Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 8, 1995 TAG: 9502080069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dallas Morning News
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Last week, the Smithsonian Institution agreed to scrap much of a proposed exhibit centered on the dropping of the first atomic bomb.
The National Air and Space Museum in Washington had planned an elaborate display that would have used the front 54 feet of the Enola Gay B-29 bomber as the backdrop for re-examining the 1945 bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However, veterans groups and congressional leaders contended that the proposed exhibit unfairly presented the Japanese as hapless victims of U.S. aggression and racism during World War II.
The exhibit now will feature only the nose of the airplane, as well as videotaped comments from its crew.
Since the controversy began more than a year ago, retired Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the Enola Gay, has refrained from publicly getting involved in the debate over the airplane, which was named after his mother.
Tibbets, 79, guards his privacy and intends after the 50th anniversary of the bombing this summer to retire permanently from the public eye.
He lives with his wife in a middle-class subdivision in Columbus, Ohio. He has two sons, a stepson and five grandchildren.
Although Tibbets rarely grants interviews and is hard of hearing, he agreed to answer written questions prepared by Dallas Morning News aviation writer J. Lynn Lunsford. His answers were recorded by a longtime friend - George W. Hicks, director of the Airmen Memorial Museum in Suitland, Md.
The following are excerpts:
Q. How would you say history has treated you?
A. It's depending on who's giving me the treatment. From the mid-'40s to the mid-'50s, I was often referred to as a hero. From the '60s and '70s, communist propaganda, which many accepted, depicted me as being insane. In other words, their thesis was ``who but an insane person would do such a thing, drop such a devastating weapon on innocent women and children?'' From the early '70s until now, I frequently get ``thank you'' letters stating: ``I would not be here except for what you did at that time. My father was scheduled to be in the invading force for the Japanese invasion.''
Q. Given the controversial fashion in which the Smithsonian Institution treated the subject of the Hiroshima bombing, how do you think historians will deal with the subject during the next 50 years?
A. Unless our school-aged youngsters are taught their heritage, and that of their parents, scholars who have never heard a shot fired will sit in their ivory towers and revise everything until the truth will be a lost art.
Q. How do you think the mission's significance should be interpreted by future generations?
A. For what it was - a mission to convince the rulers of Japan of the futility of continuing the war with the resulting effect of saving more lives than were lost.
Q. If it were up to you, how would you structure the Enola Gay exhibit?
A. Just as now expressed by [Smithsonian] Secretary [Michael] Heyman: Separate the horror of the nuclear war from the fighting it took to get the [military] bases close enough to Japan to fight their heartland with conventional air power. Portray the Enola Gay separately as the ultimate development of the B-29 and the first airplane to strike an enemy with an atomic weapon, and, after that, period.
Q. Do you ever think about the Hiroshima mission or the people who lived there? Any regrets?
A. I have stated many times that I have absolutely no regrets, but you have to put it into the context of the times that it took place. Again, in that same context, if I were confronted with the same situation that existed at that particular time, I would have no hesitancy in using this weapon again.
Q. What will you most remember about the mission?
A. I have to say that most frequently I answer this by saying that it was really boring. That sounds facetious, but the point is the mission went exactly as it had been planned. Everybody performed as they were supposed to, the airplane was absolutely perfect in its execution, and we wound up with a good mission. I can't think that anything, one way or the other, occupied the primary consideration.
Q. How do you want to be remembered?
A. That's a hard one to answer. I'd like to be remembered from the point of view that I did what I was told to do, and that was backed up by [President] Harry Truman, who said I did it and did it the way it should have been done.
More than that, I'd like to be remembered as a professional who was able to take a situation that had never been, should we say, presented before, put together a group of very fine men and executed a wartime mission probably more successfully and better than anything that I can think of in the past that concerns any particular military organization.
I'm an old gladiator and I'm facing the setting sun.
Q. A section of at least one high school history book has the end of the war in the Pacific, the use of the atomic bomb, and the dawn of the atomic age all written about in one three-sentence paragraph. How do you feel about the fact that children are being given a very simplistic version of a world war?
A. Obviously, I am extremely disappointed. I'm not one to say how people should be educated, but one thing I do believe is that they should understand their heritage. It should be taught to them that this life they are privileged to live here was not something that just happened. It was taken with blood and toil over a long period of years for our forefathers to get it into place, and my generation through world war to get it where it was when the victory with Japan was signed.
Unfortunately, by that time, we had reached a state where people didn't want to learn. They didn't want to listen. They turned their back on it. Today, you can ask a lot of high school students to say something about Iwo Jima and they'll say, ``What was that?'' They don't know geography, they don't know the history of this country.
Q. What do you think are the lessons of August 1945?
A. I think the biggest lesson that we get out of that - and people lose sight of the fact - is that here we put ourselves into the position of having the most powerful weapon in the world. Unfortunately, the do-gooders started coming along and talking about the nuclear cloud over their heads and so forth and so on.
That was just a false fear as far as I'm concerned. ... My position is, as long as we remain strong and our resolve is right, nobody will use one.
by CNB