‘The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, I watched those things go down because we could do it in B-17s,’ Tibbets spoke of that first mission. Although the mission was classified a success, inaccurate bombing had left many civilians dead. Two months later, he led the first American bombing raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe, targeting industrial sites in the French city of Lille. He then led the first American daylight heavy bomber mission over Occupied France in August 1942, targeting a railway yard in the French city of Rouen. He quickly rose through the ranks and it wasn't long before Tibbets found himself as the commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group. In 1937, he attended basic flight training at Randolph Field Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and demonstrated early on his talents as a pilot. His father was less than keen of his son’s new career choice, declaring ‘those damn machines will kill you.’ Undeterred, Tibbets enrolled in the United States Army Air Corps as a flight cadet. So I started out and I truly believed that I wanted to be a doctor and I should be a doctor, but the urge to fly aeroplanes overcame me.’ And he decided we should continue that thing. ‘There had been a doctor in the Tibbets family ever since he could remember, except for him. ‘He convinced me that I should be a doctor,’ Tibbets recalled. His father, however, had other plans for him and wanted his son to go into medicine. Read more about: WW2 Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The aftermathīeing the pilot of the Enola Gay made Tibbets a household name and earned him a Distinguished Service Cross but his contribution to the success of the mission went much further than just piloting the aircraft.įrom a young age, Tibbets had been interested in flying.
Three days later, another B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped a second atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, marking the last time a nuclear weapon has been used in armed conflict. ‘The whole sky lit up when it exploded….there was nothing but a black boiling mess hanging over the city…you wouldn’t have known that the city of Hiroshima was there,’ Tibbets recalled in a 1989 interview.īetween 70,000-90,000 perished in an instant, somewhere between 130,000-200,000 more are said to have died in the coming years from the aftereffects of the bomb.
Just over 40 seconds later it detonated at an altitude of around 2,000 feet above the city with the energy of around 15 kilotons of TNT, heralding in a new and devastating era of warfare. Tibbets guided the plane, named after his mother Enola Gay, from Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean towards its intended target – the Japanese city of Hiroshima.Īt 33,000 feet, the bomb was released. In the early hours of 6 August 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets climbed aboard a B-29 Superfortress bomber loaded with a 10,000-pound atomic bomb nicknamed 'Little Boy'.