armed forces and Japanese civilians and military. “It did in fact end the war,” said Morris Jeppson, the officer who armed the bomb during the Hiroshima flight. dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki 72 hours later the Japanese surrendered shortly thereafter, ending the war. “The objective was to stop the fighting, thereby saving further loss of life on both sides.”Įstimates of deaths in Hiroshima top 140,000 within one year of the blast, which rose up in a massive mushroom of smoke and fire, the shape and image itself destined to become a visceral cultural icon in the years to come. Once the targets were named and presidential approval received, we were to deliver the weapon as expeditiously as possible consistent with good tactics,” Gen. I’m not sure what that phrase means, “or injured.” Today it means a broken fingernail, but then it was more significant, as the WaTimes coverage clarifies quoting Tibbets, The blast killed or injured at least 140,000. Tibbets, a 30-year-old colonel at the time, and his crew of 13 dropped the five-ton “Little Boy” bomb over Hiroshima the morning of Aug. The Generals and Admirals were generally ready to fight to the last man standing in Japan, until the Emperor said no. The war ended in August 1945 only because of the unprecedented entry of the Emperor into Japanese politics, after the atomic bombs. 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.Ĭonsidering the estimates AT THAT TIME were over a million Allied casualties, and more than that on the Japanese side, I think Tibbets has the moral high ground here. 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 him 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 Thursday after six decades of steadfastly defending the mission. In recent years he has made the news about being unrepentant over what some vocal (revisionist) critics consider a war crime. Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, best known as the pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb onto the Japanese war-supporting city of Hiroshima, has died at the age of 92.