Paul Tibbets; Someone everyone should know

Posted By Deebow

The world is an emptier place today.  AP wires carried this story a little over an hour ago.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday. He was 92 and insisted for six decades after the war that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night.

Paul Tibbets lead and participated in one of the top 5 (in my opinion) events of the 20th Century and probably one of the top 10 events in human history.  He was genuinely low key about it.

"I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published 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."

The entire story is here.  Der Spiegel did an interview in 2005 with Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator of the Enola Gay that is pretty good.

And even in his waning hours, Paul was low-key.

Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, Newhouse said.

And we all remember the revisionists wanted to ensure the Smithsonian didn't have anything positive to say about this historic event that saved the lives of millions of our fighting men who would have perished in trying to invade Japan.  The hippies from the Baby Boom generation who scream about "NO NUKES!" and protest the war in Iraq will never know the sacrifices made by these men to ensure their liberty to disrespect their country.  Many of the men that would become their fathers would not be here today without dropping these bombs.

Although there are those, thankfully in the majority, that chose another path.  It is also another point to my theory that warriors are born to warriors.

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

He knew the cost of war and what he was doing.  He also knew that he could save lives by dropping this bomb. 

Is there any doubt that he was part of the "Greatest Generation?"  He retired from the Air Force in 1966 at the rank of Brigadier General and then ran his own air taxi service, from which he retired in 1985.

This is one of the last pictures of General Tibbets with this immortal aircraft in 2003.

God rest your immortal soul Paul, and thank you for ensuring that "this nation shall not perish from this earth."

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Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, the pilot of Enola Gay, slipped the surly bonds today at the age of 92. B5 has a good post and good links. He ought to be remembered for what he was-- a fine American who... [Read More]

Comments

[David]

My father MAY have flown practice missions with Tibbits in the months before Hiroshima. I say may as he was an scientific observer and never saw who flew the planes.

[Lands’nGrooves]

RIP sir.

[jordan]

Kind of sad that revisionists have called into question the rightness of this decision, and placed these individual servicemen in a position where they have to rationalize it. These aircrews were flying into the unknown, with unknowable consequences. It required heroism, and they should be given their due. Thanks, Gen. Tibbetts.

One less survivor of the last Greatest Generation...

[defendusa]

Another hero in my book...no regrets!! He is the man. RIP and God Bless you and yours, Sir.

[Goob]

Let's celebrate his life more than mourn his death. He had a good one, and he deserved it.

[mindy1]

I kind of have mixed feelins about this. While it was historical, and probably saved lives, it also opened up an era where one weapon could kill many people at once. It made killing easier, not harder. His intentions were good, no doubt, but I am personally uncomfortable with anything thing that makes killing easy. Insult me at will.

[Cincinnati_Bob]

Echo Deebow.

PS - Let's also not forget that potentially All Japanese would have been killed in a never ending war with the USA.

After victory in Europe, all barrels would have come to bear on Japan, and I believe virtually every Japanese person would have been sacrificed by the Emperor before it was over given conventional weapons.

And 2, I don't know if it is true, but I saw a documentary of sorts explaining that Japan was very close to releasing long range bombers that were to release little parachute packages of biological weapons on the US. Bubonic plague, Hemorrhagic fever. Nasty stuff. Certainly if this is true, Harry Truman had no choice in the matter and it's a damn good thing Robert Oppenheimer and crew got the work done on time.

Well, Mindy, we or no one has ever used it to kill since. Maybe that's the way it shall be.

[Cincinnati_Bob]

PS - an absolutely super page on the

Enola Gay

[Casey]

Deebow, I'd like to pick a middlin-important nit: the nukes didn't save millions of US lives, as you put it. In fact, estimates based on the previous 12 months of Pacific warfare indicated an expected value of about a half-million casualties for the invasion of Japan proper.

Apparently, over the years, half-million mutated into a million (or millions), and casualties mutated into dead.

Even "only" a half-million additional casualties would have been nasty, and IIRC that would have included another 50,000 dead. Compare that to the c. 400,000 deaths suffered; it's not a trivial number.

mindy1: we didn't need the nukes just to get more dead bodies. Haven't you ever heard of the Tokyo firebombings? The March 9 raid alone killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people, and quite frankly I'd rather be a ground zero than burn to death, or worse yet boil to death. Several thousand civilians suffered that exact fate as they tried to shelter in city swimming pools or canals. The heat was so intense the water cooked those people to death.

