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. “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. 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.
to usher in the Atomic Age is a dark-haired, twenty-nine-year-old full colonel named Paul W.
