Pilot of Hiroshima bomber dies

The historic event helped to end the war with Japan.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Before his death, Paul Tibbets told family and friends that he didn’t want a funeral service or headstone.

The pilot of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima wanted to be cremated, feared a burial site would only give detractors a place to protest.

Tibbets, 92, died at his Columbus home Thursday after a two-month decline caused by a variety of health problems.

He will be forever linked to the dropping of the bomb that marked the beginning of the end of World War II, said Morris Jeppson, the weapon test officer who armed the bomb during the 1945 Hiroshima flight.

“It did in fact end the war,” Jeppson said. “Ending the war saved a lot of U.S. armed forces and Japanese civilians and military. History has shown there was no need to criticize him.”

Tibbets’ historic mission in the B29 bomber Enola Gay, named for his mother, was the first time man had used nuclear weaponry against his fellow man.

“What I like about the arc of Paul Tibbets’ life is it helps to take this incredible, gigantic event and personalize it,” said filmmaker Ken Burns. “This is a real human being who changed the course of the world inexorably on that August morning.”

Tibbets, a 30-year-old colonel at the time of the bombing, never expressed regret over his role. It was, he said, his patriotic duty — the right thing to do.

“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.

“You’ve got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war. ... You use anything at your disposal. There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules in war.

“I sleep clearly every night.”

It was the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, when the plane and its crew of 14 dropped the five-ton “Little Boy” bomb over Hiroshima. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others.

Three days later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Tibbets did not fly in that mission. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war.

“I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing,” Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story on Aug. 6, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the bomb. “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.”

He took quiet pride in the job he had done, said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”

“He said, ’What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch — and that was me,”’ Greene said.

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., born Feb. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., spent most of his boyhood in Miami.

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.

The National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton plans a photographic tribute to Tibbets, whom they inducted in 1996.

“There are few in the history of mankind that have been called to figuratively carry as much weight on their shoulders as Paul Tibbets,” director Ron Kaplan said in a statement. “Even fewer were able to do so with a sense of honor and duty to their countrymen as did Paul.”

His role in the bombing brought him fame — and infamy — throughout his life.

After the war, Tibbets said in 2005, he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide.

“They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions,” he said. “At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon.”

Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. He later moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985.

In 1976, he was criticized for re-enacting the bombing during an appearance at a Harlingen, Texas, air show. As he flew a B-29 Superfortress over the show, a bomb set off on the runway below created a mushroom cloud.

He said the display “was not intended to insult anybody,” but the Japanese were outraged. The U.S. government later issued a formal apology.

Tibbets again defended the bombing in 1995, when an outcry erupted over a planned 50th anniversary exhibit of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution.

The museum had planned to mount an exhibit that would have provided the context of the bombing — the discussion within the Truman administration of whether to use the bomb, the rejection of a demonstration bombing, the selection of a city as a target, the environmental and health consequences of subsequent open-air nuclear testing and the dozens of Cold War issues that ensued.

Veterans groups objected that it paid too much attention to Japan’s suffering and too little to Japan’s brutality during and before World War II, and that it underestimated the number of Americans who would have perished in an invasion.

They said the bombing of Japan was an unmitigated blessing for the United States and its fighting men and the exhibit should say so.

Tibbets denounced it as “a damn big insult.”

The museum changed its plan, and agreed to display the fuselage of the Enola Gay without commentary, context or analysis.

He told the Dispatch in 2005 he wanted his ashes scattered over the English Channel, where he loved to fly during the war.

Tibbets is survived by his wife, Andrea, and three sons, Paul, Gene and James, as well as a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A grandson named after Tibbets followed his grandfather into the military as a B2 pilot currently stationed in Belgium.