Rather lengthy, but quite
interesting.
Enjoy, Courtesy of Rollie Baumann.
Subject: A Bit of Aviation History - Paul Tibbets, the Enola
Gay, and Hiroshima
bomb so powerful that
it would come to threaten the existence of the
human race. Only two
such devices have ever been used, but now, a
decade after the end
of the cold war, the world faces new dangers of
nuclear attack - from
US. Paul Tibbets, the
man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission
to Japan, tells Studs
Terkel why he has no regrets - and why he
wouldn't hesitate to
use it again. The bomb? According to Tibbets,
it was "one hell
of a big bang."
Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old
gaffers. Me and Paul
Tibbets, 89 years old,
brigadier-general retired, in his home town
of
Paul Tibbets: Hey, you've got to correct
that. I'm only 87. You said 89.
Studs Terkel: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got
you beat by three years.
Now we've had a nice
lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed
as we sat in that
restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who
you were. But once
upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola
Gay over the city of
Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning -
August 6 1945 - and a
bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first
ever. And that
particular moment changed the whole world around. You
were the pilot of that
plane.
Paul Tibbets: Yes, I was the pilot.
Studs Terkel: And the Enola Gay was named
after...
Paul Tibbets: My mother. She was Enola Gay
Haggard before she
married my dad, and my
dad never supported me with the flying - he
hated airplanes and
motorcycles. When I told them I was going to
leave college and go
fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said,
"Well, I've sent
you through school, bought you automobiles, given
you money to run
around with the girls, but from here on, you're on
your own. If you want
to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a
damn." Then Mom
just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly
airplanes, you're
going to be all right." And that was that.
Studs Terkel: Where was that?
Paul Tibbets: Well, that was
real estate business
down there for years, and at that time he was
retired. And I was
going to school at Gainesville, Florida, but I
had to leave after two
years and go to
had no medical school.
Studs Terkel: You were thinking of being a
doctor?
Paul Tibbets: I didn't think that, my
father thought it. He said,
"You're going to
be a doctor," and I just nodded my head and that
was it. And I started
out that way; but about a year before I was
able to get into an
airplane, fly it - I soloed - and I knew then
that I had to go fly
airplanes.
Studs Terkel: Now by 1944 you were a pilot
- a test pilot on the
program to develop the
B-29 bomber. When did you get word that you
had a special
assignment?
Paul Tibbets: One day [in September 1944]
I'm running a test on a
B-29, I land, a man
meets me. He says he just got a call from
General Uzal Ent
[commander of the second air force] at
Springs, he wants me
in his office the next morning at nine o'clock.
He said, "Bring
your clothing - your B4 bag - because you're not
coming back. "
Well, I didn't know what it was and didn't pay any
attention to it - it
was just another assignment. I got to Colorado
Springs the next
morning perfectly on time.
A man named
closed the door behind
me. With him was a man wearing a blue suit, a
Hiroshima - and Dr
Norman Ramsey,
nuclear physics. And
bomb. We've gotten to
the point now where we can't go much further
till we have airplanes
to work with."
He gave me an explanation which probably
lasted 45, 50 minutes, and
they left. General Ent
looked at me and said, "The other day,
General Arnold
[commander general of the army air corps] offered me
three names.
"Both of the others were full colonels; I was a
lieutenant-colonel. He
said that when General Arnold asked which of
them could do this
atomic weapons deal, he replied without
hesitation, "Paul
Tibbets is the man to do it." I said, "Well, thank
you , sir." Then
he laid out what was going on and it was up to me
now to put together an
organization and train them to drop atomic
weapons on both Europe
and the Pacific -
Studs Terkel: Interesting that they would
have dropped it on
as well. We didn't
know that.
Paul Tibbets: My edict was as clear as
could be. Drop simultaneously
in
couldn't drop it in
one part of the world without dropping it in the
other. And so he said,
"I don't know what to tell you, but I know
you happen to have
B-29's to start with. I've got a squadron in
training in
we've got. I want you
to go visit them, look at them, talk to them,
do whatever you want.
If they don't suit you, we'll get you some
more." He said:
"There's nobody could tell you what you have to do
because nobody knows.
If we can do anything to help you, ask me." I
said thank you very
much. He said, "Paul, be careful how you treat
this responsibility,
because if you're successful you'll probably be
called a hero. And if
you're unsuccessful, you might wind up in prison."
Studs Terkel: Did you know the power of an
atomic bomb? Were you
told about that?
Paul Tibbets: No, I didn't know anything at
that time. But I knew
how to put an
organization together. He said, "Go take a look at the
bases, and call me
back and tell me which one you want." I wanted to
get back to
were, where my laundry
was done and all that stuff. But I thought,
"Well, I'll go to
Wendover [army airfield, in
what they've
got." As I came in over the hills I saw it was a
beautiful spot. It had
been a final staging place for units that
were going through
combat crew training, and the guys ahead of me
were the last P-47
fighter outfit. This lieutenant-colonel in charge
said, "We've just
been advised to s top here and I don't know what
you want to do.. but
if it has anything to do with this base it's
the most perfect base
I've ever been on. You've got full machine
shops, everybody's
qualified, they know what they want to do. It's a
good place."
Studs Terkel: And now you chose your own
crew.
Paul Tibbets: Well, I had mentally done it
before that. I knew right
away I was going to
get Tom Ferebee [the Enola Gay's bombardier] and
Theodore
"Dutch" van Kirk [navigator] and Wyatt Duzenbury [flight
engineer].
Studs Terkel: Guys you had flown with in
Paul Tibbets: Yeah.
Studs Terkel: And now you're training. And
you're also talking to
physicists like Robert
Oppenheimer [senior scientist on the
Paul Tibbets: I think I went to Los Alamos
[the
HQ] three times, and
each time I got to see Dr Oppenheimer working
in h is own
environment. Later, thinking about it, here's a young
man, a brilliant
person. And he's a chain smoker and he drinks
cocktails. And he
hates fat men. And General Leslie Groves [the
general in charge of
the
hates people who smoke
and drink. The two of them are the first,
original odd couple.
Studs Terkel: They had a feud,
Paul Tibbets: Yeah, but neither one of them
showed it. Each one of
them had a job to do.
Studs Terkel: Did Oppenheimer tell you
about the destructive nature
of the bomb?
Paul Tibbets: No.
Studs Terkel: How did you know about that?
Paul Tibbets: From Dr Ramsey. He said the
only thing we can tell you
about it is, it's
going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of
TNT. I'd never seen 1
lb of TNT blow up. I'd never heard of anybody
who'd seen 100 lbs of
TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was
gonna be one h ell of
a big bang.
Studs Terkel: Twenty thousand tons - that's
equivalent to how many
planes full of bombs?
Paul Tibbets: Well, I think the two bombs
that we used [at
and
used during the war in
Studs Terkel: So Ramsey told you about the
possibilities.
Paul Tibbets: Even though it was still
theory, whatever those guys
told me, that's what
happened. So I was ready to say I wanted to go
to war, but I wanted
to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the
bomb after we dropped
it. I told him that when we had dropped bombs
in Europe and
them - which is also
the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we
do this time? He said,
"You can't fly straight ahead because you'd
be right over the top
when it blows up and nobody would ever know
you were there."
He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding
shock wave. I said,
"Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics.
What is tangency in
this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either
direction. "Turn
159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able
to put yourself the
greatest distance from where the bomb exploded."
Studs Terkel: How many seconds did you have
to make that turn?
Paul Tibbets: I had dropped enough practice
bombs to realize that
the charges would blow
around 1,500 ft in the air, so I would have
40 to 42 seconds to
turn 159 degrees. I went back to Wendover as
quick as I could and
took the airplane up. I got myself to 25,000
ft, and I practiced
turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it
where I could pull it
round in 40 seconds. The tail was shaking
dramatically and I was
afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit.
That was my goal. And
I practiced and practiced until, without even
thinking about it, I
could do it in between 40 and 42, all the time.
So, when that day
came...
Studs Terkel: You got the go-ahead on
August 5.
Paul Tibbets: Yeah. We were in Tinian [the
Pacific] at the time
we got the OK. They had sent this Norwegian to
the weather station
out on Guam [the
I had a copy of his
report. We said that, based on his forecast, the
sixth day of August
would be the best day that we could get over
Honshu [the island on
which
that had to be done to
get the crews ready to go: airplane loaded,
crews briefed, all of
the things checked that you have to check
before you can fly over
enemy territory.
General Groves had a brigadier-general who
was connected back to
thing all the time,
notifying people back there, all by code, that
we were preparing these
airplanes to go any time me after midnight
on the sixth. And
that's the way it worked out. We were ready to go
at about four o'clock
in the afternoon on the fifth and we got word
from the president
that we were free to go: "Use 'me as you wish."
