Is there anything people should know about Paul Tibbets that isn’t widely known? There are people today who still believe Tibbets became insane over the matter, and he had to endure questions about the false story until the end of his life. Anti-war activists got hold of the man, and before they were done, Eatherly began claiming that he-not Paul Tibbets-was the “Hiroshima pilot” and that the mission had been responsible for his derangement. Eatherly became unhinged after the war, robbing post offices and getting himself committed to mental institutions. A decision to retain an unstable B-29 pilot named Captain Claude Eatherly on the roster of the very nearly wrecked Tibbets’ reputation in the late 1950s. While Ferebee and Van Kirk remained relatively unknown through the years, Paul Tibbets became the public face of America’s atomic bomb arsenal. But in the heat of the war in the summer of 1945, when thousands of Americans were still dying daily and every soldier’s sworn duty was to kill the enemy, difficult decisions had to be made. Today we have the luxury of being able to debate whether atomic weapons were fair use. Probably the worst misrepresentation hurled against all three men was that they were warmongers and murderers. What are some of the misrepresentations that have been repeated about Tibbets, Ferebee, and Van Kirk? Dutch gave me a facsimile of his actual Hiroshima log, and it was invaluable in terms of reconstructing the mission. In 20, I interviewed Dutch Van Kirk extensively. In the late 1960s, I served briefly with then-Col. Air Force navigator-bombardier and still-rated commercial pilot, I had been trained in much the same way. Having been born into an aviation family and as a former U.S.
I also realized that a comprehensive biography of the three men as a unit, if you will, had never been written. My confidence in attempting to speak for the men was bolstered by my own background. Two of my three subjects, Tom Ferebee and Ted “Dutch” Van Kirk, were non-pilot flying officers. Harder: I have long been interested in writing about the neglected historiography of non-pilot, officer aircrewmen: the observers, navigators, bombardiers, and electronic warfare officers. Harder is the author of The Three Musketeers of the Army Air Forces, which chronicles how the lives of Paul Tibbets, Tom Ferebee, and Ted Van Kirk changed after they flew a mission that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945, helping to end World War II.Īir & Space: Why did you want to write this book?
This story is a selection from the June-July issue of Air & Space magazine BuyĪ B-52 navigator-bombardier in the Vietnam War, Robert O.