PAUL TIBBETS HAS PASSED AWAY AT 92

[The Swagman]

Pilot of Hiroshima bomber dies

The pilot of the plane that ushered in the age of atomic warfare with the first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, died Thursday at the age of 92, a spokesman said.

Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., whose B-29 bomber dubbed the Enola Gay dropped the 9,000-pound "Little Boy" bomb on August 6, 1945, died at his home in the midwest city of Columbus, Ohio.

He had been suffering from heart problems, manager and publisher Gerry Newhouse told AFP.

Tibbets was more than just the pilot. He was instrumental in redesigning and testing the plane used to carry the massive bomb and organizing and training the men needed to deliver it.

Tibbets never regretted the bombing that led to the end of World War II but at a horrific price: 140,000 dead immediately and 80,000 other Japanese succumbing in the aftermath, according to Hiroshima officials.

"That's what it took to end the war," he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003. "I went out to stop the killing all over."

Aware that not everyone agrees with his view of history, Tibbets asked his family to cremate him so his grave site would not be desecrated by detractors, Newhouse said.

Tibbets was just a 30-year-old lieutenant colonel when he piloted the plane named after his mother. Decades later, the memory of the first atomic bomb fired in war stayed vivid in his mind.

"If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified," Tibbets once said.

"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."

Though Tibbets saw little of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima, he would walk the streets of Nagasaki a few weeks after the second atom bomb was dropped there.

He went to sate "academic curiosity," he explained, buying a half dozen lacquered rice bowls and a few hand-carved wooden saucers from a street vendor before he left.

"A couple of the streets we walked had swelled," he told the Dispatch, as he described the buckling of the earth caused by the intensity of the blast. "Damnedest thing you've ever seen."

Tibbets stayed in the Air Force after the Japanese surrender, eventually making his way up to the rank of brigadier general before retiring in 1966 when he retired to fly private planes in Europe and then Ohio.

A highly decorated pilot who was the hero of the 1952 film Above and Beyond, he nonetheless endured a spate of urban legends that he had been imprisoned, institutionalized or committed suicide out of guilt.

"They said I was crazy," he groused in 2003, "said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions. At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon."

Born in Quincy, Illinois on February 23, 1915, Tibbets decided he wanted to be a pilot during his first flight at age 12 when he threw Baby Ruth candy bars to a crowd as an advertising stunt.

His parents wanted him to be a doctor, and Tibbets spent several years in medical school before he enlisted as a flying cadet in 1937 with the Army Air Corps.

He flew a number of bombing missions in Nazi occupied Europe and Algeria before returning to the United States in March 1943 to test the combat capability of the problem-plagued B-29.

He was briefed on the Manhattan Project — the US wartime nuclear initiative — in September 1944 and was told to organize and train a unit to deliver the bombs and supervise the modification of the B-29.

President Harry Truman gave his approval to drop the bomb in the afternoon of August 5, 1945.

Tibbets and his crew lifted off from a base on the Pacific island of Tinian at 2:45 am for an uneventful six and a half hour flight to Japan. They dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in combat at 9:15 plus 15 seconds (8:15 Hiroshima time) and returned to base at 2:58 pm.

He didn't tell the crew that the bomb they were going to drop was c@#t well into the flight.

"As the bomb left the airplane we took over manual control, made an extremely steep turn to try and put as much distance between us and the explosion as possible," he once said.

"After we felt the explosion hit the airplane, that is the concussion waves, we knew the bomb had exploded so we took a turn around to look at it. The sight that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected.

"We saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with its tremendous mushroom on top. Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima."

[Holger Danske]

Horrible mission to be send on.
Rest easy, Paul.

[Tab]

I think any one who remembers WW2 would have had very few qualms in dropping the bomb

[Holger Danske]

I think any one who remembers WW2 would have had very few qualms in dropping the bomb

You are probaly right there Tab.
I where thinking more of the time after the war.
I think that every one on that plane must have been affected by it for the rest of their lifes.
Well, i would have been anyway.

[harry hackedoff]

Tibbets wasn`t. Leonard Cheshire was there as a RAF observer.
Both of them saw the reality of what that bomb meant in a totally different way to people today who were not faced with the invasion of Japan.
Based on American actual losses in the islands war and particulary those on Okinawa, the predicted losses for an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands was one million Allied dead, minimum.

The Japanese govt had been offered unconditional surrender and they were told they would face losses on an unimaginable scale if they refused.
They made the wrong choice.
Tibbets slept well because he did the right thing.

[Wholley]

I met Brig.Gen.Tibbets some fifteen years ago at the University of North Carolina-Asheville where he spoke to the OTC and received a standing ovation.
Not relevant really,just thought I'd mention it.

[harry hackedoff]

I know mate, he told me all about it
"Gee Harry, some faggot wanted to play with mah flute in the heads" was what he said .

The Manhattan Project was huge.
Huge even by today’s standards.
And once they had a deliverable weapon the decision as to wether to use it or not passed from a strategic military to a political dimension.
(Ivan was starting to get gobby and I`m sure it was used to warn him off European expansion, as an aside)
There is no doubt in my mind that using the Hiroshima device was the right thing to do and the decision to follow up with the Nagasaki device was a direct result of the Japanese prevarication.

