His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. 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. There it will be joined by other historic planes-numbering in the hundreds-that cannot now be displayed in the current museum for lack of space.When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966. Later, plans are to reattach the wings and landing gear and put the entire plane on permanent display at an Air and Space Museum annex to be built adjacent to Dulles International Airport outside Washington. So, in 1995, the forward section of the fuselage, including the bomb bay and cockpit, will be taken to the Air and Space Museum, remaining there for several months as part of a display commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bomb. Serious restoration work began in 1984, and three years later, a decision was made to put it on display. Ownership of the plane was transferred to the Smithsonian in 1949, but it was parked at several Air Force bases until 1960, when technicians began taking it apart.ĭuring that time, including seven years when it sat unnoticed on a ramp at Andrews Air Force base near Washington, souvenir hunters made occasional forays against it and scratched their names into the fuselage. “The first time I saw it in 1987, it gave me a very creepy feeling,” Neufeld said. Most visitors who come here stare silently through the glass of the bullet-shaped nose into the compartment where Tibbets and co-pilot Robert Lewis sat, and where bombardier Thomas Ferebee aimed the bomb for Aioi Bridge in downtown Hiroshima. We have people saying that it shouldn’t be displayed at all because it would be a celebration.” We get people saying that we’re hiding the aircraft. We have gotten surprising and contradictory responses about it.
“People have very strong feelings about this plane because of the sensitivity about nuclear warfare. Neufeld, a museum curator specializing in World War II-era aircraft. “We looked at the subject for some years,” said Michael J. The plane’s 132-foot wingspan created a huge problem for a museum already packed with priceless civilian and military aircraft and space vehicles. The decision to put the bomber in the spotlight at the Air and Space Museum was not easily made. They have included Tibbets and Japanese survivors of the bombing nearly half a century ago. Garber facility-where other historically important planes await restoration-the fuselage attracts a steady stream of visitors who make their way out to this Washington suburb. Stored in a dim, unheated hangar at the Smithsonian’s Paul E. The compartment where Tibbets and his crew guided the mission to Hiroshima now looks as it did when the new plane was turned over to the 509th Composite Bomb Group in 1945. “Our objective,” said Bernie Poppert, a onetime aircraft mechanic who has been one of the leaders of the effort, “is to preserve the history of the technology, so people can look at it 250 years from now and see exactly how it was done.” Five years after that blinding flash, the weapon was estimated to have caused 200,000 fatalities.įor nearly a decade now, technicians have been at work restoring the bomber, perhaps the most famed artifact of World War II, to mint condition. The next day, the 30-year-old colonel and the airplane he named for his mother became one of the significant and enduringly controversial figures in the history of warfare: They dropped the first atomic bomb.
Shortly thereafter, a young Army Air Corps enlisted man, pulled away from a softball game, carefully inscribed the name “Enola Gay” in foot-high letters beneath the pilot’s window. 5, 1945, after the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima was loaded in the bomb bay of B-29 Superfortress No.