The View from the Enola Gay, 1945

From New York Times Oral History Program. Columbia University Oral History Collection, part IV:1-219. Sanford, North Carolina: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1979. 18-19, 30-36.

Q: What were your thoughts when you began to understand the enormity of the bomb involved?

Tibbets: You're asking me a real knotty problem. I didn't have too many thoughts and the reason that I didn't--and I've offered this explanation before, which I think is probably the most valid--I've tried to figure in my own mind what the answer to that question. Well, sure, I thought a lot of things, and I thought, "Well, gee, this thing is going to make a big bang," and all of that type of nonsense. But on the other hand, I didn't have the ability to visualize what this thing really was, and I think by the same token not too many people did either. I don't think these people working on this thing had any idea. There was no measure, no scale, by which to judge this thing. We all said, "Gee whiz, it's like its going to be a big bang because it's going to look like 20,000 tons of TNT." Well, nobody had ever seen 20,000 tons of TNT go up. You just imagined that it would be a big explosion. And, of course, many of these side effects of the thing, they weren't even discussed. Now whether they were thought of or not is something I can't say. . . .

Q: How was your weather that day?

Tibbets: Well, probably perfect.

Q: How long did it take you to get from your base to the target?

Tibbets: Oh, dear me. Around seven hours or something. Q: Did you run into any Japanese at all? Tibbets: No. We had fooled them. We had lulled the Japanese into a sense of false security, because I had sent ahead of time--for a week or ten days--an airplane up over these targets to do just exactly what we were doing, a single airplane coming in all alone. I wanted them to think that we were photographic reconnaissance airplanes. I felt that if they thought we were photographic reconnaissance airplanes, they wouldn't waste their efforts on us because they would know that no matter what they did, we still were going to get pictures. And apparently this is exactly--from what I've heard from Japanese sources, what they thought. They looked up and saw this and said well, here it is 11 o'clock in the morning, or whatever time it was, and here's our photographic airplane coming back again.

Q: It went completely according to schedule from the base to the target?

Tibbets: As far as I was concerned, it was a perfect operation.

Q: Then you made your turn without any trouble.

Tibbets: Yes, we got out of there without any trouble.

Q: You heard the blast. . .

Tibbets: Yes, we heard it and we felt it; it rocked us and it went exactly as they said it would. In other words, we made our turn and as we leveled out of our turn the flash occurred and right after the flash occurred the man in the tail gunner's position in the airplane-a fellow by the name of George Caren--said, "I can see it coming," meaning the shock wave. He had been told to watch for this as we were going into the target; we told him he would see this ring shock wave. As he said, "I see it coming and I see two more right behind it." Well, by the time he said that, the first one hit us. Well, the second hit us with less force and the third one hit us but it was just very negligible. The first one was real wallop; it was a real bang. It made a lot of noise and it shook the airplane real good.

Q: Your back was to it?

Tibbets: Oh, yes, we were tangent to this thing, so it came up and hit us from the rear. . . .We were out--actually they calculated that we were 11 miles away slant--range when it started and by that time I made my turn and came back in, I wasn't a bit closer. As we nosed around and came to it there was the old mushroom growing up and we watched her blossom. And down below it--I have said that the thing reminded me more of a boiling pot of tar than any other description I can give it. This is the way it looked. It was black and boiling underneath with a steam haze on top of it. And, of course, we had seen the city when we went and there was nothing to see when we came back. It was covered by this boiling, black looking mass. Well, anyway, we had a couple of cameras in the nose of the airplane, so we made some photographs real quickly and as we did that we approached this big cloud. Well, I of course knew I didn't want to fly into that cloud; I knew it was hot with radiation. So we turned off. I tried to judge my distance to stay a couple of miles away from this cloud.

My next thought was this: We bombed at 33,000 feet and my next thought was, well, if the Japanese get wind of this thing they might try any type of a method they can to get this airplane; I mean, any last resort things that they could do, they might try to get it. So, I was immediately concerned and had everything alerted--and in the other two airplanes, we broke radio silence and started talking to them and I told them, "Now, watch for fighters of any type." And, I've forgotten the distance we had to go to depart the coastline--it wasn't too far--well, anyway at 33,000 feet I told these other boys flying these airplanes, "Okay, now let's nose them down a little bit, get all the air speed we can, and let's get off shore as fast as we can get off shore and over the water." Because I knew that if they shot us down over the water, there would be Navy vessels and stuff out there, submarines and that sort of thing, to try to pick us up. So I said that if they were going to get us, I don't want them to do it over land; I'd rather get it over the water and we'd have a better chance to get away from them. Of course we did, we got off. We did see one fighter started up, but he stayed clear away from us, didn't come anywhere near us. And so by that time we were out over the water and on our way back home, and it was an easy flight home. . . .

Q: Would you say that the mood, the general ides, was that this was just a great big bomb?

Tibbets: The reaction didn't set in for another day. It was the next day before it set in. This didn't impress the guys who were in the outfit working on the airplanes until the information was public, and it hit these other organizations on the Island. And then when they came in there with their eyes wide opened and asked, "Jesus, is this true?" then these guys began to think. They were too close to the problem. So they weren't excited by it; nothing happened till later, a delayed reaction set in. Then, of course, everybody got to feeling real proud of the part he got to play in it. I imagine some pretty wild tales flew around too; stories got pretty big. . . .

Q: What do you feel, looking back on it, well, as far as your association with this horror?

Tibbets: Well, okay, I'll have to sound real coldblooded to you but then I can explain my reasons. I felt nothing about it. I was told, as a military person, to do something. I recognized, as somebody said a long time ago, war is hell. This wasn't anything personal as far as I'm concerned, so I had no personal part in it; I don't let my personal feelings get mixed up in it. I don't know how many people were killed--I don't want anybody to get killed; but let's face it, if you're going to fight a war, you fight it to win and use any method you can and somebody's going to get hurt. All right, if you can kill a mess of them at one time and get it over with that much quicker, I think you're better off in the long run. So, as I say, I was following instructions, I was carrying out an order I had been issued by competent authority; it wasn't my decision to make morally, one way or the other. I did what I was told; it was a success as far as I was concerned, and that's where I've left it. I can assure you that I can sleep just as peacefully at night as anybody can sleep.