Latest news with #PaulTibbets
Time of India
20-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
US pilot, who dropped the bomb over Hiroshima recalls his experience; shares horrifying details
World War II was more than just a conflict between nations, it was a deeply scarring tragedy that wrecked generations. The war spanned across six long years, and cost the lives of millions, tore families apart, and left entire cities in ruins. As the war reached its final stages, the world saw a kind of destruction it had never seen before. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. In a single, blinding flash, tens of thousands of lives were lost. People vanished from where they stood. Homes, schools, and streets disappeared into dust. Survivors carried burns, grief, and trauma that would never fully heal. The bombing wasn't just an act of war; it was, in fact, a turning point that forced the world to face the terrifying power of nuclear weapons and the unbearable cost of such violence. This terrifying incident is remembered not just for its historical impact but for the pain it caused and the humanity it forever changed. At the heart of this moment was a man named Colonel Paul Tibbets (later General), the pilot of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the bomb into the city of Hiroshima. He discusses his account of that day and how he lived with its memories in various interviews over the years. He called it the 'most boring' flight of his life Colonel Paul Tibbets, in his reflections on the Hiroshima mission, described the flight as "the most boring flight of my life." He explained, stating, "Nothing went wrong. Everything went exactly as planned." which tells about the meticulous preparation and execution of the mission. Before starting the mission, Tibbets gathered his crew and informed them of the gravity of their task. He told them, "We are on the way to drop a special weapon on target today, which happens to be Hiroshima. The blast and the explosion are going to be big as hell. You've never conceived anything like what we are going to see." This candid briefing was intended to prepare the crew for the unprecedented nature of their mission, as reported by the official handle of the US Air Force. While reflecting on the aftermath of the bombing, in an interview with the Washington Post, Tibbets described the scene as "a city that was a black, boiling mess of tar, tumbling debris, the flames, the steam and the cloud tumbling over it." The impact was immediate and devastating. He had no regrets! Throughout his life, Colonel Tibbets maintained that he had no regrets about the mission. He asserted, "I've never lost a night's sleep over it, and I never will." In a 1982 interview with UPI, Tibbets said, "You've got to remember that the entire population of the United States was behind World War II and the idea was to beat the Japs. With that thought in mind, and war being what it is, give me the same set of conditions and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again." Tibbets revealed the reality to the crew in the air The people who helped make the Hiroshima mission possible, the aircrew, mechanics, engineers, suppliers, and support teams, had no idea what the true purpose of their work was until after it was done. Even the men aboard the Enola Gay didn't fully understand the nature of the mission as they took off. Colonel Paul Tibbets only revealed the truth once they were in the air. He walked to the back of the aircraft to give his crew a pep talk, finally explaining the gravity of the weapon they had nicknamed 'the gimmick. ' Tibbets said he chose to share the details mid-flight to make sure the crew understood just how serious the mission was. Knowing the risks involved, he even offered cyanide capsules to the crew in case anything went wrong. Out of the entire team, only two accepted. While Tibbets is best known for leading the Enola Gay and working on the top-secret Manhattan Project, he said that his military career included other assignments he was proud of, assignments he earned through his leadership and skill. Still, he admitted that flying the atomic bomb mission would always be the defining moment of his life, which most people would question him for. Tibbets accepted the heavy legacy that came with it. He acknowledged that the bomb killed around 80,000 people, and that public opinion about his role would always be divided. But he stood by his decision. He said. 'I thought I was doing the right thing, and I still think I did the right thing. I've had thousands of enlisted men and officers come by and say 'You saved my butt.' That's what I wanted to do, and I'm damn glad.'
Washington Post
12-03-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Don't say (Enola) Gay
In the late 1930s, a young man named Paul Tibbets decided he wanted to fly airplanes for the U.S. Army, which his worried father disapproved of but his mother encouraged — 'Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right,' he once remembered her telling him — and seven or eight years later, when Tibbets piloted the drop of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima that ushered in the horrible end of World War II, he did so in a plane he had named after his supportive mom: Enola Gay.
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Pentagon's DEI Panic
I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I've been thinking of a classic '80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan: Enola Gay It shouldn't ever have to end this way Enola Gay It shouldn't fade in our dreams away The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. It will not fade away: The plane and its mission will always have an important place in military history. But people working in the United States Department of Defense might have a harder time finding a reference to it on any military website, because of an archival sweep of newly forbidden materials at the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a massive review of DOD computer archives in an attempt to 'align' the department with President Donald Trump's directive to eliminate anything on government systems that could be related to DEI. At the Defense Department, this seems to mean scrubbing away any posts or images on military servers that might highlight the contributions of minorities, including gay service members. So far, according to the Associated Press, some 26,000 images have been flagged for deletion, including a photo of the Enola Gay, because … well, gay. Of course, tagging for deletion images such as those of the Enola Gay is likely a mistake made by someone who plugged in gay as a keyword for a global find-and-mark command. The military, like other organizations, loves metrics, and the people in charge of executing the anti-DEI push almost certainly want to be able to show some sort of measurable progress on 'eliminating DEI.' But why not just focus on the president's order to cancel current spending on such programs? As a former DOD employee, I had to sit through some DEI events, and in my view, they were not a great use of government time. I did not need a professor from a local college to come in and explain what cis means. (My first thought during that presentation was: How much are we paying for this?) Hegseth and the Pentagon, however, don't seem particularly focused on pruning all wasteful spending, because they're actually spending money and investing hours of federal-worker time to indulge in a kind of gay panic in the DOD archives. This effort is part of a larger memory-holing exercise that includes not only getting rid of references to sexual minorities, but also eradicating racial and ethnic 'firsts.' As the AP reported: 'The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months—such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.' It's humorous to think that the Enola Gay got caught in a roundup of ostensibly pro-LGBTQ materials, but the whole business raises the question of the purpose behind deleting tens of thousands of images. There is something fundamentally weird about interpreting an order to get rid of DEI programs as a charge to erase pages of American history. What are the lethal warfighters of the Pentagon so afraid of? The most likely answer is that they're afraid of Trump, but the larger problem is that the MAGA movement—including its supporters in the military and the Defense Department—is based on fear and insecurity, a sense that American culture is hostile to them and that Trump is the protector of a minority under siege. Many members of this movement believe that the 'left,' or whatever remains of it now, is engaged in a war on the traditional family, on masculinity, on American capitalism, on Christmas and Christians. They see DEI as one of the many spiritual and moral pathogens that threaten to infect fine young men and women (especially white ones) and turn them into sexually decadent Marxists. They also seem to believe that the way to stop this is to engage in rewriting history so that impressionable young Americans don't accidentally encounter positive images of Black or female or gay service members. After all, there's no telling where that leads. This trepidation reflects a lack of faith in their own children and their fellow citizens, and it is produced in the same bubble of isolation and suspicion that makes parents fearful of letting children move away, especially to go to college. Anxious parents in small towns might not know better, but an immense—and diverse—military organization of 3 million service members and civilians surely does. In the end, however, it doesn't matter whether anyone in the DOD agrees or disagrees with this silly crusade: Orders are orders. In 1953, when Stalin died, the other members of the Soviet leadership soon closed ranks against the chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, a vicious monster of a man who kept tabs on all of them. They put him on trial, shot him in a Moscow bunker, and did not speak of him in public again. After his execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were sent an article on the Bering Strait, with instructions to remove the entry on Beria and replace it with the new entry on the Arctic waterway. Many Soviet citizens did as they were told. Today, no one needs to engage in such complicated methods. If Hegseth's commissars want to replace the history of the Tuskegee Airmen with an article about the soil and weather in Tuskegee, Alabama, a functionary at the Pentagon can do it with a keystroke, while zapping away references to gays, to minorities, to women—perhaps with the hope that one day, no one will even remember what's been lost. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
