to hear the news that Japan had surrendered after 2 atomic bombs had been dropped, the first one falling from the bomb bay doors of Enola Gay. Thank You General Paul Tibbets for your great service to this country, and for making it possible for my Dad and countless other American servicemen to come back home! Rest In Peace.

 

Dogdaddy

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#2

Thanks for posting that my friend and for honoring the man. Here's some related info:

On the Death of 'Hiroshima Bomb' Pilot Paul Tibbets

 

By Greg Mitchell

 

Published: November 01, 2007 4:10 PM ET

 

NEW YORK A bulletin topping many news sites this afternoon announced the passing of Paul W. Tibbets, pilot of the plane, the "Enola Gay" (named for his mother), which dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Tibbets was 92, and defended the bombing to the end of his life. Some of the obits noted that he had requested no funeral or headstone for his grave, not wishing to create an opportunity for protestors to gather.

 

I had a chance to interview Tibbets more than 20 years ago, and wrote about it for several newspapers and magazines and in the book I wrote with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America.â€

 

The hook for the interview was this: While spending a month in Japan on a grant in 1984, I met a man named Akihiro Takahashi. He was one of the many child victims of the atomic attack, but unlike most of them, he survived (though with horrific burns and other injuries), and grew up to become a director of the memorial museum in Hiroshima. The August 6 bombing led to the deaths of at least 75,000 people in a flash and at least that many more in the days and years that followed. At least 90% of them were civilians, mainly women and children.

 

Takahashi showed me personal letters to and from Tibbets, which had led to a remarkable meeting between the two elderly men in Washington, D.C. At that recent meeting, Takahashi expressed forgiveness, admitted Japan’s aggression and cruelty in the war, and then pressed Tibbets to acknowledge that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was always wrong.

 

But the pilot (who had not met one of the Japanese survivors previously) was non-committal in his response, while volunteering that wars were a very bad idea in the nuclear age. Takahashi swore he saw a tear in the corner of one of Tibbets’ eyes.

 

So, on May 6, 1985, I called Tibbets at his office at Executive Jet Aviation in Columbus, Ohio, and in surprisingly short order, he got on the horn. He confirmed the meeting with Takahashi (he agreed to do that only out of "courtesy") and most of the details, but scoffed at the notion of shedding any tears over the bombing. That was, in fact, "bullshit."

 

“I’ve got a standard answer on that,†he informed me, referring to guilt. “I felt nothing about it….I'm sorry for Takahashi and the others who got burned up down there, but I felt sorry for those who died at Pearl Harbor, too....People get mad when I say this but -- it was as impersonal as could be. There wasn’t anything personal as far as I’m concerned, so I had no personal part in it…

 

"It wasn’t my decision to make morally, one way or another…I did what I was told -- I didn't invent the bomb, I just dropped the damn thing. It was a success, and that’s where I’ve left it.…I can assure you that I sleep just as peacefully as anybody can sleep….†When August 6 rolled around each year "sometimes people have to tell me. To me it's just another day."

 

In fact, he wrote in his autobiography, "The Tibbets Story," that President Truman at a meeting in the White House after the bombing had instructed him not to lose any sleep over it. "His advice was appreciated but unnecessary," Tibbets explained.

 

Japan offered to surrender nine days after the Hiroshima blast but many historians hold that the Russians' entry into the war, as planned, two days after the bomb was dropped was at least equally responsible. Japan had earlier rejected "unconditional surrender" demands but, after Hiroshima, accepted a conditional surrender, as it was allowed to keep its emperor.

 

In any event, Tibbets (like Truman) had acted in a consistent manner for decades, while at times traveling under an assumed name to avoid scrutiny. After the war he called Hiroshima and Nagasaki “good virgin targets†-- they had been untouched by pre-atomic air raids -- and ideal for “bomb damage studies.†In 1976, as a retired brigadier general, he re-enacted the Hiroshima mission at an air show in Texas, with a smoke bomb set off to simulate a mushroom cloud. He intended to do it again elsewhere, but international protests forced a cancellation.

 

He told a Washington Post reporter, for a favorable profile, in 1996, "For awhile in the 1950s, I got a lot of letters condemning me...but they faded out." On the other hand, "I got a lot of letters from women propositioning me."

 

In researching the "Hiroshima in America" book I came upon some long overlooked but fascinating material on Tibbets' initial bombing mission in World War II. He admitted to an American reporter -- before flying his first combat mission in Europe in 1942 -- that he was "sick with thoughts of the civilians who might suffer from the bombs dropped by this machine." During that initial mission, as he watched the bombs fall, his reaction (as he later confided) was, "My God, women and children are getting killed!" Returning to his base he learned that the bombs had missed their target, and he realized that he had been so "intent on what was going to happen on the ground" that he didn't do "my job right." That wouldn't happen on August 6, 1945.

 

In “Hiroshima in America,†we recalled Tibbets' role as a paid consultant to the 1953 Hollywood movie, “Above and Beyond,†with Robert Taylor in the pilot role. In the key scene, after releasing the bomb and watching Hiroshima go up in flames below, Taylor radios in a strike report. “Results good,†he says. Then he repeats it, bitterly and with grim irony.

