75 years since Hiroshima: Pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb lived in Columbus

Early in the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay,” piloted by Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., took off from Tinian island in the Pacific Ocean, loaded with the world’s deadliest payload – an atomic bomb codenamed “Little Boy.”

At approximately 8:15 a.m., Tibbets and his crew dropped the bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, and the city disappeared in a mushroom cloud. It was the first time a devastating nuclear device had been unleashed upon a populated target.

In an instant, 70,000 people were obliterated. Over the next few years, the death toll would reach about 200,000 due to burns, radiation poisoning and cancer, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Three days later, on Aug. 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, killing another 70,000.

Five days after that, Japan surrendered and World War II was finally over.

Dropping the atomic bomb was a watershed moment in human history. Not only did it change warfare, but it ushered in the atomic age, one where mankind became capable of obliterating itself.

The bombings have been endlessly debated. Some people argue that they prevented a potentially more devastating invasion of Japan, including countless more deaths, and brought the war to a speedy end. Others call them atrocities.

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The man who flew the plane that delivered the bomb over Hiroshima always maintained he was proud of his service to his country, and slept well at night.

“I can assure you, I have never lost a night’s sleep on the deal,” Tibbets said in a 1989 interview that is part of a project of the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

Born in Quincy, Illinois, Tibbets had originally planned to be a doctor. He transferred to the University of Cincinnati as a pre-med student, but he preferred flying planes out at Lunken Field, so he left school in 1937 to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

He named the B-29 after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, who was supportive of his career change.

Tibbets retired as a brigadier general in 1966 and went on to run an air taxi company in Columbus, where he died in 2007.

In the 1989 interview, Tibbets also spoke of a lesson he learned in Cincinnati about doing his job:

“The first time I dropped bombs on a target over there, … I said to myself, ‘People are getting killed down there that don’t have any business getting killed. Those are not soldiers.’

“Well, then I got a thought that I had engendered and encountered for the first time in Cincinnati when I was going to medical school. I lived with a doctor. And he was telling me about previous doctors, some that had been classmates of his, who were drug salesmen. That is, they were selling legalized drugs for drug houses and so forth and so on, because they couldn’t practice medicine due to the fact that they had too much sympathy for their patients. They assumed the symptoms of the patients and it destroyed their ability to render medical necessities. So, I thought, you know, I’m just like that if I get to thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground. I’m supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I won’t be worth anything if I do that.”

Tibbets added, “I made up my mind then that the morality of dropping that bomb was not my business. I was instructed to perform a military mission to drop the bomb and that was the thing that I was going to do to the best of my ability. Morality, there is no such thing in warfare. I don’t care whether you’re dropping atom bombs, or whether you’re dropping 100-pound bombs, or you’re shooting a rifle. You’ve got to leave the moral issue out of it.”

Sources: Atomic Heritage Foundation, Enquirer archives