He was ordered to find the best pilots, navigators, bombardiers and supporting crewmen and mold them into a unit that would deliver that bomb from a B-29. Eisenhower to Gibraltar in November 1942 en route to the launching of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and participated in the first bombing missions of that campaign.Īfter returning to the United States to test the newly developed B-29, the first intercontinental bomber, he was told in September 1944 of the most closely held secret of the war: scientists were working to harness the power of atomic energy to create a bomb of such destruction that it could end the war. 17, 1942, he led a dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses on the first daylight raid by an American squadron on German-occupied Europe, bombing railroad marshaling yards in the French city of Rouen. His mother, the former Enola Gay Haggard, grew up on an Iowa farm and was named for a character in a novel her father was reading shortly before she was born.Īfter attending the University of Florida and the University of Cincinnati, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1937. His father was a salesman in a family grocery business. “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.” That was the attitude of the United States in those years.” “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took,” he said, referring to both American and Japanese casualties from an invasion of Japan. “I wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan.
“I was anxious to do it,” he told an interviewer for a documentary, “The Men Who Brought the Dawn,” marking the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. General Tibbets became a symbolic figure in the controversy, but he never wavered in defense of his mission. But questions were eventually raised concerning the morality of atomic warfare and the need for the Truman administration to drop the bomb in order to secure Japan’s surrender. The crews who flew the atomic strikes were seen by Americans as saviors who had averted the huge casualties that were expected to result from an invasion of Japan.
15, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. United States Air Force, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images with his plane, the Enola Gay, in an undated photograph.