 

But that was not in the Tibbets-approved original script for the film. It was added later, presumably to show that the men who dropped the bomb recognized the tragic nature of their mission.

 

Tibbets criticized the scene when the film came out.

Marion J Chard
Proud Daughter of Walter (Monday) Poniedzialek
540th Engineer Combat Regiment, 2833rd Bn, H&S Co, 4th Platoon
There's "No Bridge Too Far"
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#3

Still no regrets for frail Enola Gay pilot (Col. Paul Tibbets)

Columbus Dispatch ^ | August 6, 2005 | Mike Harden

 

 

Posted on 08/06/2005 4:18:39 AM PDT by Columbus Dawg

 

 

The mind of the pilot whose B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb often seems more prisoner than resident of his bantamweight body wracked by injury, ailments and 90 years of living.

 

In the months before today’s 60 th anniversary of his mission to Hiroshima, Paul Tibbets was hobbled by a pair of spills that fractured two vertebrae. For a while, his appetite disappeared, his weight dropped alarmingly, and he railed against the fates torturing him in his waning years.

 

"I’ve never been incapacitated a damned day of my life," he groused two months ago, daily downing enough OxyContin to make it out of bed and to an easy chair from which he stared at a television he could barely hear.

 

Yet by August’s first days, the fractures had mended, an orthopedic brace was gone, and his hallmark feistiness had returned.

 

"He is still the general, and I am the Pfc.," said Andrea, the old pilot’s wife of 51 years. "He went up in rank over the years, but I have stayed a Pfc."

 

The traits that sometimes have made him a difficult mate — his single-mindedness, drive, tenacity and intolerance for mediocrity — endeared him to the military leadership that chose him to command the first atomic-bomb mission.

 

"Paul’s mind works like a com- puter," said Gerry Newhouse, Tibbets’ former business manager and friend. "Eisenhower told (historian) Stephen Ambrose that Tibbets was the best bomber pilot in World War II.

 

"His crews respected him. Psychologically, he could handle the aftereffects of such a mission. For the last 60 years, he has had to deal with the controversy."

 

"I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets acknowledged Wednesday, noting of his crew, "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."

 

On Aug. 3, 1945, he was told to proceed with "Special Bombing Mission No. 13."

 

Less than three hours before takeoff, the 30-year-old colonel and his crew sat down to a midnight breakfast at a Tinian Island mess hall nicknamed the "Dogpatch Inn."

 

When the Enola Gay, named for Tibbets’ mother, roared down the runway in the predawn of Aug. 6, Tibbets was carrying his favorite smoking pipe, a few cigars and a small cardboard pillbox holding a dozen cyanide capsules, in case the crew had to bail out over enemy territory.

 

Mission from childhood

 

The seed of Tibbets’ ultimate rendezvous with history likely was planted before he was a teenager.

 

He was born in Quincy, Ill., and lived briefly in Iowa before his father moved the family to Miami. Tibbets, then 12, was hanging out at his father’s business, Tibbets & Smith Wholesale Confectioners, when a barnstorming pilot entered the offices and announced that he needed an assistant for a bombing mission. While he piloted the plane over Miami’s large public venues, an assistant would drop paper-parachuted samples of Baby Ruth candy bars to the crowd below.

 

Tibbets volunteered against the wishes of his father, who already had determined that his son was going to be a doctor.

 

The young man later recalled the week he spent dropping sweets from the back seat of a biplane, "No Arabian prince ever rode a magic carpet with a greater delight or sense of superiority to the rest of the human race."

 

He was sent to military school and then entered the University of Florida, often spending more time at the Gainesville airstrip than in class.

 

After his sophomore year, he was pressed by his father to transfer to the University of Cincinnati, where a family friend and physician could help cultivate his interest in medical school.

 

It had the opposite effect. After a brief stint as an aide at the physician’s two venereal-disease clinics, Tibbets — though deft with a syringe and needle — decided that there had to be something better in life than administering arsenic treatments to syphilitics. He applied to become an aviation cadet in the Army Air Corps.

 

By late 1941, Tibbets had earned his commission and wings and, on Dec. 7, was flying his A-10 attack bomber to Savannah, Ga., after participating in a war-games mock surprise attack on ground troops at Fort Bragg. Homing in on the signal of a radio station’s broadcast tower, he listened as a somber voice interrupted the music to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

"I thought, ‘Boy, Orson Welles is at it again,’ " he recalled, referring to the Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.

 

When the U.S. entered the war, Tibbets flew B-17 sorties in the North Africa campaign, later leading the first daylight B-17 raid across the English Channel. He was on a B-17 mission in late 1942 when enemy flak exploded part of his instrument panel and peppered him with shrapnel.

 

Tibbets says today that his missions over occupied Europe in his beloved Red Gremlin, though fraught with peril, were the most gratifying of all his military flying.

