His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. The last surviving crewmember of the Enola Gay the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II has died. 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. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces.
It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. 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. They have steadfastly taken that stance for the past six decades. Jeppson (weapon test officer), have repeatedly and humbly proclaimed that, The use of the atomic weapon was a necessary moment in history.
He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. The surviving members of the Enola Gay crew, Paul W. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. Most of those were due to RAF fire bombing. About a million German civilians died in Allied bombing over a period of several years. The vast majority of these were after March 9 1945. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966. It is estimated that 600,000 Japanese civilians died In the B-29 campaign, 80 of those from non-nuclear attacks. See some of the most remarkable military history in Nevada at the Historic Wendover Air Field museum, where you can tour masterfully restored World War II-era.