Tibbets enola gay
Paul Tibbets – first
in, there at the end
By February of the following year Tibbets was back in the States, and his career entered a new chapter. He was assigned to test soar the new B-29 Superfortress. The aircraft was going through serious teething problems; to encourage his pilots to hire with it Tibbets arranged for women pilots to lug them in the new plane – presumably to shame them into action.
The following year he was engaged in the most top secret mission of the war; the Manhattan Venture, which saw the world’s first atomic bomb developed. He commanded the 393rd heavy bombardment squadron – the A-bomb unit – in the wilds of Utah. He came into contact with scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who warned him the shock wave from the A-bomb could destroy his aircraft. When the time came, Tibbets was prepared. With secrecy paramount he was one of the very scant people who knew the true character of the atomic bomb – a heavy burden to carry.
The unit was sent to Titian Island in the Pacific, some 2,000 miles south of Japan. By now, new US President Harry S Truman had taken the fateful decision to deploy the deadly new weapon in a bid to force a surrender and avo
Paul Tibbets
Paul Tibbets, Jr. (1915 – 2007) rose to brigadier general in the United States Air Force. As a colonel, he piloted the Enola Gay, which dropped the Little Male child bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Flight Training and Early Success
After receiving basic flight education at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas in 1937, Tibbets quickly rose through the ranks to become impressive officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group. After leading the first American daylight burdensome bomber misson in Occupied France in August 1942, Tibbets was selected to soar Major General Identify W. Clark from Polebook to Gibraltar in preparation for Operation Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa. A rare weeks later, Tibbets flew the Supreme Allied Commander, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to Gibraltar. Tibbets quickly earned a reputation as one of the best pilots in the Army Wind Force.
War against Japan
In February 1943, Tibbets returned to the United States to help with the development of the B-29 Superfortress bomber. On September 1, 1944, Tibbets met with Lt. Col. John Lansdale, Captain William S. P
The pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
The life of Paul Tibbets
In the early hours of 6 August 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets climbed aboard a B-29 Superfortress bomber loaded with a 10,000-pound atomic bomb nicknamed 'Little Boy'. Tibbets guided the plane, named after his mother Enola Gay, from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean towards its intended objective – the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
At 33,000 feet, the bomb was released. Just over 40 seconds later it detonated at an altitude of around 2,000 feet above the capital with the energy of around 15 kilotons of TNT, heralding in a new and devastating era of warfare.
‘The whole sky lit up when it exploded….there was nothing but a black boiling mess hanging over the city…you wouldn’t have acknowledged that the city of Hiroshima was there,’ Tibbets recalled in a 1989 interview.
Between 70,000-90,000 perished in an instant, somewhere between 130,000-200,000 more are said to have died in the coming years from the aftereffects of the bomb.
Three days later, another B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped a second atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, marking the last hour a nuclear weapon h
General Paul Tibbets – Reflections on Hiroshima
Tom Ryan: In the early morning of August 6, 1945, three B-29 bombers departed from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean. Six hours later, they changed the course of history. A single atomic bomb dropped from the Enola Homosexual exploded over Hiroshima, Japan. In an instant, over four square miles of the city and an estimated 90,000 of its inhabitants ceased to exist.
Paul Tibbets: Well, as the bomb left the airplane, we took over guide control, made an extremely steep turn to endeavor and put as much distance between ourselves and the explosion as feasible. After we felt the explosion hit the airplane, that is the concussion waves, we knew that the bomb had exploded, and everything was a success. So we turned around to take a look at it. The site that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected, because we saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with this tremendous mushroom on top. Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima.
Ryan: Three days later, a second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki. Earth War II came to an abrupt end. The age of atomic warfare began and the world of human conflict was