Pilot who dropped atomic bomb dies

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When Paul Tibbets enlisted in the Army Air Corps, nuclear fission had not even been discovered, but it would fall upon him to unleash its staggering power in war for the first time.

If dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, weighed heavily on the pilot of the Enola Gay, he did not show it over more than 60 years. He did not minimize the deaths it caused, but balanced them against the many lives he and many others believe were saved with a quick end to World War II.

"You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time," Tibbets said in a 1975 interview. "We were at war. ... You use anything at your disposal. There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules in war."

He added, "I sleep clearly every night."

Tibbets, 92, died at his Columbus home Thursday after being in declining health for the past two months.

Tibbets and his crew of 13, flying a bomber named for his mother, dropped the 5-ton "Little Boy" bomb over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killing or injuring at least 140,000. Three days later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing at least 60,000 people. Tibbets did not fly in that mission. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war.

"He said, 'What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch -- and that was me,' " said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, "Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War."

Former U.S. Sen. 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.

"It wasn't his decision. It was a presidential decision, and he was an officer that carried out his duty," Glenn said. "It's a horrible weapon, but war is pretty horrible, too."

Tibbets simply did his duty, his granddaughter said.

"He was in the military 60 years ago. He didn't have the option to say he didn't care for something he was asked to do," Kia Tibbets said. "They asked him to serve his country, and he did."

Tibbets knew he would forever be linked to the dropping of the bomb, and spent a lifetime defending the mission.

Author Richard Rhodes said Tibbets' feelings about the bombing he helped plan embodied public opinion at the time.

"He was so characteristic of that generation. 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."

"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.

Tibbets told friends and family he wanted neither a funeral nor a grave marker when he died, picturing that it would provide a place for his detractors to stage protests. Instead, his family plans to scatter his ashes over the English Channel, where he loved to fly.

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was born Feb. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., 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. Nuclear fission was discovered the following year, and the massive Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb began a few years later.

"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. "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible."

"It did in fact end the war," said Morris Jeppson, the officer who armed the bomb during the Hiroshima flight. "Ending the war saved a lot of U.S. armed forces and Japanese civilians and military. History has shown there was no need to criticize him."

Tibbets said in 2005 that after the war he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide.

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

Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. He moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985.

In 1976, he was criticized for re-enacting the bombing during an appearance at a Harlingen, Texas, air show. As he flew a B-29 Superfortress over the show, a bomb set off on the runway below created a mushroom cloud.

He said the display "was not intended to insult anybody," but the Japanese were outraged. The U.S. government later issued a formal apology.

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.

In his later years, he frequently accepted speaking invitations and signed books on the bombing of Hiroshima, his granddaughter said.

Survivors include his wife, Andrea, and three sons, Paul, Gene and James, as well as a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A grandson named after Tibbets who followed his grandfather into the military is a B-2 bomber pilot stationed in Belgium.