But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not. The Enola Gay was a bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. Colonel Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay’s cockpit to get reporters to stand clear of the propellers prior to engine start, before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. Captain Paul Tibbets in the Enola Gay minutes before takeoff to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, 1945. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother. Tibbets, Jr. 6, 1945, died at his home in Columbus, Ohio, early Thursday. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug.
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It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. in the pilots seat of the Enola Gay moments before taking off for the mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. was airplane commander of the 509th that was responsible for dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan on August. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92, New York Times, 2 November 2007, C11 Kay Bartlett, Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets, Chicago Tribune, 3 August 1975, 14. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966. He did claim to have classmates who were beheaded by some Japanese practicing their swordsmanship.Richard Goldstein, Paul W.