Outmaneuvering some top officers who sought to take over the bombing mission, Tibbets rallied support from Washington to retain his command of the 509th and announced that he would be piloting the plane that dropped the first bomb.įorcing an unhappy Capt. Less than a month after Truman approved the invasion plans, the first atomic bomb was tested successfully at Alamogordo, N.M.īelieving that the Japanese should have one last chance to avoid the bomb, Truman issued an ultimatum: Surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” The Japanese ignored the demand, which made no mention of nuclear weapons.
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Douglas MacArthur said it could take 10 years to wipe out the last pockets of resistance, with total American losses reaching 1 million men. 1, followed five months later by an attack by 1.2 million troops on the island of Honshu. The initial assault, by 815,000 troops, would begin on the island of Kyushu on Nov. On June 18, 1945, President Truman approved military plans for the invasion of Japan. “My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war,” he wrote in his book, “Flight of the Enola Gay,” published in 1989. Tibbets was summoned to a secret military conclave in Colorado, where he was told that he had been selected over dozens of other candidates to head a unit called the 509th Composite Group. In early 1943, Tibbets was recalled to the United States to begin testing a new super bomber, the B-29. Two months later, he led the bombing runs supporting the American landings in North Africa. bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe. Tibbets liked the military life, and despite subsequent premedical studies at the universities of Cincinnati and Florida, he enlisted as a cadet at the Army Air Corps Academy at Fort Thomas, Ky., in 1937.īy late summer 1942, nine months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust America into World War II, Tibbets was flying some of the first U.S. Tibbets’ father, a believer in discipline, shipped his son off to Western Military Academy in Alton, Ill., the following year. “From that day on, I knew I had to fly,” Tibbets said. The 12-year-old Tibbets rode as a passenger, tossing handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to the crowd below. His father, a candy distributor, hired a popular barnstormer, Doug Davis, to fly over Hialeah racetrack as a promotional stunt. 23, 1915, he moved to Florida with his parents while still a child. Proud, prickly and a perfectionist, Tibbets never doubted that he was the man for the job.īorn in Quincy, Ill., on Feb. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another plane from the 509th leveled much of Nagasaki with another nuclear bomb, prompting the Japanese surrender.
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“Hap” Arnold as “the best damned pilot in the (Army) Air Force,” Tibbets was hand-picked to command the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit formed to wage nuclear war.
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6, 1945.ĭescribed by his commandant, Gen. Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the Enola Gay, the propeller-driven, four-engine bomber, named for his mother, that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug.
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“I made one great mistake in my life - when I signed a letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made,” said pioneering physicist Albert Einstein, one of the first to conceive of such a weapon. “I never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Tibbets had said.īut to millions of detractors, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was a cosmic example of man’s inhumanity to man, an act that left the world teetering on the brink of self-annihilation.