Paul Tibbets Interview [Studs Terkel interviews Enola Gay pilot]

AV Web ^ | 11/01/2007 | editor

[Kimmers]

Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old gaffers. Me and Paul Tibbets, 89 years old, brigadier-general retired, in his home town of Columbus, Ohio, where he has lived for many years.

Paul Tibbets: Hey, you've got to correct that. I'm only 87. You said 89.

Studs Terkel: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got you beat by three years.

Studs Terkel: Now we've had a nice lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed as we sat in that restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who you were. But once upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning - August 6 1945 - and a bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first ever. And that particular moment changed the whole world around. You were the pilot of that plane.

Paul Tibbets: Yes, I was the pilot.

Studs Terkel: And the Enola Gay was named after...

Paul Tibbets: My mother. She was Enola Gay Haggard before she married my dad, and my dad never supported me with the flying - he hated airplanes and motorcycles. When I told them I was going to leave college and go fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said, "Well, I've sent you through school, bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you're on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a damn." Then Mom just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right." And that was that.

[Kimmers]

Enjoy...

[Psycho_Bunny]

I can’t. Terkel was a huge lefty.

[Breto]

Probably better worded given the death of DADT.... Studs Terkel interviews the pilot of the Enola Gay

[TYVets]

Tibbets was once thanked for saving the lives of many US Military personnel had the invasion of Japan taken place.

His answer: "We would like to think we made a difference".

[Kimmers]

Thank you for fixing the title.....I appreciate it.....

[353FMG]

“We would like to think we made a difference”.

.
They made a difference, alright. The Japanese in the Dutch East Indies had planned to retreat back to Japan in order to defend it against approaching American forces. But before doing so they also planned to kill all POWs held in concentration camps.

God bless General Tibbets, the Enola Gay and Boxcar.

[Oatka]

Tibbets: Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organization and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific - Tokyo.
Terkel: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.
Tibbets: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other.

In the early '80s I was taking a Jr. College class in Oceanside, CA that had a Paki instructor. Kinda humorous guy and I got to like him - until he said that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was racist.

Now this was Marine Corps country (Camp Pendleton) and when he said that, I braced for a half dozen retired Marines in the class to jump all over him. Instead, to a man, they sheepishly hung their heads - that's how strong the Racism! epithet was then.

The continuing silence pist me off and I got up and told the Paki that I had just seen a show (History Channel then?) where Tibbets was saying what an administrative nightmare it was to plan for bombing both Japan and Germany. I also mentioned to him that my grandmother on my dad's side, along with tens of thousands of other Germans were incinerated in the Hamburg raid, so racism had no part in the atom bombing. In modern war there are no civilians and everybody gets the wrong end of the stick.

[Williams]

I had a radical Iranian foreign policy professor of all things, who said we dropped the bomb on Japan because we wanted to use it on “yellow people” and not white Europeans.

I knew and told him we built the bomb in a race with Germany to develop it before they could, and use it against them, but the war in Europe ended before the bomb was ready. He scoffed at that.

[Williams]

I had a radical Iranian foreign policy professor of all things, who said we dropped the bomb on Japan because we wanted to use it on “yellow people” and not white Europeans.

I knew and told him we built the bomb in a race with Germany to develop it before they could, and use it against them, but the war in Europe ended before the bomb was ready. He scoffed at that.

[Neanderthal]

I met Studs at a party back in 1976. The girl I was with batted her eyes at him and asked “Are you really a stud?”

[NeverForgetBataan]

Like Harry Truman said - “If you can’t stand the heat.... stay out of Hiroshima”

[Oatka]

I had a radical Iranian foreign policy professor of all things, who said we dropped the bomb on Japan because we wanted to use it on “yellow people” and not white Europeans.

I haven't had anyone pull that on me since that time in the '80s, but the next time, in addition to my standard reply, I'm going to ask if they thought that the Japs would refuse to use it on white people because it might be construed as racist. Then wait for the deer-in-the-headlights look.