By mid-1943, Tibbets began flying a new, innovative bomber: the B-29. Tibbets piloted various observation aircraft and bombers, including the B-17, which he flew in bombing raids above German-occupied Europe in the summer of 1942.
In 1937, Tibbets withdrew from the University of Cincinnati’s medical school and joined the U.S. But about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it-I soloed-and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes,” Tibbets said, according to a 2002 interview in The Guardian. “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. But the man who would fly perhaps the world’s most important sortie almost wasn’t a pilot. “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. 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.
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. 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.