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He later said, “ the only thing we can tell you about it is, ‘It’s going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT.’ I’d never seen one pound of TNT blow up. Tibbets was not completely briefed on the nature of the Little Boy bomb. This led to him being chosen to command the atomic bombing mission in Japan. He even served as a personal pilot to General Dwight Eisenhower.Īfter returning to the US in 1944, Tibbets did test flying of development B-29s. Over the course of the combat missions he flew in Europe during the first part of World War II, Tibbets earned a reputation as one of the best fliers in the service. After dropping out of college, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
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He said, ‘If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don’t give a damn.’ Then Mom just quietly said, ‘Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you’re going to be all right.’” Tibbets later said, “My dad never supported me with the flying. On August 5th, while preparing for the mission, pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets named the B-29 after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. The planned attack on Hiroshima for August 1st was postponed for a few days because of a typhoon.
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On one, it dropped a 6300 “pumpkin” bomb, designed to simulate the “Fat Man” atomic bomb (the code name reportedly referred to Sydney Greenstreet’s character in the movie The Maltese Falcon), which would soon be dropped on Nagasaki. In the month leading up to the Hiroshima bombing, the plane, still unnamed, flew eight practice missions and two regular bombing missions over Japan. The Navy turned it into a 40,000-person military base. The island, formerly under Japanese control and used as a sugar plantation, had been seized by U.S. The plane arrived on the South Seas island of Tinian in July 1945. The most famous war plane in history was built in 1945, as part of a batch of 15 Silverplate B-29 bombers specially modified for atomic bombing missions.