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. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city.
He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.
