Behind the Headlines

By Charles Slat
ctslat@monroenews.com
He was sitting under a canopy set up on the tarmac at Custer Airport, his white hair shielded from the heat of a late July day.
Members of the Young Marines scampered to and fro, seemingly oblivious to the historical figure that sat at a table behind a couple stacks of books.
I guess I expected a long line in front of Ret. Gen. Paul Tibbets when I showed up at one of the airport’s “Living History” days in 2001. There were only a few queued before him.
I introduced myself and Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, invited me to sit down.
Before I arrived, I had wondered if I even would be able to speak with him and, if so, what would I ask a guy who was responsible for the instantaneous deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – grandmas, moms, children and babies among them — innocently going about their lives on Aug. 6, 1945.
Tibbets was in his mid-80s when I met him, sharp and articulate.
I asked an obvious and probably hackneyed question – one that he probably had been asked thousands of times.
“Any regrets?”
“Why would I have regrets?” he replied without hesitation. “I was just a soldier doing my job.”
Clearly, this wasn’t just a rehearsed response. It was his belief.
Tibbets, who died Thursday at 92, didn’t ask to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, he didn’t want to be in a war with Japan. But he was in the Air Force, he was given a mission, and he carried it out.
At the Living History day, he was selling his memoir, “Return of the Enola Gay.” It isn’t just a chronicle of his career and the bombing. It’s a history lesson.
The lesson is this: Throughout history, good soldiers follow orders. It is their duty and most do it unwaveringly. How well they do it often is the difference in who wins and who’s vanquished.
Here’s how Tibbets put it in his book: “Fact is, in 1945, I was simply an airman, a pilot. Wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army Air Forces, I was – as I has sworn to do – following the orders of my Commander in Chief. To the best of my abilities and the limits of my strength and endurance, I was doing what I could to bring the war to an expeditious and victorious conclusion. There was nothing heinous or monstrous about that.”
I talked with Tibbets for about an hour on that July day and my thoughts occasionally would race back to the scenes at the Hiroshima Peace Park, which I visited on an early spring morning in 1986. The park is a solemn place, a lasting memorial so that no one forgets.
Tibbets, I realized, never forgot.
“It is a sobering thought that our two bombs, feeble by today’s standards, were the curtain-raiser on what many view as the supreme human tragedy,” he wrote in his book. “Mankind’s best hope is that the prologue was so frightening that the main show will be canceled.”
If that is Tibbets’ legacy, generations to come will owe him a debt of gratitude.