November 2, 2007
Paul Tibbets Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Paul Tibbets died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force, and his death would have been of interest chiefly to family and friends, except for one mission in a long military career. That one mission, however, earned him a reefer on the front page of the New York Times. On August 6, 1945, the 30-year-old Tibbets, then a colonel, commanded Enola Gay (named for his mother), the B-29 that carried an atomic bomb to Hiroshima and dropped it. When the bomb exploded 1,890 feet over the city, it killed instantly somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 human beings. Thousands more died later of radiation poisoning and radiation-induced cancers.
Tibbets was a bomber pilot (one of the very best, by all accounts, which is why he was chosen for this mission) and he did what bomber pilots do in wartime, having received a lawful order. Therefore he is purely symbolic, no more responsible for the bomb or it use than any of the other eleven men on board Enola Gay. It is interesting that while I have known of Paul Tibbets all my life, I haven’t the faintest idea who was the pilot on the B-29 that dropped the second bomb, on Nagasaki, three days later.
And yet a powerful symbol he was. He requested that there be no funeral service or headstone placed on his grave, for he did not want to be a locus for antiwar demonstrations. History, like life, is not fair.
It will never be settled whether President Truman (who was responsible) was right to order the use of the atomic bomb, for if history is not fair, it is also not mathematics. Different people can have different opinions. As for me, I think he was right, especially given the knowledge he had at the time. The Battle of Okinawa had been horrendous. The island is only 454 square miles, yet capturing it had taken from April 1st to June 21st and had cost the lives of 11,260 American soldiers, sailors, and marines, along with 33,769 wounded. A total of 36 Allied ships were sunk and 368 damaged; 763 American aircraft were destroyed. About 110,000 Japanese were killed. Extrapolating from Okinawa, everyone thought the conquest of the main islands of Japan would be a bloodbath for both sides quite unprecedented in history. Further, both the country at large and the armed forces were very war-weary. The victorious American forces in Europe were, to put it mildly, unhappy at the prospect of being transferred to the Pacific.
Had Truman decided not to use the bomb, one wonders what would have been the public reaction afterwards when it was learned that he’d had a weapon that might have ended the war in a week (which, after all, it did) with no American casualties at all. Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.
When Paul Tibbets landed Enola Gay back on Tinian, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor. As far as I’m concerned, he deserved it. And now he deserves to rest in peace.
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