This is a real human being who changed the course of the world inexorably on that August morning.” You use anything at your disposal.”įilmmaker Ken Burns said Tibbets’ life “helps to take this incredible, gigantic event and personalize it. “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. Tibbets died at his Columbus home after a two-month decline caused by a variety of health problems, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend. “He said, ‘What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch - and that was me,’ ” said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”
Tibbets grew tired of criticism for delivering the first nuclear weapon used in wartime, telling family and friends that he wanted no funeral service or headstone because he feared a burial site would only give detractors a place to protest.Īnd he insisted he slept just fine, believing with certainty that using the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives than they erased because they eliminated the need for a drawn-out invasion of Japan. The attack marked the beginning of the end of World War II. Throughout his life, Tibbets seemed more troubled by other people’s objections to the bomb than by having led the crew that killed tens of thousands of Japanese in a single stroke. Paul Tibbets, who etched his mother’s name - Enola Gay - into history on the nose of the B-29 bomber he flew to drop the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, died yesterday after six decades of steadfastly defending the mission.