Mount Ayr Record-News
Mount Ayr, Ringgold County, Iowa
Thursday, August 02, 2012

August 06, 1945 ~ A single plane dropped a single bomb that effectively ended the second world war. The pilot, Colonel Paul TIBBETS, was raised in Cedar Rapids, IA where his father was a confectionery salesman. He joined the U.S. Army Air Force as a flying cadet in 1937. He flew B-17s in Europe and by 1944 he was considered the "best flyer in the Army Air Force." In 1944 he returned to the US to test and fly the newly developed B-29 Superfortress.

In 1945 General "Hap" ARNOLD selected TIBBETS to head a special group, the 509th Composite, a top-secret military unit to deliver the world's firstatomic bomb. The development of the B-29 Superfortress made possible the bombing of the Japanese home islands from bases like Tinian in the Mariannas. Aware of the historic nature of his mission, TIBBETS named his B-29 after his mother, Enola Gay, who had encouraged his desire to fly.

The plane, built in the Martin bomber plat in Bellevue, NE, had been selected by Colonel TIBBETS while it was still on the assembly line.

Extensive modifications had to be made to carry the atomic bomb -- pneumatic bomb doors, special propellers, modified engines and the deletion of protective armor and armaments.

The bomb, a uranium atomic bomb, called "Little Boy" by its designers, was an unknown quantity.

Enola Gay navigator, Theodore "Dutch" Van KIRK, said even when the mission was in progress that no one knew whether it would work and if it did, what the effects would be.

Because of the potential power of the weapon, TIBBETS developed a special diving maneuver which would get the plane away from the point of detonation.

The bomb was dropped from 31,000 feet at 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time. The crew had just 45 seconds to get the Enola Gay at least eight miles from the blast, a distance that experts said was necessary to keep the plant from being ripped apart by shock waves.

Despite the wide-spread destruction, Japanese militarists refused to surrender, so on August 9, 1945, a second atomic bomb, a plutonium bomb called "Fat Man," was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki from a B-29 called Bockscar, piloted by Major Charles SWEENEY.

In the years following the second world war, many have questioned the morality of using such a terrible weapon. TIBBETS never did. He believed that the bomb saved more lives than it took by removing the necessity of an invasion of the Japanese home islands and ending the war.

Allied POWs like Louis ZAMPERINI in the book, Unbroken, would agree. They had reason to believe that Japanese militarists planned to carry out a "kill all" order by August 22, 1945.

So did Bob GREENE, the author of the book, Duty, A Father, His Son, And The Man Who Won The War.

GREENE'S father was one of many thousands of veterans of the European war who were being sent home to be retrained to invade Japan. Because of fanatical Japanese resistance, GREENE'S father did not believe that he would survive the invasion.

Following the end of the war, he returned home to Columbus, OH, married and had children. Ironically, living in Columbus, OH at that time was Paul TIBBETS who he always described as "the man who won the war."

Transciption by Sharon R. Becker, August of 2012

 

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