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“We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. On the 60th anniversary of the bombing, Tibbets told the Columbus Dispatch that he knew when he got the assignment “it was going to be an emotional thing.” Months after authorizing the attack, President Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about the criticism over dropping the bomb. He was 92 and, according to his longtime friend Gerry Newhouse, had been in declining health over the last few years and died of heart failure. The Army Air Forces officer died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. “I never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Tibbets said of the Aug.
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believed that dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a justifiable means of shortening World War II and preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen who military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.įor Tibbets, the pilot whose bombing run unleashed the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled two-thirds of the city and killed at least 80,000 people, there was never any need to apologize. To the end of his days, Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. Oh, and by the way, “Enola Gay” was the name of Tibbets’ mother: We need another Truman in the White House and anothe Paul Tibbets leading the attack. The first three sentences say it all, and I wish we would heed it about Iran (and perhaps some of the other choice Muslim countries in the Mid-East). Here is an inspiring, extensive set of excerpts from the fantastic obit/article about this great American from today’s Los Angeles Times. Because he did not want to give left-wing anti-war protestors any opportunities to use his death for their cause, he will have no funeral or headstone and his ashes will be scattered over the North Atlantic. “Our young people don’t know anything about what happened because nobody taught them and now their minds are being filled up with things that aren’t true.”īut even after death, he’s got the last laugh. The new wave of controversy about Hiroshima “got me roused up,” Tibbets told the Palm Beach Post in 2001. He had it right on America’s schools and distorted history:Īmerican Hero Paul Tibbets After Historic Hiroshima Mission And the military apologized to the Japanese after Tibbets re-enacted his important flight. Sadly, in later life, the State Department treated him with dishonor when India criticized his role in saving the world from Axis forces. He was bright and had just the right amount of bravado to save America. And he flew some of the first bombing missions against the Nazis and their allies. And he wasn’t just the pilot–he basically planned the whole mission. He saved the Western world and his life had meaning for all of us, even though most do not know his name. But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not.Retired Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, Jr.–the heroic American serviceman who did to Hiroshima what we should have already done to Tehran–died, yesterday, at the age of 92 in Ohio. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother.
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At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces.
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It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.