68 Facts About Paul Tibbets

Paul Tibbets is best known as the aircraft captain who flew the B-29 Superfortress known as the Enola Gay when it dropped a Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

In July 1942, the 97th became the first heavy bombardment group to be deployed as part of the Eighth Air Force, and Paul Tibbets became deputy group commander.

Paul Tibbets flew the lead plane in the first American daylight heavy bomber mission against Occupied Europe on 17 August 1942, and the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe on 9 October 1942.

Paul Tibbets returned to the United States in February 1943 to help with the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

Paul Tibbets commanded the 308th Bombardment Wing and 6th Air Division in the late 1950s, and was military attache in India from 1964 to 1966.

Paul Tibbets then attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, and became an initiated member of the Epsilon Zeta chapter of Sigma Nu fraternity in 1934.

Paul Tibbets transferred to the University of Cincinnati after his second year to complete his pre-med studies there, because the University of Florida had no medical school at the time.

Paul Tibbets was commissioned as a second lieutenant and received his pilot rating in 1938 at Kelly Field in San Antonio.

Paul Tibbets did not inform his family or his commanding officer, and the couple arranged for the notice to be kept out of the local newspaper.

Paul Tibbets III was born in 1940, in Columbus, Georgia, and graduated from Huntingdon College and Auburn University.

Paul Tibbets was a colonel in the United States Army Reserve and worked as a hospital pharmacist.

The younger son, Gene Wingate Paul Tibbets, was born in 1944, and was at the time of his death in 2012 residing in Georgiana in Butler County in southern Alabama.

In June 1941, Paul Tibbets transferred to the 9th Bombardment Squadron of the 3d Bombardment Group at Hunter Field, Savannah, Georgia, as the engineering officer, and flew the A-20 Havoc.

On 7 December 1941, Paul Tibbets heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while listening to the radio during a routine flight.

Paul Tibbets remained on temporary duty with the 3d Bombardment Group, forming an anti-submarine patrol at Pope Army Airfield, North Carolina, with 21 B-18 Bolo medium bombers.

In February 1942, Paul Tibbets reported for duty with the 29th Bombardment Group as its engineering officer.

Paul Tibbets flew the lead bomber Butcher Shop for the first American daylight heavy bomber mission on 17 August 1942, a shallow-penetration raid against a marshalling yard in Rouen in Occupied France, with Armstrong as his co-pilot.

On 9 October 1942, Paul Tibbets led the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe, attacking industrial targets in the French city of Lille.

On that first mission, Paul Tibbets saw in real time that his bombs were falling on innocent civilians.

Paul Tibbets had flown 25 combat missions against targets in France when the 97th Bomb Group was transferred to North Africa as part of Major General Jimmy Doolittle's Twelfth Air Force.

Paul Tibbets said that he saw the real effects of bombing civilians and the trauma of losing his brothers in arms.

In January 1943, Paul Tibbets, who had now flown 43 combat missions, was assigned as the assistant for bomber operations to Colonel Lauris Norstad, Assistant Chief of Staff of Operations of the Twelfth Air Force.

Paul Tibbets had recently been given a battlefield promotion to colonel, but did not receive it, as such promotions had to be confirmed by a panel of officers.

Paul Tibbets did not get along well with Norstad, or with Doolittle's chief of staff, Brigadier General Hoyt Vandenberg.

Paul Tibbets protested that flak would be most effective at that altitude.

When challenged by Norstad, Paul Tibbets said he would lead the mission himself at 6,000 feet if Norstad would fly as his co-pilot.

Paul Tibbets found that without defensive armament and armor plating, the aircraft was 7,000 pounds lighter, and its performance was much improved.

Crews were reluctant to embrace the troublesome B-29, and to overcome crew anxiety, Paul Tibbets taught and certified two Women Airforce Service Pilots, Dora Dougherty and Dorothea Moorman, to fly the B-29 as demonstration pilots, and the crews' attitude changed.

On 1 September 1944, Paul Tibbets reported to Colorado Springs Army Airfield, the headquarters of the Second Air Force, where he met with its commander, Major General Uzal Ent, and three representatives of the Manhattan Project, Lieutenant Colonel John Lansdale Jr.

Paul Tibbets was told that he would be in charge of the 509th Composite Group, a fully self-contained organization of about 1,800 men, which would have 15 B-29s and a high priority for all kinds of military stores.

