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. "You can’t fly straight ahead because you’d be right over the top when it blows up, and nobody would ever know you were there." -Robert Oppenheimer to Paul Tibbets Jr.
But the man who would fly perhaps the world’s most important sortie almost wasn’t a pilot. Los Alamos National Laboratory “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. The video is shaking because Harold Agnew is taking the video and also running diagnostics. The B-29 Superfortress, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr., and an 11-man crew were chosen to deliver Little Boy, the first atomic bomb released in combat, above Hiroshima, Japan. 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. 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. and others explain, delivering a 10,000-pound bomb to southern Japan was a years-long endeavor that required patience, practice, and precision. weapon would explode with a yield of 300 kilotons of TNT”.On August 6, 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb designed at Los Alamos on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In comparison, today’s thermonuclear weapons are much more powerful. It is estimated that these two bombs killed roughly 200,000 people in the near term, with more dying in the following years from cancer. One frightening aspect of nukes today is that they’re many times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb: “The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable to explosions of about 15 to 20 kilotons of TNT. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible”.
We knew it was going to kill people right and left. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. “I knew when I got the assignment”, he told a reporter in 2005, “it was going to be an emotional thing. In a 1975 interview, Paul Tibbets said: “I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did. Tibbets, en route to Guam, felt a 2.5g shockwave driven before a kaleidoscopic pillar of smoke and debris. 31,000 feet above (9,500 meters), and 10 and a half miles away from them, Paul W. local time, poised above Hiroshima’s Aioi Bridge, Little Boy dropped. The bomb, named “Little Boy”, was anything but snout-nosed, and weighing in at 9,700 pounds (4,400 kg), it resembled nothing more than an obese metal baseball bat.Īt 8:15 a.m. Rather than isobutyl methacrylate or its more famous kin, napalm, this bomb was packed with two masses of highly enriched uranium-235. Unlike the bombs with which the US Air Force had scorched Japan for roughly a year, this bomb was not filled with the usual incendiaries. On 6 August 1945, during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The Enola Gay was a bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line.
Colonel Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay’s cockpit to get reporters to stand clear of the propellers prior to engine start, before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima.