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“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. "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.
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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.
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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. He retired in 1966.On August 6, 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb designed at Los Alamos on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. His last assignment was on the Joint Staff. Subsequent assignments included work on the B-47 bomber and command of the Proof Test Division at Eglin AFB, Fla. At the end of the war, Tibbets served as a technical advisor on the Bikini Bomb Project and, in 1947, served at the Air Staff in the directorate of requirements. He returned to the US in March 1943 to work on the B-29 program and, in September 1944, was placed in charge of developing an organization that would employ the atomic bomb in combat operations. Following assignments as an engineering officer, he took command of the 340th Bomb Squadron and flew 25 combat missions in B-17s over Europe and North Africa, where he led the first heavy bombardment mission, serving under British control.
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Tibbets entered the Army Air Corps in 1937 and, after graduating from pilot training in 1938, served first with the 16th Observation Squadron in Georgia. Tibbets Jr., who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay on its historic World War II flight to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan, credited with ending the war and saving thousands of American lives, died Nov.