Gordon Thomas: Enola Gay

“What for?”

“The chief of police at Surfside caught me in the back of an automobile… with a girl,” confessed Tibbets.

The rest took little telling—his arrest, a spell in the cells, the intervention of a judge who was a family friend, the indiscretion hushed up.

By admitting the truth about the backseat dalliance with a girl whose name he now had difficulty recalling, Paul Tibbets had assured himself of a place in history. Within a year his name would become forever linked with the destruction of Hiroshima, a Japanese city he was yet to hear of.

Until three days earlier, on Tuesday, August 29, 1944, Tibbets had not been considered for the task. Then, late in the afternoon, General Barney Giles, assistant chief of air staff, decided to replace an earlier nominee with Tibbets. Lansdale, one of the less than one hundred men who knew what the Manhattan Project was meant to do, immediately supervised the most thorough investigation of Tibbets, staging the cloakroom meeting as the climax.

Lansdale’s question about a teenage sexual peccadillo was intended as the final test of Tibbets’s character. If he told the truth, he was in. Lansdale was satisfied.

In General Ent’s office, Ramsey and Parsons gave Tibbets a thorough briefing on the history and problems associated with building America’s first atomic bomb. Then Lansdale took over.

“Colonel, I want you to understand one thing. Security is first, last, and always. You will commit as little as possible to paper. You will tell only those who need to know what they must know to do their jobs properly. Understood?”

“Perfectly understood, Colonel.”

General Ent concluded the meeting by formally assigning the 393rd Heavy Bombardment Squadron, based in Nebraska, to Tibbets. Its fifteen bomber crews would provide the world’s first atomic strike force, capable of delivering nuclear bombs on Germany and Japan. Their training base would be at Wendover, Utah. The code name for the air force’s part of the project would be “Silverplate.”

Tibbets briefly wondered who had chosen such a homely name for a weapon “clearly designed to revolutionize war.” Even so, he still could not accept that one bomb dropped from a single aircraft could equal the force of twenty thousand tons of high explosive. Ordinarily, some two thousand bombers would be required to deliver such a payload.

But he had more pressing problems to deal with. He must gather together some of the trusted men who had served with him before; he must inspect Wendover; he must devise a training program; finally, he must be prepared to work alongside “a bunch of civilians who would give me a glimpse of Pandora’s box.”

As Tibbets was leaving the office, General Ent stopped him.

“Colonel, if this is successful, you’ll be a hero. But if it fails, you’ll be the biggest scapegoat ever. You may even go to prison.”

Tibbets was a stocky, medium-sized man with a crisp, detached manner. It would have been hard to guess that he was one of America’s most successful bomber pilots; a combat veteran who had flown the first B-17 across the English Channel on a bombing mission in World War II; who had piloted General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Mark Clark to Gibraltar to plan the Allied invasion of North Africa; who had taken Clark on to Algiers, landing on a field being bombed and strafed. Tibbets later led the first American raid on North Africa. Returning to the United States, he took charge of flight-testing the new B-29 Superfortress at a time when the bomber was thought too dangerous to fly; it had killed its first test pilot. Tibbets was courageous, used to command, able to give and execute orders with speed and efficiency.

Some people, though, found him difficult to work with. He did not suffer fools, and, by his own standards, there were many fools. Restrained and reticent, Tibbets appeared the paragon of service correctness. Few knew he concealed his sensitivity by steely control, that behind his outward appearance was a shy man who had suffered acutely the loss of any of his fliers in action. All that invariably showed on his face was a pleasant, noncommittal intelligence.

Tibbets was born in Quincy, Illinois, in 1915. His father, a wholesale confectioner, was a strict disciplinarian who severely punished the slightest infringement of the many rules which hedged in his son’s formative years. Paul’s mother, Enola Gay, was as gentle as her unusual forenames. She adored her only son and strongly opposed her husband’s decision to send Paul, at the age of thirteen, to the Western Military Academy at Alton, Illinois. Afterward, it was his mother who first encouraged him to be a doctor, and later, against strong family opposition, to join the U.S. Army Air Corps; she quietly accepted Paul’s wish to abandon medicine in favor of flying. But in those difficult post-Depression days a military career was not viewed with great favor in the middle-class community of which Paul Tibbets’s father was a pillar. When his son enlisted in 1937, his father’s last words on the subject were, “You’re on your own.” His mother had said, “Son, one day we’re going to be real proud of you.” She reminded him always to “dress neatly,” never to promise more than he could do, and always to tell the truth.

It was because Tibbets had followed her advice that he was able, in such unlikely surroundings, to answer truthfully Lansdale’s intimate question.

When Brigadier General Leslie Groves took command of the Manhattan Project, he was answerable only to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and, through him, to President Roosevelt.

Both knew more about this man with old-fashioned manners than they did about any other serving officer. An FBI check—the only occasion the bureau became involved in the atomic project—turned up Groves’s passion for candy, his concern about middle-age spread, his mean tennis playing, his ability to solve complicated mathematical problems while eating. The probe revealed Groves was known as “Greasy” at West Point, that he had few interests outside his work, that he was stable and happily married.

Stimson also knew his professional background: an outstanding West Point engineering graduate who had helped build the Pentagon; a man reputed to be the “best barrack-builder in the Army.”

His service record showed Groves to be a corner-cutter, a dimesaver, tough, tireless, and resilient. He was used to working to time and budget. He got things done. Although he tended both to ruffle the tempers of his equals and inspire fear in his subordinates, Groves seemed to Stimson and Roosevelt the best possible choice to run the world’s biggest-ever military project.

From the outset, Groves worked a fifteen-hour day, seven days a week. He gave up tennis and put on weight, sustaining himself with pounds of chocolates which he kept locked in the safe where he also stored the project’s most important secrets.

But Groves was not just a builder going from site to site with a bag of candy in his pocket. Even his friends in the project—and they numbered few—believed, in the words of one, that Groves “not only behaves as if he can walk on water, but as if he actually invented the substance.” Another, less cruel, claimed “he has the most impressive ego since Napoleon.”

Forty-eight years old, with a vocabulary capable of blistering a construction worker—though many found more unnerving his deep sigh at a piece of misfortune—Groves came from the same mold as MacArthur and Patton.

Ultimately, nobody could withstand his barrage of orders and demands. Opposition was crushed and arguments he regarded as pointless ended with a crisp “Enough.” He drafted industrial tycoons as if they were buck privates, and drove his work force to exhaustion as he built and ran his empire.