Enola gay crew visit bomb site
"I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets acknowledged Wednesday, noting of his crew, "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. For the last 60 years, he has had to deal with the controversy." Psychologically, he could handle the aftereffects of such a mission. "Eisenhower told (historian) Stephen Ambrose that Tibbets was the best bomber pilot in World War II. "Pauls mind works like a com- puter," said Gerry Newhouse, Tibbets former business manager and friend. The traits that sometimes have made him a difficult mate his single-mindedness, drive, tenacity and intolerance for mediocrity endeared him to the military leadership that chose him to command the first atomic-bomb mission. "He went up in rank over the years, but I have stayed a Pfc."
"He is still the general, and I am the Pfc.," said Andrea, the old pilots wife of 51 years. Yet by Augusts first days, the fractures had mended, an orthopedic brace was gone, and his hallmark feistiness had returned. "Ive never been incapacitated a damned day of my life," he groused two months ago, daily downing enough Ox圜ontin to make it out of bed and to an easy chair from which he stared at a television he could barely hear.
For a while, his appetite disappeared, his weight dropped alarmingly, and he railed against the fates torturing him in his waning years. In the months before todays 60 th anniversary of his mission to Hiroshima, Paul Tibbets was hobbled by a pair of spills that fractured two vertebrae. The mind of the pilot whose B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb often seems more prisoner than resident of his bantamweight body wracked by injury, ailments and 90 years of living. Posted on 4:18:39 AM PDT by Columbus Dawg Still no regrets for frail Enola Gay pilot (Col.