07-03-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Pentagon's DEI Panic
I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I've been thinking of a classic '80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan: Enola Gay It shouldn't ever have to end this way Enola Gay It shouldn't fade in our dreams away The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. It will not fade away: The plane and its mission will always have an important place in military history. But people working in the United States Department of Defense might have a harder time finding a reference to it on any military website, because of an archival sweep of newly forbidden materials at the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a massive review of DOD computer archives in an attempt to 'align' the department with President Donald Trump's directive to eliminate anything on government systems that could be related to DEI. At the Defense Department, this seems to mean scrubbing away any posts or images on military servers that might highlight the contributions of minorities, including gay service members. So far, according to the Associated Press, some 26,000 images have been flagged for deletion, including a photo of the Enola Gay, because … well, gay. Of course, tagging for deletion images such as those of the Enola Gay is likely a mistake made by someone who plugged in gay as a keyword for a global find-and-mark command. The military, like other organizations, loves metrics, and the people in charge of executing the anti-DEI push almost certainly want to be able to show some sort of measurable progress on 'eliminating DEI.' But why not just focus on the president's order to cancel current spending on such programs? As a former DOD employee, I had to sit through some DEI events, and in my view, they were not a great use of government time. I did not need a professor from a local college to come in and explain what cis means. (My first thought during that presentation was: How much are we paying for this?) Hegseth and the Pentagon, however, don't seem particularly focused on pruning all wasteful spending, because they're actually spending money and investing hours of federal-worker time to indulge in a kind of gay panic in the DOD archives. This effort is part of a larger memory-holing exercise that includes not only getting rid of references to sexual minorities, but also eradicating racial and ethnic 'firsts.' As the AP reported: 'The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months—such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.' It's humorous to think that the Enola Gay got caught in a roundup of ostensibly pro-LGBTQ materials, but the whole business raises the question of the purpose behind deleting tens of thousands of images. There is something fundamentally weird about interpreting an order to get rid of DEI programs as a charge to erase pages of American history. What are the lethal warfighters of the Pentagon so afraid of? The most likely answer is that they're afraid of Trump, but the larger problem is that the MAGA movement—including its supporters in the military and the Defense Department—is based on fear and insecurity, a sense that American culture is hostile to them and that Trump is the protector of a minority under siege. Many members of this movement believe that the 'left,' or whatever remains of it now, is engaged in a war on the traditional family, on masculinity, on American capitalism, on Christmas and Christians. They see DEI as one of the many spiritual and moral pathogens that threaten to infect fine young men and women (especially white ones) and turn them into sexually decadent Marxists. They also seem to believe that the way to stop this is to engage in rewriting history so that impressionable young Americans don't accidentally encounter positive images of Black or female or gay service members. After all, there's no telling where that leads. This trepidation reflects a lack of faith in their own children and their fellow citizens, and it is produced in the same bubble of isolation and suspicion that makes parents fearful of letting children move away, especially to go to college. Anxious parents in small towns might not know better, but an immense—and diverse—military organization of 3 million service members and civilians surely does. In the end, however, it doesn't matter whether anyone in the DOD agrees or disagrees with this silly crusade: Orders are orders. In 1953, when Stalin died, the other members of the Soviet leadership soon closed ranks against the chief of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, a vicious monster of a man who kept tabs on all of them. They put him on trial, shot him in a Moscow bunker, and did not speak of him in public again. After his execution, subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were sent an article on the Bering Strait, with instructions to remove the entry on Beria and replace it with the new entry on the Arctic waterway. Many Soviet citizens did as they were told. Today, no one needs to engage in such complicated methods. If Hegseth's commissars want to replace the history of the Tuskegee Airmen with an article about the soil and weather in Tuskegee, Alabama, a functionary at the Pentagon can do it with a keystroke, while zapping away references to gays, to minorities, to women—perhaps with the hope that one day, no one will even remember what's been lost.
