 |  | | Col. Paul Tibbets in front of the Enola Gay. | |
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"The day I dropped the bomb was the most boring flight I ever made," Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets, USAF, ret., recently said. "Nothing went wrong. It was just like a clock. LeMay himself was asked what he thought about it. He said it was a textbook performance."
During the first week of August 1945, Tibbets watched, and waited.
"Of course, we knew about when President Harry Truman was supposed to be meeting with Stalin and Churchill," he recalled. "We knew because of the Teletype machine that was brought into our area, at the request of General Lester Groves, so they could talk back and forth to Brigadier General Tom Farrell, the Corps of Engineer man. We knew what was going on, almost by segments. We were watching that. I felt confident we were going to get word to go as fast as Truman could get to us—if we didn't get word to go and unload. I had everything ready."
On August 5, that word finally came. Gen. Curtis LeMay was telling them August 6 would be the date of "Operation Centerboard," the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As for the primary target of the operation, it would be Hiroshima, an important center of military operations. There were also two alternate targets. |
