But about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it-I soloed-and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes,” Tibbets said, according to a 2002 interview in The Guardian.
“He said, ‘You’re going to be a doctor,’ and I just nodded my head and that was it. His mother, though, encouraged her son to follow his dream. Tibbets later attended a private military preparatory school in Illinois and began taking flying lessons, despite his father’s wish for him to pursue a medical career. A stunt pilot let a 12-year-old Tibbets climb aboard his small plane and toss Baby Ruth candy bars to the crowd below, according to The New York Times. He was drawn to flying at an early age, never forgetting a summer day at the local racetrack. Tibbets was born to Paul and Enola Gay Tibbets on February 23, 1915, in Quincy, Illinois, and spent most of his childhood in Miami, Florida. But the man who would fly perhaps the world’s most important sortie almost wasn’t a pilot. “I had to go fly airplanes”Ībout a year earlier, in September 1944, Tibbets was chosen to lead the mission to deliver the world’s first atomic bomb used in combat. Sticking his head out just above the plane’s painted name- Enola Gay, after his mother-the 30-year-old husband and father gave a wave and a slight smile and began to taxi.Īt 2:45 a.m., the plane took off, and at 8:15 a.m., the crew of the Enola Gay released Little Boy, the world’s first nuclear weapon, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. As the plane’s engines roared and its propellers spun, Tibbets looked out an open window at the crowd amassed on the runway. In the early-morning darkness of that historic day 75 years ago, Colonel Tibbets and his 11-man crew boarded the plane and began their preflight preparations. It was all leading to one day that would help end years of bloodshed and change the world forever. Even years before that, development of this revolutionary cargo began in secrecy under the direction of a physicist and an Army general in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. and his crew had practiced dropping dummy concrete bombs on targets in Wendover, Utah. And months before that, pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. Preparations on the tiny Pacific island-about 1,500 miles southeast of the plane’s intended target in Japan-had begun months before on April 3. You just thought, what would you think if you were coming home to this? The amount of the devastation and destruction that the bomb had caused surprised all of us.Hours before the sun would rise over Tinian island on the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 airplane was positioned above a specially built bomb-loading pit, as crews readied the aircraft with cargo unlike anything the world had ever known. We have a picture of a Japanese soldier coming back from where he had been fighting, returning to his city, which had been destroyed. The Japanese had cleaned up their city, but all the buildings were flattened. You'd think if an atomic bomb had been dropped, you would have seen bodies lying around, but there was none of that. We were all amazed at how quickly the Japanese had cleaned up the city. We went in to visit Nagasaki, stayed at a resort in there for about two days. So then we got down to Nagasaki where we landed at a little old dirt field about 20 miles outside of Nagasaki. We had to pick up some Japanese nuclear scientists and then we flew over Hiroshima. SPIEGEL: You visited Japan shortly after the capitulation. When you have a war, there is only one thing to do in my opinion, and that is make damn sure you win it and expend any energy that you must in order to bring that war to a rapid conclusion with a minimum loss of life. And I think people that go around and start wars for any reason whatsoever are crazy, but that's another story.
But how do you win a war without killing people? If you don't want to kill people, you should not start a war. Van Kirk: I'm not proud of all the deaths it caused, and nobody is. SPIEGEL: Do you feel any regrets today about dropping the first bomb? It's hard for me to think of a city over there that hadn't been bombed so badly that it would have been worth using the first atomic bomb. SPIEGEL: Did you ever talk about any possible targets in Germany, like Berlin? SPIEGEL Media Menü SPIEGEL Media aufklappen.Alle Magazine Menü Alle Magazine aufklappen.SPIEGEL-Heft Menü SPIEGEL-Heft aufklappen.Gutscheine Anzeige Menü Gutscheine aufklappen.Marktplatz Anzeige Menü Marktplatz aufklappen.Partner-Inhalte Anzeige Menü Partner-Inhalte aufklappen.Wissenschaft Menü Wissenschaft aufklappen.