They give you a time
you're supposed to drop your bomb on target and
that was 9.15 in the
morning , but that was
later than Japanese
time. I told Dutch, "You figure it out what time
we have to start after
midnight to be over the target at 9 am."
Studs Terkel: That'd be Sunday morning.
Paul Tibbets: Well, we got going down the
runway at right about 2:15
am and we took off, we
met our rendezvous guys, we made our flight
up to what we call the
initial point, that would be a geographic
position that you
could not mistake. Well, of course we had the best
one in the world with
the rivers and bridges and that big shrine.
There was no mistaking
what it was.
Studs Terkel: So you had to have the right
navigator to get it on
the button.
Paul Tibbets: The airplane has a bomb sight
connected to t he
autopilot and the
bombardier puts figures in there for where he
wants to be when he
drops the weapon, and that's transmitted to the
airplane. We always
took into account what would happen if we had a
failure and the bomb
bay doors didn't open: we had a manual release
put in each airplane
so it was right down by the bombardier and he
could pull on that.
And the guys in the airplanes that followed us
to drop the
instruments needed to know when it was going to go. We
were told not to use
the radio, but, hell, I had to. I told them I
would say, "One
minute out," "Thirty seconds out," "Twenty seconds"
and "Ten"
and then I'd count, "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four
seconds", which
would give them a time to drop their cargo. They
knew what was going on
because they knew where we were. And that's
exactly the way it!
worked , it was absolutely perfect.
After we got the airplanes in formation I
crawled into the tunnel
and went back to tell
the men, I said, "You know what we're doing
today?" They
said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I
said, "Yeah,
we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit
special." My tail
gunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said,
"Colonel, we
wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I
said, "Bob,
you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in
the front end and I
told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer,
in turn. I said,
"OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They
listened intently but
I didn't see any change in their faces or
anything else. Those
guys were no idiots. We'd been fiddling round
with the most
peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen. So we're coming
down.
We get to that point where I say "one
second" and by the time I'd
got that second out of
my mouth the airplane had lurched, because
10,000 lbs had come
out of the front. I'm in this turn now, tight as
I can get it, that
helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my
airspeed and
everything else all the way round. When I level out,
the nose is a little bit
high and as I look up there the whole sky
is lit up in the
prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my
life. It was just
great. I tell people I tasted it. "Well," they
say, "what do you
mean?" When I was a child, if you had a cavity in
your tooth the dentist
put some mixture of some cotton or whatever
it was and lead into
your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I
learned that if I had
a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those
teeth I got this
electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it.
And I knew right away
what it was.
OK, we're all going. We had been briefed to
stay off the radios:
"Don't say a damn
word, what we do is we make this turn, we're going
to get out of here as
fast as we can." I want to get out over the
sea of Japan because I
know they can't find me over there. With that
done we're home free.
Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his
bombardier's report
and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log.
Tom is working on his
log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over
the target?" And
Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee
says: "What lousy
navigating. Fifteen seconds off!"
Studs Terkel: Did you hear an explosion?
Paul Tibbets: Oh yeah. The shockwave was
coming up at us after we
turned. And the tail
gunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he
said that, we got this
kick in the ass. I had accelerometers
installed in all
airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. It
hit us with two and a
half G. Next day, when we got figures from the
scientists on what
they had learned from all the things, they said,
"When that bomb
exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away
from it."
Studs Terkel: Did you see that mushroom
cloud?
Paul Tibbets: You see all kinds of mushroom
clouds, but they were
made with different
types of bombs. The
a mushroom. It was
what I call a stringer. It just came up. It was
black as hell, and it
had light and colors and white in it and grey
color in it and the
top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.
Studs Terkel: Do you have any idea what
happened down below?
Paul Tibbets: Pandemonium! I think it's
best stated by one of the
historians, who said:
"In one micro-second, the city of
didn't exist."
Studs Terkel: You came back, and you
visited President Truman.
Paul Tibbets: We're talking 1948 now. I'm
back in the Pentagon and I
get notice from the
chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of
staff of the air
force. When we got to General Spaatz's office,
General Doolittle was
there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen.
Spaatz said,
"Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants
us to go over to his
office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle
and Spaatz were doing
some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When
we got out of the car
we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office.
There was a black man there who always took
care of Truman's needs
and he said,
"General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?"
And now, facing the
desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and
Shillen. Of course,
militarily speaking, that's the correct order:
because Spaatz is
senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left. Then I
was taken by this man
and put in the chair that was right beside the
president's desk,
beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of
coffee and we got most
of it consumed when Truman walked in and
everybody stood on
their feet.
He said, "Sit down, please," and
he had a big smile on his face and
he said, "General
Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first
chief of the Air
Force," because it was no longer the air corps.
Spaatz said,
"Thank you, sir, it's a great honor and I appreciate
it." And he said
to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you
pulled flying off of
that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a
day's work, Mr.
President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said,
"Colonel Shillen,
I want to congratulate you on having the foresight
to recognize the
potential in aerial refueling. We're gonna need it
bad some day."
And he said thank you very much.
Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he
didn't say anything. And
when he finally did,
he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr.
President, I think I
did what I was told." He slapped his hand on
the table and said:
"You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who
sent you. If anybody
gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."
Studs Terkel: Anybody ever give you a hard
time?
Paul Tibbets: Nobody gave me a hard time.
Studs Terkel: Do you ever have any second
thoughts about the bomb?
Paul Tibbets: Second thoughts? No. Studs,
look. Number one, I got
into the air corps to
defend the
ability. That's what I
believe in and that's what I work for. Number
two, I'd had so much
experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where
there was no
particular direction about how you do it and then of
course I put this
thing together with my own thoughts on how it
should be because when
I got the directive I was to be
self-supporting at all
times. On the way to the target I was
thinking: I can't
think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make
a mistake: maybe I was
too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was
so shot in the ass
with confidence I didn't think there was anything
I couldn't do. Of
course, that applied to airplanes and people. So,
no, I had no problem
with it. I knew we did the right thing because
when I knew we'd be
doing that I thought , yes, we're going to kill
a lot of people, but
by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We
won't have to invade [
Studs Terkel: Why did they drop the second
one, the Bockscar [bomb]
on
Paul Tibbets: Unknown to anybody else - I knew
it, but nobody else
knew - there was a
third one. See, the first bomb went off and they
didn't hear anything
out of the Japanese for two or three days. The
second bomb was
dropped and again they were silent for another
couple of days. Then I
got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay
[chief of staff of the
strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He
said, "You got
another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yes sir."
He said, "Where
is it?" I said, "Over in
here. You and your
crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yes sir." I
sent word back and the
crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed
back to bring it right
on out to
California debarkation
point, the war was over.
Studs Terkel: What did General LeMay have
in mind with the third one?
Paul Tibbets: Nobody knows.
Studs Terkel: One big question. Since
September 11, what are your
thoughts? People talk
about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.
Paul Tibbets: Let's put it this way. I
don't know any more about
these terrorists than
you do, I know nothing. When they bombed the
Trade Centre I
couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many
enemies at different
times. But we knew who they were and where they
were. These people, we
don't know who they are or where they are.
That's the point that
bothers me. Because they're gonna strike
again, I'll put money
on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic.
But they're gonna do
it in their own sweet time. We've got to get
into a position where
we can kill the bastards. None of this
business of taking
them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't
waste five seconds on
them.
Studs Terkel: What about the bomb? Einstein
said the world has
changed since the atom
was split.
Paul Tibbets: That's right. It has changed.
Studs Terkel: And Oppenheimer knew that.
Paul Tibbets: Oppenheimer is dead. He did
something for the world
and people don't
understand. And it is a free world.
Studs Terkel: One last thing, when you hear
people say, "Let's nuke
'em," "Let's
nuke these people," what do you think?
Paul Tibbets: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I
had the choice. I'd wipe
'em out. You're gonna
kill innocent people at the same time, but
we've never fought a
damn war anywhere in the world where they
didn't kill innocent
people. If the newspapers would just cut out
the shit: "You've
killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck
for being there.
Studs Terkel: By the way, I forgot to say
Enola Gay was originally
called number
82. How did your mother feel about having her name on it?
Paul Tibbets: Well, I can only tell you
what my dad said. My mother
never changed her
expression very much about anything, whether it
was serious or light,
but when she'd get tickled, her stomach would
jiggle. My dad said to
me that when the telephone in
mother was quiet
first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he
said: "You should
have seen the old gal's belly jiggle on that one."
Paul Tibbets was born in 1915 and the
interview was conducted some
time in 2002.