The invasion of Japan was to be an Allied affair involving all of the Western Allies and the one million plus deaths justified the course of action taken by the Americans(with the full co-operation of the British)

If you look at the KIA and wounded on Iwo Jima and Okinawa then the one million plus estimate looks extremely optimistic. Any Bootneck will tell you what the figures are for an opposed beach landing, at least sixty per cent.
So I say good effort matey, well done Paul. Bomb the fark out of them because you saved Allied lives.

And for any of you wrestling with your conscience, that is a “good thing”

[Holger Danske]

the predicted losses for an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands was one million Allied dead, minimum.

Your are all right. I tend to forget how bloody WWII was.
The numbers are so freaking huge that it's impossible imagine.

[harry hackedoff]

H, (do you mind if I call you H, by the way ) the Operation to invade was well into the planning stage.
Called Operation Olympus I think.
The planning staff had no idea about Manhattan because it was beyond ultra secret and so they carried on as if the Op was a go-er.
Units in UK, Europe and America were being told not to get too excited about VE Day because they were going on a long journey.....
Olympus wouldn’t happen straight off the back of Okinawa though. There would be a prolonged period of intense blockade coupled with conventional bombing of an unprecedented scale. The entire Japanese home islands would be reduced to starvation, there would be no logistic capability, no infrastructure, no medical or civil emergency services and hundreds of thousands would die from disease and malnutrition.
Using the bombs saved all those people as well as the projected Allied losses.
This wasn`t a video game. This was the real deal. And while it was a tragic event for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government must take full responsibility for that, not the Allies.

[Tab]

I think we should get the deaths in perspective from the Atom Bomb. When the Americans firebombed Tokyo more people died in the flames of that one raid than died in both atomic bomb explosion, yet every one says how bad the bomb was, or have they got heads stuck up their ars*

[Holger Danske]

H, (do you mind if I call you H, by the way ) the Operation to invade was well into the planning stage.
Called Operation Olympus I think.
The planning staff had no idea about Manhattan because it was beyond ultra secret and so they carried on as if the Op was a go-er.

No, i don't mind.
Yeah, i remember reading about Niels Bohr and how they lived on that base for a looong time under intense surveillance.

When the Americans firebombed Tokyo more people died in the flames of that one raid than died in both atomic bomb explosion

Can't remember hearing about this actually..

[harry hackedoff]

It`s true H. This would have been the routine in every Jap city if Olympus was a goer.
Houses in Tokyo were constructed from timber and the fire storm that resulted did cause more deaths than the Atomic bombs.

Don`t you ever read second world war history then

[Holger Danske]

Yes i did.
But i can't remember this bit.
I'll check up on it.

[Holger Danske]

Found this on Wiki.

The first firebombing raid was on Kobe on February 3, 1945, and following its relative success the USAAF continued the tactic. Japanese cities were susceptible to such attack, but the most favorable conditions for success were areas with few firebreaks and high surface winds. Much of the armor and defensive weaponry of the bombers was also removed to allow increased bomb loads, but ultimately loads were increased by the use of low altitudes for fuel conservation, with individual aircraft bomb loads increasing from 2.6 tons per plane in March to 7.3 tons in August. The increased bomb load allowed for a longer drop line. The firebombing tactic involved planes flying in three lines and dropping either napalm or incendiary bombs every 50 feet (15 m). When the distance was changed to 100 feet (30 m) the results were not as successful.

The first such raid on Tokyo was on the night of February 23, when 174 B-29s destroyed around one square mile (~2.56 km²) of the city. Following on that effort, 334 B-29s took off from the Mariana Islands on the night of March 9 heading for Tokyo. Robert Guillain, a French journalist living in Tokyo and a witness to the bombing attack, described what happened as the U.S. B-29s arrived over Tokyo:

They set to work at once, sowing the sky with fire. Bursts of light flashed everywhere in the darkness like Christmas trees, lifting their flame high into the night, then fell back to earth in whistling bouquets of jagged flame. Barely quarter of an hour after the raid started, the fire, whipped by the wind, began to scythe its way through the density of that wooden city. As they fell, cylinders scattered a kind of flaming dew that skidded along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed, and spreading a wash of dancing flames everywhere. The first version of napalm. Roofs collapsed under the bombs’ impact, and within minutes the frail houses of wood and paper were aflame, lighted from the inside like paper lanterns.

After 2 hours of bombardment, Tokyo was engulfed in a firestorm. The fires were so hot they would ignite the clothing on individuals as they were fleeing. Many women were wearing what were called 'air-raid turbans' around their heads, and the heat would ignite those turbans like a wick on a candle. This was the worst disaster for Tokyo since the 1923 earthquake. The death toll was at least 80,000, and perhaps exceeded 100,000. This may have been the most devastating single raid ever carried out by aircraft in any war including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the firebombing of Dresden.

And a picture of Tokyo burning.

[The Swagman]

Wholley quote:

I met Brig.Gen.Tibbets some fifteen years ago at the University of North Carolina-Asheville where he spoke to the OTC and received a standing ovation.
Not relevant really,just thought I'd mention it.

It is very relevant mate. Nice one.