Three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, and six days after that, Japan surrendered. Tibbets was just 29 years old at the time.
6, Tibbets and his flight crew dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, thus leading to the end of the war. 5, 1945, President Truman ordered the secret mission to be executed, and on Aug. For his final task he would fly a plane that he'd name the Enola Gay, in honor of his mother. But it wasn't until September 1944 that he was chosen for a top-secret mission, which he oversaw at Wendover Army Air Base in Utah. As a skilled aviator, he tested the B-29. In World War II, he filled important flight missions out of England and Algeria. 25, 1937, Tibbets entered the Army Air Corps. He attended the University of Florida beginning in 1933, then transferred to the University of Cincinnati after his sophomore year so he could enroll in its medical school.īut his interest in medicine diminished as he frequently found himself at the airport "taking lessons and renting airplanes an hour at a time for the sheer fun of flying." After tying tiny parachutes to each piece of candy, his job was to toss the bars overboard as the plane flew over the heads of racetrack and beach visitors.Beginning in September 1928, and for five years after, Tibbets attended Western Military Academy in Alton, Ill.īecause his father wanted him to become a doctor, Tibbets set his sights on that goal. Through his father's business, he was given the chance to fly in an open-cockpit biplane during a promotion of Baby Ruth candy bars. It was in Florida, when Tibbets was 12, that he became hooked on flying. I went back to Iowa every summer for a long vacation on my uncle's farm." "The move to Florida didn't sever the ties with the corn country.
Tibbets wrote that the move provided him the best of both worlds: A life in Florida, plus the chance to escape Florida's summer heat with his mother and sister by returning to Iowa "for prolonged vacations." His mother and sister remained behind to pack up the house in Des Moines. His son remembered being, at age 9, the first in the family to join him, via a train trip, on July 4, 1924. The senior Tibbets remained in Florida to establish his own wholesale confectioner's business. When he saw the palm trees and felt the warmth of the Florida sun, he decided on the spot that this was for him." later wrote: "He boarded the train in a blizzard and arrived in Miami two days later in bright sunshine. The senior Tibbets went to Florida to visit his mother, who always wintered there, and as Tibbets Jr.
The senior Tibbets had met his Glidden-born future wife while crossing Iowa on business.Ī turning point came during a particularly nasty Iowa winter. His father was employed by his family-operated wholesale grocery company, Warfield, Pratt & Howell, that was based in Chicago and had branches in Davenport, Des Moines and Sioux City. He added that he dearly loved "a glamorous new piece of furniture" in the living room " a Zenith radio. "It was a big, white, two-story house with green shutters," Tibbets wrote, adding that it was "at the top of a small hill on Waterbury Road in what you would call a good neighborhood." The Des Moines city directory of the period shows the family living at 5700 Waterbury Road. was 3, the Tibbets family moved to Davenport, "and a couple of years later, we bought a house in Des Moines," Tibbets wrote in his autobiography, "The Tibbets Story," later titled "The Return of the Enola Gay."
Later, the couple had a daughter, Barbara. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Illinois, the first child of Paul Warfield Tibbets and his Iowa-born wife, Enola Gay Haggard. For several years, he called Des Moines home. The man who played a monumental and pivotal role near the end of World War II spent much of his boyhood in Iowa. Editor's note: This story originally published in the Register's Famous Iowans database.įew people have altered the course of history as significantly as bomber pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr.