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government later issued a formal apology. He said the display "was not intended to insult anybody," but the Japanese were outraged. As he flew a B-29 Superfortress over the show, a bomb set off on the runway below created a mushroom cloud. In 1976, he was criticized for re-enacting the bombing during an appearance at a Harlingen, Texas, air show. Tibbets' role in the bombing brought him fame - and infamy - throughout his life.
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"Even fewer were able to do so with a sense of honor and duty to their countrymen as did Paul." "There are few in the history of mankind that have been called to figuratively carry as much weight on their shoulders as Paul Tibbets," director Ron Kaplan said in a statement. The National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton plans a photographic tribute to Tibbets, who was inducted in 1996. He later moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985. Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. "At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon." "They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions," he said. He was a student at the University of Cincinnati's medical school when he decided to withdraw in 1937 to enlist in the Army Air Corps.Īfter the war, Tibbets said in 2005, he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., and spent most of his boyhood in Miami. "He said, 'What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch - and that was me,'" Greene said. Tibbets took quiet pride in the job he had done, said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, "Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War." "You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. "I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview. He said it was his patriotic duty and the right thing to do. Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role. "History has shown there was no need to criticize him." armed forces and Japanese civilians and military," Jeppson said. Morris Jeppson, the officer who armed the bomb during the Hiroshima flight, said Tibbets was energetic, well-respected and "hard-nosed." But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible." We knew it was going to kill people right and left. "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. "I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published on the 60th anniversary of the bombing. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war. Three days later, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others. The plane and its crew of 14 dropped the five-ton "Little Boy" bomb on the morning of Aug. It was the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime. Tibbets' historic mission in the plane named for his mother marked the beginning of the end of World War II and eliminated the need for what military planners feared would have been an extraordinarily bloody invasion of Japan. Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend. He suffered from a variety of health problems and had been in decline for two months.
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He was 92 and insisted for six decades after the war that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night.
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Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday.