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As he flew a B-29 Superfortress over the show, a bomb set off on the runway below created a mushroom cloud. In 1976, he was criticized for re-enacting the bombing during an appearance at a Harlingen, Texas, air show. He later moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985.īut his role in the bombing brought him fame - and infamy - throughout his life. Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. "At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon." "They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions," he said. He was a student at the University of Cincinnati's medical school when he decided to withdraw in 1937 to enlist in the Army Air Corps.Īfter the war, Tibbets said in 2005, he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., and spent most of his boyhood in Miami. "You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. "I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview. He said it was his patriotic duty and the right thing to do. Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role.
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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. "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. "I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published on the 60th anniversary of the bombing. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war. Three days later, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others. The plane and its crew of 14 dropped the five-ton "Little Boy" bomb on the morning of Aug. It was the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime. Tibbets' historic mission in the plane named for his mother marked the beginning of the end of World War II and eliminated the need for what military planners feared would have been an extraordinarily bloody invasion of Japan. Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, Newhouse said. He suffered from a variety of health problems and had been in decline for two months. Tibbets died at his Columbus home, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend.
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He was 92 and insisted almost to his dying day that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night. COLUMBUS, Ohio - Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday.