Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92
Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92
Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the commander and pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the final days of World War II, died yesterday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.
His granddaughter Kia Tibbets, of Columbus, said in confirming the death that General Tibbets had been in failing health for several months.
In the hours before dawn on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off from the island of Tinian carrying a uranium atomic bomb assembled under extraordinary secrecy in the vast endeavor known as the Manhattan Project.
Six and a half hours later, under clear skies, then-Colonel Tibbets, of the Army Air Forces, guided the four-engine plane he had named in honor of his mother toward the bomb’s aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima, the site of an important Japanese Army headquarters.
At 8:15 a.m. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy dropped free at an altitude of 31,000 feet. Forty-three seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno that left tens of thousands dead and dying and turned much of Hiroshima, a city of some 250,000 at the time, into a scorched ruin.
Estimates for the dead and injured in the bombing have varied widely over the years. A summary report by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey issued on July 1, 1946, estimated that 60,000 to 70,000 people had been killed and 50,000 injured.
After releasing the bomb, Colonel Tibbets executed a well-rehearsed diving turn to avoid the blast effect.
In his memoir “The Tibbets Story,” he told of “the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city.”
“The giant purple mushroom, which the tail-gunner had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,” he remembered.
Three days later, an even more powerful atomic bomb — a plutonium device — was dropped on Nagasaki from a B-29 flown by Maj. Charles W. Sweeney.
On Aug. 15, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end.
The crews who flew the atomic strikes were seen by Americans as saviors who had averted the huge casualties that were expected to result from an invasion of Japan. But questions were eventually raised concerning the morality of atomic warfare and the need for the Truman administration to drop the bomb in order to secure Japan’s surrender.
General Tibbets became a symbolic figure in the controversy, but he never wavered in defense of his mission.
“I was anxious to do it,” he told an interviewer for a documentary, “The Men Who Brought the Dawn,” marking the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. “I wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan. I wanted to kill the bastards. That was the attitude of the United States in those years.” “I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took,” he said, referring to both American and Japanese casualties from an invasion of Japan. “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was born on Feb. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill. His father was a salesman in a family grocery business. His mother, the former Enola Gay Haggard, grew up on an Iowa farm and was named for a character in a novel her father was reading shortly before she was born.
The family moved to Miami, and at age 12 Paul Tibbets took a ride with a barnstorming pilot and dropped Baby Ruth candy bars on Hialeah racetrack in a promotional stunt for the Curtiss Candy Company. He was thrilled by flight, and though his father wanted him to be a doctor, his mother encouraged him to pursue his dream.
After attending the University of Florida and the University of Cincinnati, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1937.
On Aug. 17, 1942, he led a dozen B-17 Flying Fortresses on the first daylight raid by an American squadron on German-occupied Europe, bombing railroad marshaling yards in the French city of Rouen. He flew Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Gibraltar in November 1942 en route to the launching of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, and participated in the first bombing missions of that campaign.
After returning to the United States to test the newly developed B-29, the first intercontinental bomber, he was told in September 1944 of the most closely held secret of the war: scientists were working to harness the power of atomic energy to create a bomb of such destruction that it could end the war.
He was ordered to find the best pilots, navigators, bombardiers and supporting crewmen and mold them into a unit that would deliver that bomb from a B-29.
Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves Jr., who oversaw the Manhattan Project, said in his memoir “Now It Can Be Told” that Colonel Tibbets had been selected to train the crews because “he was a superb pilot of heavy planes, with years of military flying experience, and was probably as familiar with the B-29 as anyone in the service.”
He took command of the newly created 509th Composite Group, a unit of 1,800 men who trained amid extraordinary security at Wendover Field in Utah.
In the summer of 1945, Colonel Tibbets oversaw his unit’s transfer for additional training on Tinian, in the Northern Marianas. On July 16, an atomic bomb was successfully tested in the New Mexico desert, and when Japan ignored a surrender demand issued at the Potsdam Conference, Colonel Tibbets completed final preparations to drop a uranium bomb.
The Enola Gay, with a crew of 12, carried out a flawless mission, delivering the bomb on time, almost precisely on target and with no opposition from Japanese fighters. When the plane returned to Tinian, Gen. Carl Spaatz, the commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, presented Colonel Tibbets with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army Air Forces’ highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor.
Remaining in the military after the war, he served with the Strategic Air Command, the nation’s nuclear bombing force, and became a one-star general. After retiring in 1966, he was president of Executive Jet Aviation, an air-taxi company in Columbus.
General Tibbets is survived by his wife, Andrea; his sons Paul 3rd, of North Carolina; Gene, of Alabama, and James, of Columbus; six grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren. His marriage to his first wife, Lucy, ended in divorce.
Kia Tibbets said her grandfather would be cremated. “He didn’t want a funeral because he didn’t want to take the chance of protesters or anyone defacing a headstone,” she said.
General Tibbets’s wartime experiences were dramatized in the 1952 MGM movie “Above and Beyond,” in which he was portrayed by Robert Taylor.
As the years passed, however, his image suffered in some quarters. While he was deputy chief of the United States military supply mission in India in 1965, a pro-Communist newspaper denounced him as “the world’s greatest killer.” In 1976, he drew a protest from Hiroshima’s mayor, Takeshi Araki, when he flew a B-29 in a simulation of the Hiroshima bombing at an air show in Texas.
In 1995, the Enola Gay’s forward fuselage and some other parts of the plane were displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Veterans’ groups and some members of Congress denounced a proposed text for the exhibition, contending that it portrayed the Japanese as victims and the Americans as vengeful. Their protest resulted in the resignation of the museum’s director, Dr. Martin Harwit, and the withdrawal of almost all material in the exhibition providing visitors with historical background. General Tibbets’s plane — the name Enola Gay freshly repainted — was left to speak for itself.
In December 2003, the Enola Gay found another home. Fully restored and completely assembled, it went on display at the newly opened Smithsonian air museum branch outside Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia.
The previous spring, General Tibbets visited the Virginia Aviation Museum in Richmond. “There is no morality in war,” The Virginian-Pilot quoted him as saying then. “A way must be found to eliminate war as a means of settling quarrels between nations.”
At the same time, General Tibbets expressed no regrets over his role in the launching of atomic warfare.
“I viewed my mission as one to save lives,” he said. “I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. I didn’t start the war, but I was going to finish it.”
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Bush Terminal
Monday, October 22, 2007
Germans in NYC
And here's their contact info:
German-American Community Project, Inc.
871 U.N. Plaza
New York, NY 10017
Tel.: 212-610-9721
Fax: 212-610-9704
email: info@germanyinnyc.org
There's also the German Consulate, which you should really contact:
Deutsches Generalkonsulat
212-572-5633
460 Park Ave.
New York NY 10022
Hitler's Long Island Legion
This is a really long article, but what an interesting piece of history!! I've been doing some internet scouring about Germans in New York during World War II, and got kind of soundtracked into the whole German-American Bund / Friends of the New Germany movement.
Click on the link above for the whole article. Here's some excerpts:
In the summer of 1936, the still-distant threat of Nazism cast an unexpected shadow across the hinterlands of Long Island.
That spring, Adolf Hitler had been preparing for war. His newly mobilized troops rolled into the Rhineland, unopposed by the Allies. It was the first of a series of Nazi military adventures setting the stage for World War II.
On Long Island, Nazism invaded Yaphank in the form of a summer retreat called Camp Siegfreid.
Located on a wooded lakefront near the mid-Suffolk village, the camp was ostensibly a summer place for youngsters and a weekend campground for adults. In reality it was more dangerous -- a project sponsored by the German-American Bund, which had been established to promote Hitlerism in this country.
...
Carrying flags emblazoned with swastikas, the emblem of the Nazi movement, older bundists and young campers paraded in uniform -- showing off stiff-armed salutes and singing the ``Horst Wessel Song,'' a Nazi anthem. Later, it was discovered that plans to commit espionage and sabotage in the future were also discussed covertly. ``We remain oblivious to the Nazi prototype that existed in our own backyard,'' Marvin Miller wrote in ``Wunderlich's Salute,'' the first history of the bundist movement on Long Island, published in 1983. Now 63, Miller was a Long Island high school teacher. He decided to begin the project in the 1970s, he said, when he discovered that no history of the camp existed in book form.
Miller recounted the experience of Murray Cohen, a Brooklyn high school student who rode the ``Camp Siegfried Special'' to Yaphank in 1937. Photographs Cohen secretly took at the camp were later published by PM, New York's liberal afternoon daily in the 1940s. On the train, Cohen chatted with Mueller while, in the background, uniformed bundists sang Nazi anthems.
...
At the camp, Fritz Kuhn, a U.S. citizen who headed the bund, predicted that someday he would be ``America's Fuhrer,'' Miller wrote. Activities included more than sports and sunbathing. There were recorded operas by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, and anti-Semitic lectures by Walter Kappe, the camp's propaganda chief. Kappe argued that Jews were the founders of international communism. The Friends of the New Germany in America would become ``what the Storm Troopers were in Germany,'' he promised.
By 1937, up to 40,000 bundists would arrive on Sundays to celebrate Nazism in America, while young Siegfrieders lined up to greet them as the train pulled into Yaphank. A large contingent of Nazis also marched through the village of Lindenhurst that year. Some threats of violence came from members of American Legion posts, who threatened to break up the camp but were dissuaded by Suffolk District Attorney Robert Vunk.
Soon after, Miller wrote, Kappe was ordered to return to Germany to work on plans to land spies on the coast of Long Island. In the early days of the war, four would-be saboteurs were captured after landing near Amagansett -- three turned out to be former Siegfrieders.
...
Operation Pastorius
Operation Pastorius was a failed plan for a series of attacks by Nazi German agents inside the United States. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic U.S. economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America.
Recruited for the operation were eight Germans who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernest Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.
Click on the link above for the rest of the Wikipedia article.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
A-Bomb
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Sourcing for Ken Burns' footage
Just over five solid minutes of archival film used in The War came from Carolina's Fox Movietone News Collection at the News Film Library, which was given to the University by 20th Century Fox in 1980.
Included were scenes of New York City, combat in Europe and the Pacific, the manufacture of dolls for little girls, and presidential reports to the nation, among other images.
For the full article, click here. The article mentions some of his other sources. It would be a great idea to contact Eastman House - if you do, I have a friend with good connections there.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Interview
Aurthor Lonto is the subject
i need to know who's willing to be part of this shoot
if you are i will send you over a copy of his auto biography
This guy lost his brother in the war.
He entered the war in 1943
He has attended several Worlds Fairs
He has some interesting stories