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He was 65 years old and had lived in Smithfield, Va., for two years. Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died of a heart attack Saturday in Riverside Hospital in Newport News, Va. By that time I’ll be a pretty old-fashioned fellow and they’ll be telling me.Robert A. If I ever have any grandchildren, I doubt if I get a chance to tell them about the bomb. Some people have a theory that anything I do from now on will seem anticlimactic, but I feel fine. “I think they mean to sound proud of me,” he said, “but they’re all sore about those stories I’d fed them. Tibbets has been getting letters from relatives and friends ever since.
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Then they flew back to the Marianas, eating ham sandwiches as they went. When the bomb was dropped, everyone craned his neck to watch the enormous black cloud that rose over the city-an effect quite different from anything any of them had ever seen. To the best of his recollection, it went something like “Well, boys, here’s the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle.’ The squadron had had a hand in dropping ordinary bombs on quite a lot of cities by that time, and there wasn’t, Tibbets told us, a single man in the plane who would have thought of a phrase like “a new era in history.” “All we wanted was for the thing to go off right, after all our work,” he added. He doesn’t remember exactly what he said next. The crew in Tibbets’ plane, which carried the bomb, were, as Tibbets put it, “pretty busy for the first couple of hours,” and it wasn’t until they were well out to sea that he called “Attention!” over the interphone system. At dawn on August 6th, Marianas time (August 5th back here), the six planes in the squadron took off for Hiroshima. Just before the New Mexico tryout, the 509th flew to a base in the Marianas. It’s a wonder I had any strength left by August, or any of the rest of us who knew about what was going on.” Those in the 509th who did know, aside from Tibbets, were the navigator and bombardier of his own plane and five or six others in the squadron. Every time I ran into a guy, I had to rack my brains figuring out what I’d told him the week before. “I’d never realized before,” he said, “that the question somebody asks you every hour on the hour is ‘What have you been up to lately?’ I’ll bet I thought up more jobs in the Air Corps than there are in the Air Corps. Tibbets’ chief difficulty up to this August was in lying about what he was doing. Myself, I found that I was just as anxious as ever to finish up and get back to that steak dinner and ‘Terry and the Pirates.’ ” “People keep asking me these days whether I wasn’t shaken by the importance of our atomic-bomb work. “I will go only so far as to say that I knew what an atom was,” Tibbets told us. He was hard at work at this job when one day a high-ranking general summoned him to his office, locked the door, peeked under his desk, and said, “You are the member of the Air Corps who may henceforth consider the atomic bomb your baby.” Tibbets didn’t know what the general was talking about. In the fall of ’43, he was called home to serve as a test pilot for B-29s. Tibbets went overseas in 1942 and dropped old-fashioned bombs on North Africa and Occupied France. The cheapest way to learn to fly was to sign up with the Air Corps for three years, which he did by the time the three years were up, he was a captain and the Air Corps wanted him to stick around.
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“I do not want to sound pompous,” he said, “but I am well known among my friends and family as a fellow who does not do much talking.” We did manage to worm from him the fact that he started out to be an abdominal surgeon and that he graduated from the University of Florida and spent a year and a half at the University of Cincinnati before he decided to take up flying instead of cutting.
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In a recent talk with Colonel Tibbets, who has been in town, we found him suitably uncommunicative about the size, shape, and characteristics of the bomb, and not too readily communicative about anything else. He commanded the 509th Combat Squadron, which conducted a number of still secret experiments having to do with the dropping of atomic bombs, and he piloted the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
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to usher in the Atomic Age is a dark-haired, twenty-nine-year-old full colonel named Paul W.