LeMay -in his book Superfortress stated that the XX Air Force had gotten to the point where they were wiping out one city per day via firebombing by mid-1945. Add to that the imminent starvation of the islands (see also: North Korea today) since 99% of all shipments had been interdicted by the US Navy, and I have to conclude that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks were relatively humane.

[Jay Crawford]

Mindy, you're fine; no one will insult you for wanting to avoid killing. Weapons of mass destruction make it easier (from a logistical point of view) to destroy cities but, as Cincinatti_Bob points out, atomic/nuclear weapons haven't been used again. This is because special weapons of this power have become their own category of war and while wars have continued, the intimidation value of nuclear weapons has kept safe the homelands of their owners.
And Casey, don't forget that Operation Olympic (the invasion of the southern home island of Kyushu) would have involved MASSIVE Japanese resistance. In fact, though the U.S. Navy patrolled the waters around Kyushu, we could NOT prevent the Japanese from doubling their forces on Kyushu (with reinforcements from Honshu) in the months leading up to August 1945. Adding a (nominal) couple million of civilian militia to a force of at least 300-400,000 soldiers fighting on rough home territory, gave the Japanese a substantial defensive capability. U.S. military intelligence knew this and knew that the resulting battles would probable cost 100,000+ American lives.
What the U.S. intelligence personnel didn't know was that while Japan had used small groups of kamikazes at Okinawa, they were prepared with upwards of 10,000 aircraft and thousands of small explosive-packed boats and "kaiten" suicide torpedoes to use in defense of the home islands.
And then the invasion of Honshu (Operation Coronet) with its larger land mass and more numerous defenders was going to be worse.
Therefore, actual battle planning included plans for MASSIVE preparatory bombardments (which MAY have involved the use of tens of thousands of tons of mustard and lewisite gases against some strategic cities). It was certainly going to be a campaign of artillery and close air support aimed at reducing Japanese fighting/hiding positions, all in the name of trying to keep America's dead casualties (about 400,000 up to that point) from doubling in the 6-12 months of the home island invasions.
Caught in the middle of this was going to be the Japanese civilian population of about 65 million people. Even if the majority of them didn't fight, the small portion (still probably hundreds of thousands) that did fight would have caused the Americans to take fewer chances with "innocent civilians". Unable to tell the intentions of approaching Japanese (whether military or civilian) and in the name of their own survival, the American troops would have cut them down and razed villages and towns where Japanese combatants could have hidden.
It would have been one of the worst bloodbaths in history. And because of its face-to-face aspect of combat, the Japanese would have the basis for a belief that they could win; Emporer Hirohito probably would not have intervened to stop the war until millions had died.
The atomic bombings were different: Against imperial court protocol, Hirohito intervened because he assumed that Japan would be anihilated from the air and their was no possible chance for an armistice. By virtue of the "shock and awe" of the the two rapidly successive bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was convinced not to believe his generals who told him victory was still possible.
Before August 6, 1945, President Truman had issued the order for the use of our only two atomic weapons and killed about a hundred thousand Japanese.
Upon August 15, 1945, Hirohito issued the order for fighting to cease...and saved the lives of millions of Japanese.

[Bob"theRhinoKeeper"]

Rendering proper honors, another great man lost to the ages. I'd have been honored to meet and talk history and flying with this man. It is a sad thing that he felt he needed to request no memorial headstone, this is a man that should have had an honored place in Arlington. I agree with the reasoning for his request though, the moonbats would have trashed the site every August 6 if they had such a site.

[Soldier's Mom]

I, too, had the extreme priviledge of meeting this wonderful man when I still lived in Ohio. I met him through the auspices of a colleague whose father is Colonel Dean Hess, the author of the book "Battle Hymn". Colonel Tibbetts was an absolute delight to be around -- and he has a mind like a steel trap! He apparently met my father once in 1948 at a conference and he remembered him when we met in 2002!

Colonel Tibbetts: May the Almighty hold you in His hands forever and may the Angels of Mercy protect your family until you are joined again.

[ibm1130]

It is just sad that Col Tibbetts had to request an unmarked grave. He deserves much better, more in fact than we could provide. At a minimum, he should have a place in one of the national cemetaries with an armed guard 24/7 to ensure his rest is undisturbed.

[Tantor]

Mindy, the atom bomb did not make it easier to kill people. It made it harder. That's why the Japanese brought their war to a screeching halt. They were prepared to sacrifice "One Hundred Million Lives For The Emperor," as their propaganda went. That's the entire population of Japan plus some of their hostage nations. Once the atom bombs fell, that changed to "No More Lives For The Emperor."

There is also the case to be made that the atom bombs made Hirohito aware that he could be killed. After Hiroshima, he asked the military for a better bomb shelter. When he was told that his was sufficient, the topic of surrender became more urgent in the Imperial Household.

When you argue against the atom bomb, you are arguing for pursuing a conventional war, which would have cost many more lives, making it the inferior moral choice. Waging conventional war would have cost at least hundreds of thousands of Allied, mostly American lives, but it would have also cost millions of Japanese lives, not to mention the lives in their captive Asian nations.

A conventional war would have involved ground, sea, and land attacks. The most deadly would have been by sea, particularly the embargo of the home islands. Japan had a population of about 60 million people and could just about feed itself, but relied on rail and sea transport to distribute that food. Japan also relied heavily on fishing to feed itself. The US Navy would have stopped most fishing and the distribution of food by sea.

Japan is divided into compartments traversed by rail lines. The rail lines would have been cut by our air forces. The various pockets of Japan would have been cut off from supply and starve.

Starving is a process of degrees without any sudden shock. The government can maintain control easily over a starving population. North Korea, with a population of 25 million, suffered a famine in the '90s that killed one to two million people without losing control. If you apply the North Korean example to Japan, Japan might well have lost millions of people to famine without breaking.

While many Japanese would have been killed in direct combat, more killed by their own troops as in Okinawa, more killed in air raids, the great killer would have been starvation. That's the classic killer of civilians in war. That's why War, Famine, Disease, and Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. One leads to another. An atom bomb or two is very much preferable to that.

I met General Tibbets on his 80th birthday at the Cavanaugh air museum at Addison airport north of Dallas. His hearing was shot, probably from being around so many aircraft engines, but he was still alert. I have my photo with him.

If you read his autobiography, he says he had a hard time making general because he chewed a general out once during preparation for a mission over North Africa. The general was new to the war and was trying to do something that had already been proven a bad practice and wouldn't give it up. Tibbets finally blew up in a meeting.

Tibbets didn't get his way. The mission went on as planned and the practice was proven disastrous. Again. The general quietly changed it for the next mission. But later, when Col Tibbets got passed over for general after the war, the Chief of Staff told him that the general he dissed had blocked it, basically out of spite. He had been blackballed in the clubby world at the top.

Tibbets named his plane after his mom because he was on the outs with his wife. He was just gone too much and too inattentive to be a good husband or father, as he admitted.

When Tibbets was a hot shot B-17 pilot at the beginning of the war, when they were figuring out the tactics to bomb mainland Europe, he was given the assignment to fly Gen. Eisenhower down to Africa for the campaign there. The weather was bad and Tibbets wasn't sure he should risk taking off from England with such a valuable passenger. Eisenhower heard him out, thought about it, and said let's go. "I've got a war to win," he said. The other B-17 that took off with them was lost and never found.

It was just that simple for Tibbets and his generation. They had a war to win so they just bore down and got it done.

[Bill M]

I was fortunate to have meant Paul Tibets on several occasions around some shooting competitions while in the military. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations. He carried out a mission that saved hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives. He was a true hero in my eyes. God Bless him. Bill

[Sean G]

An excellent post and a fitting tribute to an American Hero. Its a shame, and a sad testament to our times that he had to opt for no public funeral. His actions, and the actions of his aircrew, though it was likely that many Army pilots and crew could have successfully completed the mission, were directly responsible to ending the war in the Pacific, and saved countless lives.

Another good post on him is to be found at:
http://toomuchliberty.blogspot.com