The Miami News from Miami, Florida • 6

6A The Miami News Friday. August 6. 1982 ti HIROSHIMA, i. i I 1 -1 I (I ii fllal- lllfli "One day we were walking down a long corridor at Los Alamos. We walked by this door and Oppenheimer looked in and he took about four more steps and he stopped," said Tibbets.

"He turned around and went into this room that had blackboards on three sides. There was a guy sitting in a straight-backed chair in the middle of the room. And the blackboards are covered with formulas. Oppenheimer doesn't say a damn word. He just stands there for about 15 seconds and then he walks over to the board, down in the left corner, and he rubs something out and he puts something else in place of it." Tibbets is grinning now.

"And this character jumps up and shouts, 'I've been looking for that mistake for two It was Enrico Fermi. Oppenheimer, just walking by the room, photographic mind, boom, caught the mistake that affected the whole damn formula. How do -you explain something like that?" Fermi was the mastermind behind the Dec. 2, 1942, experiment at the University of Chicago that produced the chain reaction necessary to make an atomic bomb. it i if A iJ I Alt lfS if i mother Enola Gay, father Paul Tibbets Sr.

home to Aug. 6, 1945 "broadcast of bombing War's first mushroom cloud: The bomb named Little Boy a swatting strap at the ready, hated airplanes. "You're going to get killed in one of those machines," was the advice. Paul Tibbets Sr. had been to a military school in Missouri and he figured what his son needed was a five-year dose of discipline at the Western Military Academy in North Alton, 111.

"I agree with him," said Tibbets Jr. "It taught me regulation, regimentation and whatnot. I never did anything without thinking about it. I saw too many guys get killed because they thought something happened that didn't happen. I've got an expression I use all the time: 'Make haste Enola Gay Tibbets was a red-haired Iowa farmgirl who showed all the emotion of a cob of corn.

"Mother could be absolutely cold-faced, but if she got amused by something, she had a little bit of a nervous twitch in the corner of her mouth," said Tibbets. "I take after my mother: I do not expose my emotions, but I got them. They're in me. I feel them. Crippled children and this sort of thing, that tears me up.

But I have the ability to reject certain things that I don't want to dwell on." Enola Gay said what he wanted to hear. "You go ahead and fly. You're going to be OK," she said, and her son never forgot: "On more than one occasion, whether it was during the war or testing some airplane, and I was in kind of a tight spot, I'd say, 'Well, you're going to be all right because Mom said A mother gave her coolness to her only son and her name to history. "I suppose you might say the plane is the Enola III. My father named me after the heroine of a novel he happened to be reading just before I was born," Mrs.

Tibbets said from her Miami apartment at 1629 SW 6th on the day her son roared at 330 miles an hour ground speed at 31,060 feet on heading of 264 degrees over Hiroshima and blistered the face of the planet. i i. '-Vf I) I 'Ml -W ri i from 1A mothers at the river washing clothes, fathers at the factory. In the book "Children of Hiroshima," published in conjunction with the Japan Association for the Protection of Children, youngsters describe the horror: "We were all the color of blood," said Setsuko Sakamoto, the only one in her class to survive. "There was a streetcar that was burned until you could see right through it ana you could see the passengers burned black inside," said Yoshimi Mukuda, a first-graaer at the time.

"On the riverside and in the fields, men and cattle lay dead and dying side by side," said Hisayo Ya-guchi, a fifth-grader. "There was a pregnant woman with burns over her entire back lying near the bridge, stark WHAT HAPPENED to chill 1942's compassion and turn Tibbets into history's first atomic pilot, able to rain radioactivity on civilians and soldiers alike, without a blink of his brown eyes? "Like they say, war is hell," he says now, in the summer of 1982. "War makes you numb. From day one, I always looked at that bomb as something that was not personal to me. I thought it would stop the war." Tibbets took off from a Miami pasture and rode on his first bombing run at the age of 12, in a red, white and blue Waco 9 airplane.

As the pilot's helper, he tossed out Baby Ruth candy bars over the hat-brims and the horses at Hialeah race track in a stunt for his father's business, Tibbets-Smith, wholesale confectioners. He is graying now and a hearing aid plugs his right ear as he conducts business as president of Executive Jet Aviation, a Columbus air taxi company, "I am a hero to some and a devil to others," said the man who moved With his family from Des Moines, Iowa, to Miami in 1924 to get away from the snow. "I've been called a cold fish. I can control my emotions and it was particularly helpful to me during the war. Yes, we were killing people.

We were slaughtering them right and left. That's what war does. "I realized almost immediately when I started dropping bombs on occupied Europe, that people were getting killed down there. But I said to myself, 'Lookit, if you start thinking about innocent victims, you're not going to be effective in doing the job you're supposed to So I blanked it out. I rejected it." President Truman believed an invasion of Japan would have cost a million or more lives.

To knock Japan out of World War II, "Give 'em Hell Harry" ordered Little Boy exploded 1,850 feet above Hiroshima and another atomic bomb nicknamed Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki three days later, on Aug. 9, 1945. "The casualties suffered had we had to invade Japan would have been many times greater," said Tibbets. "I just saluted and said 'Yes, when they told me what I was going to do." He piloted the first strike and commanded the 509th Composite Group of the Second Air Force that-planned and executed both missions. "I did what I had sworn to do: Uphold the laws and the Constitution of the United States, defend it against ail enemies, foreign and domestic." And when he landed at North Field on Tinian Island in the Marianas after a perfect 12-hour, 13-min-ute roundtrip flight to Hiroshima, a general, without saying a word, pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on the green combat overalls of Miami's adopted son.

"I don't necessarily want to be a hero," Tibbets says now, 37 years later, as summer flowers bloom from Hiroshima's ashes. "I don't think what I did was heroic. I would like for history to confirm what I've always believed: That I was a savior of many more lives than I destroyed, that I was a person who had been given a mission in which nobody envisioned what to do, how to do it or why. I worked all of that out and I'd like to get credit for that, for just doing a damn good job." PAUL WARFIELD TIBBETS the 67-year-old retired Air Force brigadier general, would have been happy to be a bird: "There's nothing I love any better in my whole life than four good fans turning out there on a wing, all singing a song." When he speaks of flying and of being young at the controls of the four Wright-Cyclone engines, he almost sprouts feathers. "That was music.

And I loved to listen to it out over the North Atlantic at 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. That's where I really lived, in that quiet, nice darkness when you are alone with the stars. Your mind's clear. It's not all cluttered up with these other things from down below." The aviation executive logged 100 hours in the air last year in the 550-mile-an-hour, eight-seat Lear jets his company operates. He is in good health at 5-foot-9 and 170 pounds, but he is backing off the joystick: This year, he said, he will be lucky to fly 60 hours.

His father wanted h.m to be a doctor, but the flying bug bit him early, during the days he attended Silverbluff Elementary School and Shesandoah Junior High School. He first rode in an airplane in 1927, the day he threw fistfuls of chocolate over Hialeah. "I was king bee. I was 12 years old and I had the wind in my face and I was wearing a helmet and gogglis," said Tibbets. f'Right then, I wanted to look down on everything, to see things from above." His father, a strict man who kept THE ENOLA GAY is as archaic today as the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, said Tibbets: "We're talking six or seven minutes flight time to get a missile from one place to another, anywhere in the world." So the Hiroshima pilot believes the United States should maintain a solid nuclear weapons arsenal and an efficient missile delivery system, both kept technically up-to-date, to counter the Russian nuclear capability.

"It was fortunate that we had the bomb first," said Tibbets. "I hate to think about it, but let's face facts: If the Russians would have had the bomb first, we'd all be speaking Russian and we'd be doing slave work somewhere." He has no sympathy for the anti-nuclear movement. "I look at it as a bunch of people getting hysterical over something they don't know anything about," he said. "These ban-the-bomb people are part of an organized effort that's basically communistic, in my opinion." Tibbets does not believe a nuclear war would be started accidentally. "If something happens, it is going to be a deliberate act after it has been well calculated," he said.

"The Russians have one objective and if you get an honest Russian, he'll tell you: 'Yeah, world They are going to accept calculated risks, but the question is, how many?" Thirty-seven years ago, 62,000 of Hiroshima's 90,000 buildings were destroyed and 270 of 298 available doctors were killed, along with 1,645 out of 1,780 nurses. And 42 of 45 hospital facilities were destroyed or made useless. Tibbets would go just so far in limiting the nuclear stockpile: "The thing to do is get yourself a good delivery system and one that is reasonably immune from attack. If you can get one 20-megaton bomb through with reliability, forget anything else. It's overkill." THE PILOT with dogtag O-361713 swinging across his chest said Little Boy tasted like lead.

"I had these fillings in my teeth and the moment the bomb exploded, the radioactivity hit them and I got electrolysis," said Tibbets. "I tasted the lead in my mouth." Flying toward Japan in the dark before dawn was like a dream world, the moon, a cloud carpet, purple water, he said. "And then, by God it's a beautiful, clear day. We first see Hiroshima from 70 miles away. We watch the city get closer and you see all the details, the little rivers that run through it, the fingers from the different streams, and then you pick up buildings, you pick up streets, everything becomes more defined, like focusing a camera." Tibbets is stone-faced like Mother Enola Gay as he completes the mission.

"After the bomb is released and we make our turn and come back again to take a look at it, then the city isn't down there anymore. It's underneath' all this boiling turmoil, it's tumbling, it's rolling. And the mushroom cloud lets you know that something has taken place that nobody has seen before in warfare. "And then I'm south of the city, dropping the nose down about 200 feet a minute and leaving the pewer where it is so I can increase the airspeed to get offshore as quickly as I can. My concern is not to sit up there' like a duck.

I let her go on down to 14,000 feet and send a strike report back by radio and everything just calms down. "My co-pilot and I flip a coin to see who is going to get two hours sleep first. I win the toss and I go and get myself a parachute for a pillow and I slide down in my seat and put my head back and I go sound asleep. I Wake up and I feel fine. The engines are just singing.

We land and they have everybody and their brother there and the other guys get their Distinguished Flying Crosses. It all goes perfect." A month later, Tibbets and his bombardier and navigator flew into Nagasaki to inspect the damage. The visit had little emotional impact on the pilot. "Hell, I was just like any other tourist, walking around in my shorts and shirtsleeves, just like we'd been there all our lives," he said. "I bought some little rice bowls." He has not returned to Hiroshima.

"There's little or no evidence of damage back there today, you know. I would like to go back if it were possible to go incognito, without all this ban-the-bomb And then he took off his glasses and rubbed the wrinkles around his He looked into the lightning that stabbed an Ohio thundercloud and took a slug of lukewarm coffee from a plastic cup. "I'd just kind of like to go back to Hiroshima," said Paul Warfield Tibbets "so I could say, 'I've been here mmmmm Bombardment Wing that hangs on his office wall. "And because I'm an airman," he said, "I don't want to be put into the ground." He spent 29 years and seven months in the Air Force, retiring the same year his mother died. Just about everything connected with war's first atomic blast had a pseudonym the nuclear research, the mission, the airplane, the bomb: Manhattan Project, Silverplate, Enola Gay, Little Boy.

But the pilot had only his own handle. "If I'd had a nickname during those days," said Paul Warfield Tibbets "I'd have wanted it to be FATHER HUBERT F. Schiffer was a newly ordained Catholic priest at a retreat eight blocks from Ground Zero in Hiroshima the day heaven turned to hell. He said there was no justice. "A city of a half-million people was on fire," he said.

"It was like being in a frying pan. The screams were nightmares. We heard someone scream, then scream again, then screech, then nothing." Priest and pilot met in Dallas in 1975 during a reunion of the Tibbets troops. Schiffer was then Jesuit retreat master at Montserrat House in nearby Lake Dallas. "Big man," said Tibbets.

"He stuck out his big hand and grabbed me and said, "I've been looking for you for The blast severely burned Schiffer and later he founded a Hiroshima home for abandoned children. He died of a heart attack in Frankfurt, West Germany, last March 27 at the age of 57 and in his personal papers in Texas, he called the bombing "inexcusable." "It should' never have happened. Japan imports all its raw materials and most of its food. If Americans and our allies had established a seige around the islands, the Japanese would have been forced to surrender," he said. "I've talked to generals about this and learned about the strong pressures on the military to 'bring the boys home by They opted to invade or bomb but clearly ignored a third option to do nothing." MISCHIEF WAS the navigator during the two Tibbets years at the University of Florida, during Prohibition and bootleg whisky, during the Betty Boop days of fast cars and rumble-seats and women who danced the night away in short skirts and bobbed hair.

Tibbets had a 1931 Chevrolet convertible, black and blue, "I run crazy. I chase women. I go to class, but I don't know anything when I get there. I came close to getting kicked out my first semester," he said, showing his mother's twitch in the corner of his mouth. 67-year-old Paul Tibbets, who EXECUTIVE v' Z-7 'V V--V A- i IV- Hiroshima pilot's listen in Miami And he laughed his way through the story of his most famous college escapade, in November 1933, during the homecoming dance at the American Legion Hall, when the woods around Gainesville boiled with the spirit of moonshine.

"Me and a friend out there and brought back a five-gallon jug of hooch. We had tin cups and every time we'd pour a cup of whisky for somebody, we'd have a cup for ourselves," he said. "In that dance hall dancing was a girl who that summer had won the title of Miss Miami. Her name was Jessie Smith. After I got enough of this' moonshine in me, the last thing I remember that night was being out in the middle of the dance floor hollering, 'Oh, Jessie! Oh, Jessie! Where are you now that I need He woke up in the university hospital.

"We'd been there for 15 hours. Five of us had got poisoned on that bootleg stuff. I was blind as a bat. And sick, if I could've died, I'd have been happy. We got over the blindness and in four or five days we were out of the hospital.

But from that day to this, I can't stomach whisky." And with an "Oh, God!" he perched his hands over his gray pompadour. "Then I got serious again and stayed serious. But I got a little bit of a streak in me because I still play with fast cars. I got a Corvette over in a hangar that's a hot one. I love machinery and I love performance." Tibbets has been married twice and has two grown sons one a hospital administrator in Montgomery, and the other a pilot for a Saudi Arabian prince and five grandchildren.

Part of the reason he wears a hearing aid "I have trouble with women's voices and I can't hear whistles" was the jet-engine roar of the B-47, which he helped to coax into flight. And the other reason is his only hobbv. "Fm a shotgun fanatic. I shoot trap and skeet all the time. I play with a shotgun," said Tibbets.

"That's a weekend requirement. Sunday is my day to have fun with the rest of the guys and lose a buck or make a buck." What had he planned for today, the 37th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic explosion? "I'm not going to pay a damn bit of attention to it. I realize its significance, but it's just another day to me. I have a date with my shotgun and some clay targets and that's a date I'm going to keep." "Enola Gay, Is mother proud of Little Boy today? This kiss you give, i It's never ever going to fadey away." A "Enola Gay, It shouldn't ever have to end this way. now pilots Lear jets, near his Enola Gav.

It shouldn't fade our dreams Those are tne woros of a current rock song by an outfit named Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. That some people consider him a nuclear devil does not concern Tibbets, the technician. What makes him mad is the mistaken belief that he is crazy with guilt and remorse. "The one thing that probably bothers me more than any other single thing is the perception that a large segment of the public has that I am insane and that most of the people who flew with me are insane," he said. "This, of course, is generated and fostered by Communist propaganda." One of Tibbets' pilots, Major Claude Eatherly, a flashy, poker-playing Texan, flew another B-29 nicknamed the Straight Flush several hours ahead of the Enola Gay to find out what the weather was like over Hiroshima.

After the war, Tibbets said, Eatherly had some minor skirmishes with the law and was hospitalized with emotional problems. "The story was picked up and sent world-wide that the Hiroshima pilot was crazy," said Tibbets. "But in the public's mind, Paul Tibbets flew the bomb to Hiroshima, the Hiroshima pilot's crazy, Paul Tibbets' is crazy. And that burns me up." The subject of heat never worried Harty Truman. The 33rd American president kept a sign on his White House desk that said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." As commander-in-chief, he sent Tibbets to Hiroshima.

Truman summoned the pilot to the Oval Office in 1947. "He looked at me with the bomb on his mind and said, 'What do you think about And I said, 'Mr. President, the only thing I thought was that I was carrying out your order and I did it the best I said Tibbets. "And the president slapped his fist down on his desk and said, 'You're God damn right you did a good job! And if anybody gives you a hard time, you refer them to me. I'm.

the guy who told you to do Tibbets came eyeball-to-eyeball many times with another main figure in the atomic story physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico where Little Boy was created. "We had problems with high ex-losives that caused the implosion," said Tibbets. "We had problems with the fusion system. We had problems with the barometric system.

We had ballistic problems because the damn fins didn't cause the bomb to fall correctly." To find the answers, Tibbets visited Oppenheimer and his scientists from his base at Wendover, Utah, where he trained his pilots the year before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Special to The Miami Newt CHARLES ARBOGAST air taxi firm in Columbus, Ohio WHEN TIBBETS raised the infamous B-29 off a Tinian runway at 2:45 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, it weighed 150,000 pounds, men, machine, fuel, bomb. And in the pilot's pocket lay a small metal suicide box containing 12 lethal cyanide pills for the crew, should the plane be downed in Japan.

In the rear turret rode a tail-gunner wearing a Brooklyn Dodg-. ers baseball cap. Today, 11 of the dozen crew-members are alive, but the Enola Gay is shunned and scattered in a Smithsonian-owned warehouse in Maryland not far from the nation's capitol. The words of a red-haired farmgirl from Iowa echo from 37 years ago: "Enola is 'alone' spelled backwards. Did you notice that?" And a son and a pilot mourn.

"The engines have been taken off the wings, the wings have been taken off the fuselage, the tail has been taken off. And there it sits," said Tibbets of the B-29 that flew under the secret radio name of Dimples Thirteen. "The State Department won't let them do anything with it. We'll offend the Japanese by enshrining the airplane. That's what they told me.

It doesn't make any difference that it's a part of history. It's a sad end." The pilot's mother died in 1966, but her name lives on in a nuclear age. His father remains in Florida. "My old man had a feeling for the Florida Everglades and when he died, he was cremated and his ashes were spread out there where he enjoyed himself as a hunter for years," said Tibbets. When the end comes for the Hiroshima pilot, he, too, will be consumed by fire.

"I want my ashes spread out over the North Atlantic," he said. "Nobody can appreciate the serenity I felt, how I was part of nature out there on a dark night." Tibbets peered through his bifocals at the mushroom cloud under the gold eagle and the 13 white stars on the flag of the 509th JET AVIATION A Jr fil I I i -v.