General Paul Tibbet's Reflections on Hiroshima

Interview with General Paul Tibbets

In 1989, General Paul Tibbets gave a 58-minute interview reflecting on his military career and the Hiroshima mission.

He explained his deep-seated belief that the bombing was essential to ending the war. In the interview, he recounts, 'I have arrived at the same conclusion because by ending the war, we would save lives. That was my idea. Save lives, not destroy them… there is no morality in warfare, so I don't dwell on the moral issue. The thing is, it did what it was supposed to do. It brought peace to the world at that time.'

Col. Paul Tibbetts poses in front of his B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay," the plane that he piloted to bomb Hiroshima

In the first few decades after World War Two, Tibbets was celebrated as a national hero and was invited to the White House to meet President Truman. Yet, today, Tibbets is a controversial figure. To some, he is a symbol of a devastating and unforgivable act of human power. To others, he is a soldier who fulfilled a grim but necessary duty to hasten the end of World War II.

In his 1989 interview, Tibbets described a defining moment in his life that coloured his view of the Hiroshima mission. Before joining the army, Tibbets attended medical school, living with a doctor in Cincinnati, US. His roommate explained that some former classmates were unable to practice medicine since ‘they had too much sympathy for their patients’ and began ‘assum[ing] the symptoms of the patients,’ thus ‘destroy[ing] their ability to render medical necessities.’

During his first bombing mission, Tibbets watched the bombs fall on civilians and was horrified that people were ‘getting killed’ who didn’t ‘have any business getting killed.’ Yet, before the Hiroshima mission, he realised he would be just like the ex-doctors if he began ‘thinking about some innocent person getting hit on the ground,’ explaining ‘I am supposed to be a bomber pilot and destroy a target. I won’t be worth anything if I do that.’ Tibbets embodied this mindset during the Hiroshima bombing.

Looking back in a 1999 interview, Tibbets found commonalities between US and Japanese troops, describing how ‘those of us on the American side were over there risking our butts to meet the obligations that were set forth by the leaders of our country,’ and that ‘The other side was doing the same thing. There's a certain common thread there.’

While Tibbets was required to be ‘coldly objective’ during his missions in 1945, he has always thought deeply about the Hiroshima bombings and the major, defining role that he played in World War II.