When I was preparing this podcast on the restoration of the Enola Gay, National Air and Space restoration specialist Ann McCombs told me that if you were in the cockpit of the Enola Gay today, at the Udvar-Hazy Center where the airplane is displayed, it would appear entirely as it did in 1945 save for one detail. In Tibbets, history found the right man.From the interviews I’d seen, I always took Tibbets to be a no-nonsense guy and probably not given to sentimentality. Given how complex getting the bomb on target was and how many things could have conspired to make it fail, the fact that Tibbets made sure that it didn’t stands as one of the towering examples of military leadership in a war that produced many others. It was his duty and he did what was expected of him.
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Inevitably, he was asked if he ever lost any sleep over the horrific results of the Hiroshima attack. He was 29 years old and responsible for what would become the most important weapon system of the war.I never met Tibbets-he died in 2007-but I saw him interviewed many times. The following year, Tibbets was selected to form what would eventually be the 509th Composite Group. It was so beset with developmental problems that by 1943, when Tibbets showed up in Wichita to help sort out the airplane’s shortcomings, there was some doubt that the airplane would be combat ready in time to have an impact on the war. Tibbets, whose arc through history put him at the point of two of the war’s biggest projects-the bomb and the bomber that would deliver it.Although it’s not commonly known, the B-29 was actually said to be a larger undertaking than the Manhattan Project, at least in terms of total dollars spent. And that leads inevitably to the B-29 Superfortress and Paul W.
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I have always been fascinated by World War II and especially by the history of the Manhattan Project.