Every time I ran into a guy, I had to rack my brains figuring out what I’d told him the week before.
“I’d never realized before,” he said, “that the question somebody asks you every hour on the hour is ‘What have you been up to lately?’ I’ll bet I thought up more jobs in the Air Corps than there are in the Air Corps. Tibbets’ chief difficulty up to this August was in lying about what he was doing. Myself, I found that I was just as anxious as ever to finish up and get back to that steak dinner and ‘Terry and the Pirates.’ ” “People keep asking me these days whether I wasn’t shaken by the importance of our atomic-bomb work. “I will go only so far as to say that I knew what an atom was,” Tibbets told us. He was hard at work at this job when one day a high-ranking general summoned him to his office, locked the door, peeked under his desk, and said, “You are the member of the Air Corps who may henceforth consider the atomic bomb your baby.” Tibbets didn’t know what the general was talking about. In the fall of ’43, he was called home to serve as a test pilot for B-29s. Tibbets went overseas in 1942 and dropped old-fashioned bombs on North Africa and Occupied France. The cheapest way to learn to fly was to sign up with the Air Corps for three years, which he did by the time the three years were up, he was a captain and the Air Corps wanted him to stick around. “I do not want to sound pompous,” he said, “but I am well known among my friends and family as a fellow who does not do much talking.” We did manage to worm from him the fact that he started out to be an abdominal surgeon and that he graduated from the University of Florida and spent a year and a half at the University of Cincinnati before he decided to take up flying instead of cutting. In a recent talk with Colonel Tibbets, who has been in town, we found him suitably uncommunicative about the size, shape, and characteristics of the bomb, and not too readily communicative about anything else. He commanded the 509th Combat Squadron, which conducted a number of still secret experiments having to do with the dropping of atomic bombs, and he piloted the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
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to usher in the Atomic Age is a dark-haired, twenty-nine-year-old full colonel named Paul W.