Paul Tibbets was considerably younger than both men and had experience in both staff and command duties in heavy bomber combat operations.

Paul Tibbets was already an experienced B-29 pilot, which made him an ideal candidate for the top-secret project.

Paul Tibbets indicated that the decision on what aircraft to use to deliver the bomb was left to him.

Paul Tibbets was promoted to colonel in January 1945 and brought his wife and family along with him to Wendover.

Paul Tibbets felt that allowing married men in the group to bring their families would improve morale, although it put a strain on his own marriage.

At one point, Paul Tibbets found that Lucy had co-opted a scientist to unplug a drain.

On 5 August 1945, Paul Tibbets formally named his B-29 Enola Gay after his mother.

Paul Tibbets recalled that the city was covered with a tall mushroom cloud after the bomb was dropped.

Paul Tibbets was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by Spaatz immediately after landing on Tinian.

Paul Tibbets became a celebrity, with pictures and interviews of his wife and children in the major American newspapers.

Paul Tibbets was seen as a national hero who had ended the war with Japan.

Paul Tibbets was interviewed extensively by Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch, and profiles appeared in the newspaper on anniversaries of the first dropping of an atomic bomb.

Paul Tibbets was a technical advisor to the 1946 Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, but he and his Enola Gay crew were not chosen to drop another atomic bomb.

Paul Tibbets then attended the Air Command and Staff School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

Paul Tibbets was convinced that the bombers of the future would be jet aircraft and thus became involved in the Boeing B-47 Stratojet program.

Paul Tibbets subsequently served as B-47 project officer at Boeing in Wichita from July 1950 until February 1952.

Paul Tibbets then became commander of the Proof Test Division at Eglin Air Force Base in Valparaiso, Florida, where flight testing of the B-47 was conducted.

Paul Tibbets returned to Maxwell Air Force Base, where he attended the Air War College.

Paul Tibbets left Lucy and his sons behind in Alabama, and he and Lucy divorced that year.

Paul Tibbets returned to the United States in February 1956 to command the 308th Bombardment Wing at Hunter Air Force Base, Georgia, and married her in the base chapel on 4 May 1956.

In January 1958, Paul Tibbets became commander of the 6th Air Division at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

Paul Tibbets spent 22 months there on this posting, which ended in June 1966.

Paul Tibbets retired from the United States Air Force on 31 August 1966.

Paul Tibbets was one of the founding board members and attempted to extend the company's operations to Europe, but was unsuccessful.

Paul Tibbets retired from the company in 1968, and returned to Miami, Florida, where he had spent part of his childhood.

Paul Tibbets succeeded Sundlun as president on 21 April 1976, and remained in the role until 1986.

Paul Tibbets served for a year as a consultant before his second and final retirement from EJA in 1987.

Paul Tibbets IV was promoted to brigadier general in 2014, and became Deputy Director for Nuclear Operations at the Global Operations Directorate of the United States Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Paul Tibbets died in his Columbus, Ohio, home on 1 November 2007, at the age of 92.

Paul Tibbets had suffered small strokes and heart failure during his final years and had been in hospice care.

Paul Tibbets was survived by his French-born wife, Andrea, and two sons from his first marriage, Paul III and Gene as well as his son, James, from his second marriage.

Paul Tibbets had asked for no funeral or headstone, because he feared that opponents of the bombing might use it as a place of protest or destruction.

On this date Colonel Paul Tibbets flew a B-29 type aircraft in a daring daylight strike against the city of Hiroshima on the main island of Honshu, Japan, from a base in the Marianas Islands carrying for the first time a type of bomb totally new to modern warfare.

Paul Tibbets successfully dropped his bomb upon reaching the Target city, this single attack being the culmination of many months of tireless effort, training and organization unique in the Army Air Forces history, during which he constantly coped with new problems in precision bombing and engineering.

An interview with Paul Tibbets appeared in the movie Atomic Cafe, as well as was in the 1970s British documentary series The World at War, and the "Men Who Brought the Dawn" episode of the Smithsonian Networks' War Stories.

Paul Tibbets figured largely in the 2000 book Duty: A Father, His Son and the Man Who Won the War by Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune.

Paul Tibbets said that he had not intended for the re-enactment to insult the Japanese people.

Paul Tibbets was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1996.