I don’t care whether you’re dropping atom bombs, or whether you’re dropping 100-pound bombs, or you’re shooting a rifle. on August 6, 1945, a modified American B-29 Superfortress bomber named the Enola Gay left the island of Tinian for Hiroshima. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare.
I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb and that was the thing that I was going to do to the best of my ability. Tibbets added, “I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. Enola Gay Boeing B-29 on 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. I’m supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. So, I thought, you know, I’m just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. The Hiroshima bombing The Enola Gay is a Boeing B29 Superfortress bomber named after Enola Gay Tibbets the mother of the pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets On 6. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they couldn’t practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. And he was telling me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. He named the plane in tribute to his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. It was piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, a 30-year-old colonel from Illinois. The Enola Gay was the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. “Well, then I got a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. The Enola Gay Was Named After the Pilots Mother. Los Alamos National Laboratory Training for a secret mission Tibbets piloted various observation aircraft and bombers, including the B-17, which he flew in bombing raids above German-occupied Europe in the summer of 1942. “The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, … I said to myself, ‘People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. named his B-29 bomber the 'Enola Gay' after his mother, who long supported his dream of becoming a pilot. In the 1989 interview, Tibbets also spoke of a lesson he learned in Cincinnati about doing his job: Tibbets retired as a brigadier general in 1966 and went on to run an air taxi company in Columbus, where he died in 2007. He named the B-29 after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, who was supportive of his career change. He transferred to the University of Cincinnati as a pre-med student, but he preferred flying planes out at Lunken Field, so he left school in 1937 to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. “I can assure you, I have never lost a night’s sleep on the deal,” Tibbets said in a 1989 interview that is part of a project of the Atomic Heritage Foundation.īorn in Quincy, Illinois, Tibbets had originally planned to be a doctor. The man who flew the plane that delivered the bomb over Hiroshima always maintained he was proud of his service to his country, and slept well at night. Some people argue that they prevented a potentially more devastating invasion of Japan, including countless more deaths, and brought the war to a speedy end. The bombings have been endlessly debated. Not only did it change warfare, but it ushered in the atomic age, one where mankind became capable of obliterating itself. 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, killing another 70,000.įive days after that, Japan surrendered and World War II was finally over.ĭropping the atomic bomb was a watershed moment in human history. Over the next few years, the death toll would reach about 200,000 due to burns, radiation poisoning and cancer, according to the U.S. In an instant, 70,000 people were obliterated. It was the first time a devastating nuclear device had been unleashed upon a populated target. Tibbets Jr., took off from Tinian island in the Pacific Ocean, loaded with the world’s deadliest payload – an atomic bomb codenamed “Little Boy.”Īt approximately 8:15 a.m., Tibbets and his crew dropped the bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, and the city disappeared in a mushroom cloud. 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay,” piloted by Col. Tibbets, Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, waves from his cockpit prior to takeoff on August 6, 1945.Early in the morning of Aug.