Grandson of Enola Gay’s pilot now oversees nuclear forces at StratCom

U.S. AIR FORCE
Paul Tibbets IV and his grandfather, Paul Tibbets Jr., pilot “Fifi,” the last flying B-29 Superfortress, in 1998.

POSTED: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2014 1:00 AM
By Steve Liewer / World-Herald staff writer

The Air Force bomber pilot who oversees U.S. Strategic Command’s nuclear forces answers to the call sign “Nuke.”
It’s a moniker with a history going back 69 years, to Aug. 6, 1945.

That’s the day the grandfather and namesake of Brig. Gen. Paul Warfield Tibbets IV helmed the mission that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.



PFC. ARMEN SHAMLIAN/U.S. AIR FORCE

Paul Tibbets Jr. waves from the cockpit of the Enola Gay — which he named for his mother — just before the historic mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.



The bomb killed between 90,000 and 166,000 Japanese people, most of them civilians. But it also heralded the end of World War II and ended the need for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Historians say the planned invasion, called “Operation Downfall,” might have killed as many as 1 million American soldiers and up to 10 million Japanese soldiers and civilians.

For his efforts, then-Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor. The unit he organized and commanded, the 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces, would go down in history because of its momentous mission to deploy and drop the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from its base on the western Pacific island of Tinian.

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