Mature Life Features

. . . isn’t the problem.

It’s what happens when you stop.

= = = = =

The Man Who Flew Into History

By Tom Morrow, Mature Life Features

An argument could be made that the biggest load of World War II landed on shoulders of 30-year-old U.S. Army Air Corps’ Col. Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. He commanded and trained an entire bomb group before personally piloting the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb Aug. 6, 1945, on Japan.

After flying 43 combat missions over Europe, he returned to the United States in February 1943 to help with the problem-ridden development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber. In September 1944, he was named commander of the 509th Composite Group, which a year later would drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tibbets was selected for these duties because he was recognized as the best flier in the Army Air Corps.

The 509th  was a self-contained unit comprising 1,700 men and 15 B-29s with a high priority for unlimited military supplies. Tibbets chose Wendover on the Utah-Nevada border for his base because of its remoteness. In January 1945, Tibbets moved his wife and family with him to Wendover because he felt that allowing married men to be accompanied by their families would improve morale.

While he had been briefed briefly on the Manhattan Project, which was designing the bomb that his crews would carry to Japan, not even he knew the full scope of their mission. Hundreds of runs were made over the Mohave Desert and Salton Sea in Southern California dropping replicas of the nuclear bombs credited with ending World War II.

To explain the presence of all the highly-technical civilian engineers who were working on the highly secret project, he had to lie to his wife, telling her they were “sanitary workers.” It worked because Tibbets discovered that his wife had recruited a scientist to unplug a drain in their apartment.

Tibbets named his bomber “Enola Gay” after his mother while it was still on the assembly line at the Martin plant in Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of Omaha. At 2:45 a.m. Monday, Aug 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off from Tinian, the Mariana Island just 1,500 miles from Japan for the six-hour run to Hiroshima. With Tibbets at the controls, the 10,000-pound Little Boy was dropped at 8:15 a.m. After a second atomic bomb was dropped two days later on Nagasaki, Japan surrendered.

Tibbets was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and celebrated as a national hero back home. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1959. “I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did … I sleep clearly every night.” He went on to say, “I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.”

A Hollywood film, “Above and Beyond” starring Robert Taylor, was made in 1952 about Tibbets leadership in the development of the 509^th Bomb Group in Utah and on Tinian.

He died Nov. 1, 2007, in Columbus, Ohio, and his ashes were scattered over the English Channel, which he had flown across so many times on bombing raids over Europe during World War II. He opted for that instead of a military grave or headstone because he was as concerned such a memorial might become ground zero for anti-nuclear weapons protests, anti-war protesters, or any other kind of revisionist historian looking to make a stand against what he saw as the right history.