 

A few months after he was wounded, Tibbets was ordered back to the States to begin testing the new Boeing B-29. By 1944, he knew the plane’s capabilities as well or better than the company that built it, but some of the young pilots who would form his 509 th Composite Bomb Group thought the craft dangerous and unwieldy.

 

To show the younger fliers that their fears were unfounded, Tibbets recruited two Women’s Air Service Pilots to train on the B-29. To the embarrassment of the male pilots, they maneuvered the B-29 superbly, even with two of the four engines shut off.

 

Visit from the feds

 

In 1944, Tibbets learned that the FBI was nosing around his old neighborhood regarding his fitness for a top-secret clearance.

 

They unearthed his lone arrest, at 19, after a Surfside, Fla., police officer had caught Tibbets and his date in the back seat of a car on a remote stretch of beach.

 

When Gen. Uzal Ent informed Tibbets that he had been selected for the atomic-bomb mission, the general cautioned, "If this is a success, you’ll be a hero. If not, it’s possible that you could wind up in prison."

 

Tibbets didn’t know which it would be when, 10 miles from Hiroshima, his bombardier, Maj. Thomas Ferebee, broke in on the intercom: "OK, I’ve got the bridge."

 

A T-shaped span over the Ota River was the target.

 

"As we approached the aiming point," Tibbets remembered, "I watched for the first signs of anti-aircraft fire or fighter planes."

 

There were none.

 

When the bomb christened "Little Boy" tumbled from the belly of the Enola Gay, the plane’s nose, unburdened of 8,900 pounds in an instant, jerked upward. Tibbets swung the craft into a 155-degree diving turn to put as much distance as possible between the impending blast and his bomber. Forty-three seconds later, the sky lit up with a terrible flash.

 

"If Dante had been on the plane with us, he would have been terrified," Tibbets later said.

 

"My God," co-pilot Capt. Robert Lewis scribbled in his flight log.

 

Death estimates have varied widely. Some say 80,000 is a reliable figure, while noting that tens of thousands of others perished by year’s end from the effects of radiation. The dead included 20,000 Koreans the Japanese had enslaved for war work.

 

No escape from war

 

Tibbets remained in the Air Force until 1966, leaving the service as a brigadier general.

 

Not long after, he went to work for Executive Jet Aviation, a global all-jet, air-taxi company based in Columbus. His first assignment was in Geneva, Switzerland. He spent two years there before moving to Columbus and, in 1976, becoming the company’s president.

 

Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Tibbets endured urban legends suggesting, among other falsehoods, that he was in prison or had died at his own hand.

 

"They said I was crazy," he complained, "said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions. At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon."

 

Tibbets retired from Executive Jet in 1987 and, since then, has been both hot and cold about his notoriety. He was active behind the scenes in the protest of the National Air and Space Museum’s 1995 exhibit of part of the Enola Gay’s fuselage, where the initial presentation suggested that the atomic bomb crews were agents of a vengeful nation. The script ultimately was changed.

 

In late 2003, a fully restored Enola Gay went on display in a companion facility to the air and space museum in Chantilly, Va.

 

"I wanted to climb in and fly it," Tibbets said.

 

The exhibit opening was his last major public hurrah.

 

This past spring, he gave up driving after his falls and what doctors think to have been two minor strokes. He convalesces in a home guarded by a yammering chihuahua named Lolita and looks out on a front yard whose chief adornment is a weeping Japanese cherry.

 

At the 60 th anniversary, Tibbets said of his notoriety, "It’s kind of getting old, but then so am I."

 

He waved off other requests to be interviewed, in part because of his health and for weariness of suffering a new crop of reporters thinking they are the first to ask, "Any regrets?"

 

His answer always has been a resounding "Hell, no," lately modified to lament, "The guys who appreciated that I saved their asses are mostly dead now."

 

He is, today, a man untroubled with the certainty of joining their ranks.

 

"I don’t fear a goddamn thing," he said. "I’m not afraid of dying.

 

"As soon as the death certificate is signed, I want to be cremated. I don’t want a funeral. I don’t want to be eulogized. I don’t want any monuments or plaques.

 

"I want my ashes scattered over water where I loved to fly."

 

The English Channel.

 

Tibbets’ eyes brimmed for a moment when he pondered the absent friends who formed the unshakeable brotherhood that become the only religion some men ever know.

 

"That’s the first time I’ve seen that kind of emotion in 51 years," a clearly stunned Andrea said.

 

"He doesn’t want to have a tombstone or monument in a cemetery, because that would create a controversy," friend Gerry Newhouse said.

 

One of the candidates for the eventual task of spreading Tibbets’ ashes likely might be his grandson and namesake, Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets IV, a B-2 mission command pilot.

 

His Air Force nickname is "Nuke."

 

mharden@dispatch.com

Marion J Chard
Proud Daughter of Walter (Monday) Poniedzialek
540th Engineer Combat Regiment, 2833rd Bn, H&S Co, 4th Platoon
There's "No Bridge Too Far"
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