John Lansdale, chief of security for the Manhattan Project, and then with Gen. In August 1944, Tibbets was called to Colorado Springs, where he met with Col. Lauris Norstad, operations officer of the 12th Air Force, the army transferred Tibbets back to the U.S., where he was given responsibility for testing and perfecting the new B-29 “Superfortresses,” the largest, best-equipped, and most modern bombers in the world. Before that first attack, Tibbets told a reporter that he felt great apprehension over the possibility of civilian casualties, admitting he was “sick with thoughts of the civilians who might suffer from the bombs dropped by this machine.” Watching the bombs fall, he thought, “My God, women and children are getting killed!” In all, Tibbets flew 43 combat missions with the 8th Air Force in England and the 12th in North Africa.įollowing a run-in with Col. to pinpoint military targets in a way that minimized the deaths of civilians who were killed indiscriminately in the far-less-accurate nighttime bombing raids conducted by the British. Daylight precision bombing was particularly important because it allowed the U.S. tactical bombing strategies of the early war years.
Tibbets demonstrated both exceptional creativity and bravery in implementing U.S. Subsequent strikes targeted marshalling yards, a shipyard, an aircraft factory, and a base for FW-190s. On August 17, 1942, as captain and commander of the 340th Bomb Squadron in the 97th Bombardment Group, he led a dozen B-17 “Flying Fortresses” in the first daytime raid by American bombers against German targets in occupied France, bombing railroad yards in Rouen. Though a mediocre student, Tibbets was a gifted pilot, and quickly worked his way up the ranks. His experience administering arsenic treatments to syphilitics in two Cincinnati venereal disease clinics only convinced him that he was making the right choice. Tibbets transferred from the University of Florida to the University of Cincinnati, but dropped out to join the Army Air Corps in 1937. He later remembered the thrill and the sense of power this afforded, commenting, “No Arabian prince ever rode a magic carpet with a greater delight or sense of superiority to the rest of the human race.” Thereafter, medicine could not compare with the excitement of flying. He sat in the front seat of a tiny Waco 9 biplane and, as the barnstormer sitting behind him flew low to the ground over Hialeah race track and other places where people gathered, he dropped Baby Ruth candy bars with parachutes attached to people below.
The sight of blood gave me no squeamish moments.” But at age 12, Tibbets participated in a unique promotional giveaway while working for a candy company. “On my grandfather’s farm in Iowa during the summers of my boyhood, I had been fascinated by such things as the birth of animals and the castration of pigs. “The prospect of becoming a doctor was appealing to me,” he wrote. In his 1978 autobiography The Tibbets Story, in what some might consider ominous foreshadowing, Tibbets explained how his interest in medicine evolved. As a young man, Tibbets had aspired to become a doctor. His father, a wholesale confectioner, sent him to Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois. Paul Tibbets was born in Quincy, Illinois on Februand raised mostly in Miami, Florida. () Basing his judgment of Tibbets on the “accounts of those who knew him,” Kamm declared that Tibbets was “a humane man, who reflected publicly and thoughtfully on the A-bomb decision, the lives it cost and also the lives it saved.” A closer look at Tibbets’s life and comparison of his views with those of others who participated in the atomic bombings will shed light not only on whether Tibbets was as humane and thoughtfully reflective as Kamm suggests, but on why so many World War II veterans share Tibbets’s difficulty in moving beyond official pieties of 1945 and today to understand the complex history of the end of the Pacific War, the role the atomic bombings played in the Japanese surrender, and their own role in the historical process.
Among the most laudatory assessments is a piece (really a pair of blogs) by Oliver Kamm that quickly shot up to #1 at History News Network. In the days since his passing, Tibbets has been both lionized and vilified. And he spent the next 62 years fighting to defend the atomic bombings. Throughout his adult life, he was a warrior. On November 1, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., the man who piloted the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at his Columbus, Ohio home at age 92. Defending the Indefensible: A Meditation on the Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr.