_Paul Tibbets – first in, there at the end

Ace pilot Paul Tibbets was the lead pilot on the Eighth Air Force’s first daytime bombing mission. He became by reputation the best flier in the Army Air Force through his time in the East of England and ended the war by dropping the first atomic bomb on Japan. An American Army Air Corps pilot when America first entered the war, Tibbets flew the B-29 Enola Gay that dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, hastening the end of the war.

‘Fellows, you have just dropped the first atom bomb in history.’ With these words Col Paul Tibbets told his shocked crew aboard their SuperFortress bomber Enola Gay the true nature of their deadly mission.

Tibbets has a unique claim to fame. He was in at the very start of America’s air war, and there at the very end. In 1942 he took part in the US Eighth Air Force’s first ever raid on occupied Europe, while being chosen for secret missions flying VIPs to locations across the continent.

Tibbets was a trailblazer, one of the USA’s best military aviators of the Second World War. Indeed, historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers, would later describe him as ‘by reputation the best flier in the Army Air Force’.

Born on February 23, 1915, in Quincy, Illinois, his family later moved to Florida. He abandoned his early training as a doctor to concentrate on flying, which he had loved from an early age. Having enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1937, within a year he was a pilot.

All that was a preparation for the events that unfolded on December 7, 1941. By now based in Savannah, Georgia, he learnt of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that catapulted the USA into the war. Tibbets recalled his initial reaction was: ‘What in the hell is Orson Welles doing now?’ – a reference to the public panic that greeted Welles’s radio broadcast of War in the Worlds in 1938.

Tibbets was among the first USAAF officers to be posted to England as the strategic air war against Nazi Germany unfolded. As commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron, of the 97th Bombardment Group he arrived in Polebrook, Northamptonshire.

On August 17, 1942, he flew the leading aircraft in the first American daylight raid. It was against marshalling yards at Rouen in northern France – by coincidence, now the twin city of Norwich. The raid was a success; all the aircraft involved returned to base.

If only all the raids had been so straightforward. The Americans soon began taking terrible casualties on daylight bombing raids. In October of that year Tibbets was one of those deployed in the first 100-bomber raid. By that time, he was one of two elite pilots chosen by his commanding officer Carl Spaatz to carry out top secret missions. That autumn Operation Torch was being planned, the American invasion of North Africa in support of General Montgomery’s British forces battling Rommel’s Africa Korps and the Italians.

Tibbets flew senior officer Maj Gen Mark Clark from Polebrook to Gibraltar, the British bastion at the southern tip of Spain across the straits from Africa. On the night of the invasion, he also flew the overall Allied commander, Dwight D Eisenhower, to Gibraltar. In all, Paul Tibbets flew 43 combat missions from England and, subsequently, North Africa.

By February of the following year Tibbets was back in the States, and his career entered a new chapter. He was assigned to test fly the new B-29 Superfortress. The aircraft was going through serious teething problems; to encourage his pilots to engage with it Tibbets arranged for women pilots to carry them in the new plane – presumably to shame them into action.

The following year he was engaged in the most top secret mission of the war; the Manhattan Project, which saw the world’s first atomic bomb developed. He commanded the 393rd heavy bombardment squadron – the A-bomb unit – in the wilds of Utah. He came into contact with scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who warned him the shock wave from the A-bomb could destroy his aircraft. When the time came, Tibbets was prepared.

With secrecy paramount he was one of the very few people who knew the true nature of the atomic bomb – a heavy burden to carry.

The unit was sent to Titian Island in the Pacific, some 2,000 miles south of Japan. By now, new US President Harry S Truman had taken the fateful decision to deploy the deadly new weapon in a bid to force a surrender and avoid a costly Allied invasion of the Japanese islands.

Tibbets had hand-picked a crew of 12 and also hand-picked their aircraft. The new Boeing B-29 was fresh off the assembly line when Tibbets named her after his mother – Enola Gay – ‘the courageous red-haired mother whose quiet confidence had been a source of strength to me since boyhood’.

On August 6, 1945, the bomb, known as ‘Little Boy’, was loaded and the crew began their fateful mission. At 8am that morning they dropped the bomb in the city of Hiroshima. Of 320,000 people in the city that day, an estimated 80,000 died immediately or were badly injured. Temperatures reached a level of 5,400degF.

Tibbets swerved the plane at an extreme angle to avoid the shock wave and recalled the sombre mood as the crew flew away from the levelled city and mushroom cloud, which rose three miles into the sky. Of course, using the atomic bomb was controversial at the time, and will remain so for evermore, but Paul Tibbets said he had no regrets.

In a 1975 interview he said, ‘I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did… I sleep clearly every night. I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing. We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. I knew we did the right thing. My one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.’

On his return to base, Gen Carl Spaatz awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross. Three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Japanese bowed to the inevitable, and announced their surrender on August 16 and the war came to an end on September 1. It is certain that an Allied invasion of Japan, which would have been led by the USA, would have killed many more people on both sides – whether that justified Truman’s decision to use the A-bomb is debated to this day.

Tibbets’s story of dropping the bomb was told in the 1952 Hollywood film Above and Beyond, in which he was portrayed by Robert Taylor. He stayed in the forces until retirement in 1966 with the rank of Brigadier General.

On his death in 2007, at the age of 92, his family followed his final wishes. Tibbets had asked for no funeral or headstone, because he feared that opponents of the bombing might use it as a place of protest or destruction. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over the English Channel, the body of water he had flown over so many times during the war, and where he was, by all accounts, at his happiest.