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Homing in on the signal of a radio stations broadcast tower, he listened as a somber voice interrupted the music to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor. 7, was flying his A-10 attack bomber to Savannah, Ga., after participating in a war-games mock surprise attack on ground troops at Fort Bragg. He applied to become an aviation cadet in the Army Air Corps.īy late 1941, Tibbets had earned his commission and wings and, on Dec. After a brief stint as an aide at the physicians two venereal-disease clinics, Tibbets though deft with a syringe and needle decided that there had to be something better in life than administering arsenic treatments to syphilitics. He was sent to military school and then entered the University of Florida, often spending more time at the Gainesville airstrip than in class.Īfter his sophomore year, he was pressed by his father to transfer to the University of Cincinnati, where a family friend and physician could help cultivate his interest in medical school. The young man later recalled the week he spent dropping sweets from the back seat of a biplane, "No Arabian prince ever rode a magic carpet with a greater delight or sense of superiority to the rest of the human race."
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Tibbets volunteered against the wishes of his father, who already had determined that his son was going to be a doctor. While he piloted the plane over Miamis large public venues, an assistant would drop paper-parachuted samples of Baby Ruth candy bars to the crowd below. Tibbets, then 12, was hanging out at his fathers business, Tibbets & Smith Wholesale Confectioners, when a barnstorming pilot entered the offices and announced that he needed an assistant for a bombing mission. He was born in Quincy, Ill., and lived briefly in Iowa before his father moved the family to Miami. The seed of Tibbets ultimate rendezvous with history likely was planted before he was a teenager. 6, Tibbets was carrying his favorite smoking pipe, a few cigars and a small cardboard pillbox holding a dozen cyanide capsules, in case the crew had to bail out over enemy territory. When the Enola Gay, named for Tibbets mother, roared down the runway in the predawn of Aug. Less than three hours before takeoff, the 30-year-old colonel and his crew sat down to a midnight breakfast at a Tinian Island mess hall nicknamed the "Dogpatch Inn." 3, 1945, he was told to proceed with "Special Bombing Mission No.
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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. "I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets acknowledged Wednesday, noting of his crew, "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. For the last 60 years, he has had to deal with the controversy." Psychologically, he could handle the aftereffects of such a mission. "Eisenhower told (historian) Stephen Ambrose that Tibbets was the best bomber pilot in World War II.
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"Pauls mind works like a com- puter," said Gerry Newhouse, Tibbets former business manager and friend. The traits that sometimes have made him a difficult mate his single-mindedness, drive, tenacity and intolerance for mediocrity endeared him to the military leadership that chose him to command the first atomic-bomb mission. "He went up in rank over the years, but I have stayed a Pfc." "He is still the general, and I am the Pfc.," said Andrea, the old pilots wife of 51 years. Yet by Augusts first days, the fractures had mended, an orthopedic brace was gone, and his hallmark feistiness had returned. "Ive never been incapacitated a damned day of my life," he groused two months ago, daily downing enough Ox圜ontin to make it out of bed and to an easy chair from which he stared at a television he could barely hear. For a while, his appetite disappeared, his weight dropped alarmingly, and he railed against the fates torturing him in his waning years. In the months before todays 60 th anniversary of his mission to Hiroshima, Paul Tibbets was hobbled by a pair of spills that fractured two vertebrae. The mind of the pilot whose B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb often seems more prisoner than resident of his bantamweight body wracked by injury, ailments and 90 years of living. Posted on 4:18:39 AM PDT by Columbus Dawg Still no regrets for frail Enola Gay pilot (Col.