"It's hard for people today to think about the atomic bombings without feeling they were just out and out atrocities, but people at the time had a very different sense of what they needed to do," Rhodes said.Imagine a world where John F. He was a man who took great pride in what he did during the war, including the atomic bombing," said Rhodes, who wrote "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." "He was so characteristic of that generation. In his later years, he frequently accepted speaking invitations and signed books on the bombing of Hiroshima, said granddaughter Kia Tibbets.Īuthor Richard Rhodes said Tibbets' feelings about the bombing he helped plan embodied public opinion at the time. Tibbets again defended the bombing in 1995, when an outcry erupted over a planned 50th anniversary exhibit of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution. government later issued a formal apology. He said the display "was not intended to insult anybody," but the Japanese were outraged. As he flew a B-29 Superfortress over the show, a bomb set off on the runway below created a mushroom cloud. In 1976, he was criticized for re-enacting the bombing during an appearance at a Harlingen, Texas, air show. He moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985. Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. "At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon." "They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions," he said. Tibbets said in 2005 that after the war he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide. "It's a horrible weapon, but war is pretty horrible, too." It was a presidential decision, and he was an officer that carried out his duty," Glenn said.
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John Glenn, a former Marine fighter pilot, said people who criticized Tibbets for piloting the plane that dropped the bomb failed to recognize that an allied invasion of Japan, which the bomb helped avert, would have resulted in the deaths of several million people. History has shown there was no need to criticize him."įormer U.S. 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. The Japanese surrendered a few days later. Three days later, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing at least 60,000 people.
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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. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible." We knew it was going to kill people right and left. "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background.
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"I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story on the 60th anniversary of the bombing. This is a real human being who changed the course of the world inexorably on that August morning." "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," he said in a 1975 interview.įilmmaker Ken Burns said Tibbets' life "helps to take this incredible, gigantic event and personalize it. Tibbets, 92, died at his Columbus home after a two-month decline caused by a variety of health problems, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend.