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“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. 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. “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.