The National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton plans a photographic tribute to Tibbets, who was inducted in 1996. He later moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985. Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. "At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon." "They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions," he said. He was a student at the University of Cincinnati's medical school when he decided to withdraw in 1937 to enlist in the Army Air Corps.Īfter the war, Tibbets said in 2005, he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., and spent most of his boyhood in Miami. "He said, 'What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch - and that was me,'" Greene said. Tibbets took quiet pride in the job he had done, said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, "Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War." "You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. "I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview.
![fiftieth anniversary of the enola gay fiftieth anniversary of the enola gay](http://www.eclipsewar.net/images/EnolaGay-banners1995.jpg)
He said it was his patriotic duty and the right thing to do. Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role.
![fiftieth anniversary of the enola gay fiftieth anniversary of the enola gay](https://live.staticflickr.com/8460/7909545712_c3da28fddf_b.jpg)
"History has shown there was no need to criticize him." armed forces and Japanese civilians and military," Jeppson said. Morris Jeppson, the officer who armed the bomb during the Hiroshima flight, said Tibbets was energetic, well-respected and "hard-nosed." But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible." We knew it was going to kill people right and left.
![fiftieth anniversary of the enola gay fiftieth anniversary of the enola gay](http://user.xmission.com/~tmathews/b29/f09.jpg)
"We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. "I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published on the 60th anniversary of the bombing.