Pilot who dropped atomic bomb on Hiroshima

dies with no regrets 02 November 2007

The American pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb has died, aged 92 - with no regrets. After a series of
strokes and heart failure Paul Tibbets died at his home in Columbus, Ohio. To his dying day, the experienced
pilot insisted he never lost a single's night sleep over the apocalyptic mission and that his main concern was to
do the "best job" he could.
Tibbets, who had flown some of the first
bombing missions over Germany during
World War Two, dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima from B-29 bomber Enola Gay
on August 6 when he was aged 30.
Nicknamed 'Little Boy' the bomb killed
78,000 people instantly but by the end of
1945 the death total had reached 140,000.
After the mission Mr Tibbets said: "If
Dante had been with us on the plane, he
would have been terrified. The city we
had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few
minutes before was now an ugly smudge.
It had completely disappeared under this
awful blanket of smoke and fire."
While Tibbets never regretted the
mission, he did not want a funeral or
headstone erected over his grave for fears
this would be a landmark for protestors.
He stated in an interview with newspaper
the Columbus Dispatch in 1975: "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.
"You've got to take stock and assess the
situation at that time. We were at war.
You use anything at your disposal." He
added: "I sleep clearly every night."
In a recent interview, Tibbets said: "We
A man with no regrets: Paul Tibbetts with the B-29 bomber had feelings, but we had to put them in
(named after his mother) he used to drop the atomic bomb the background. My one concern was to
do the best job I could so we could end
the killing as quickly as possible." He
added, it was his patriotic duty - "to do the right thing".
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was born on February 23, 1915, in Quincy, Illinois, and spent most of his boyhood in
Miami. He was a student at the University of Cincinnati's medical school when he decided to withdraw in 1937
to enlist in the Army Air Corps. He became a brigadier general before leaving the military in 1966. Later he
became president of Executive Jet Aviation, a Columbus-based international air-taxi service. Tibbets will be
cremated and his ashes scattered in the English Channel, which he loved to fly over during the war.