An American Hero

Few decisions in American history have been attended by as much controversy as President Harry Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan in an effort to quickly end World War II. And perhaps no other figure in aviation history has borne a greater burden than the man who piloted the aircraft that delivered the first atomic bomb to its target. Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. did not ask for nor deserve the controversy generated by his historic mission to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, but it dogged him for the rest of his life.

Brigadier General Tibbets died at age 92 on November 1, 2007, steadfastly maintaining to the end that the mission for which he has been lionized by some and condemned by others was necessary. As he put it succinctly in an interview for the September 1995 issue of Aviation History: “The use of the bomb helped save countless American, Allied and Japanese lives, and helped hasten the end of World War II. It also demonstrated the specter of atomic destruction, such that those weapons have never again been used in anger. But the most important thing to me will always be the fact that we convinced the Japanese that it was futile to continue fighting.”

A nearly 30-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Tibbets flew 58 missions in Europe and North Africa during WWII before piloting a B-29 named after his mother on his sole Pacific mission. Less than a year earlier, he had been tasked with organizing and training the 509th Composite Bomb Group to deliver the first atomic weapons. “We had a mission,” he remarked in 1994. “Quite simply, bring about the end of World War II. I feel fortunate to have been chosen to command that organization and to lead them into combat. To my knowledge, no other officer has since been accorded the scope of the responsibilities placed on my shoulders at that time.”

As Tibbets observed on numerous occasions, the thing most often absent in debates about the morality of the atomic bomb missions is context. Too often contemporary writers impose modern sensibilities on events that cannot be fully understood without taking into account the times in which they occurred. “No. 1, there is no morality in warfare—forget it,” he told The New York Times in 1995. “No. 2, when you’re fighting a war to win, you use every means at your disposal to do it.”

“Most writers have looked to the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to find answers for the use of these atomic weapons,” Tibbets wrote in 1994. “The real answers lay in thousands of graves from Pearl Harbor around the world to Normandy and back again.”

Ask any WWII veteran or their family members if the atomic bomb missions were justified, and you’ll get a resounding “Yes!” And who could be better qualified to pass judgment on this terrible but necessary decision than the men and women who put their lives on the line to rid the world of Axis aggression?

As the National Aviation Hall of Fame, which enshrined Tibbets in 1996, observed, “It is well documented that generations owe their lives to the true heroism of Paul Tibbets.” There could be no more fitting epitaph for an American hero.

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