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Many of the crewmen were personal friends who had flown missions with him over Nazi-occupied Western Europe and North Africa. He selected the combat veterans who manned the bombers. Tibbets chose the planes that flew those missions – specially reconfigured B-29s, then the largest operational aircraft on Earth, stripped of armament and armor plating to lighten them for their extended journeys. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another plane from the 509th leveled much of Nagasaki with another nuclear bomb, prompting the Japanese surrender.
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“Hap” Arnold as “the best damned pilot in the (Army) Air Force,” Tibbets was hand-picked to command the mysterious 509th Composite Group, the first military unit ever formed to wage nuclear war. 6, 1945.ĭescribed by his commandant, Gen. Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the Enola Gay, the propeller-driven, four-engine bomber, named for his mother, that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. “I made one great mistake in my life – when I signed a letter to President Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made,” said pioneering physicist Albert Einstein, one of the first to conceive of such a weapon. “I never lost a night’s sleep over it,” Tibbets had said.īut to millions of detractors, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was a cosmic example of man’s inhumanity to man, an act that left the world teetering on the brink of self-annihilation. To him and millions of supporters, dropping the atomic bomb was a justifiable means of shortening World War II, preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen that military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.
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The pilot never apologized for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and immediately killed at least 80,000 people. Tibbets suffered from a variety of ailments and died of heart failure, said Gerry Newhouse, his longtime friend. Kondo will receive an honorary Master of Philosophy degree in human ecology, as will recently retired Acadia National Park wildlife biologist Bruce Connery.Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., the Army Air Forces pilot whose bombing run over Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 introduced nuclear war, died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. Now is the time to listen, and to carry these stories with us into the future.” “It has been 74 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and there will soon be a time when survivors are no longer here to tell their stories. Her story is a testament to peace I believe every person should hear,” said COA student Devyn Adams. “Koko is one of the most kind, warm, and captivating people I have ever met. She learned to embrace the enormous contradictions and paradoxes of her hibakusha experiences, and now exudes an inspiring, affirmative energy and compassion. For Kondo, the meeting was a life-changing, transformative experience. Lewis, co-pilot of Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In 1955, Kondo and her father appeared on the popular television program “This is Your Life,” where they met Captain Robert A. Simply put, she is one of the most influential speakers I have witnessed in my lifetime.” “As an atomic bomb survivor, she is able to speak with authority about the horror of war, the need for resilience, the imperative of world peace, and the power of forgiveness. “I am delighted that Koko Kondo will be sharing her inspirational message with the COA graduating class and their friends and family,” said College of the Atlantic provost Ken Hill. Kondo received her undergraduate degree from American University in 1969 and since then has told the world the story of the hibakwha, which means “explosion-affected people.” She fosters peace through the Children as the Peacemakers organization, the American University Nuclear Studies Institute, and the Tanimoto Peace Foundation. Her father, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of the six survivors featured in John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima” was instrumental in rebuilding the city and promoting a message of peace through the Hiroshima Maiden Project, which assisted young girls who had been disfigured from the attack, and the Moral Adoption Project, which supported war orphans. Too young to remember details of the event, Kondo grew up witnessing its horrific consequences. Kondo was eight months old in 1945 when the first atomic bomb was dropped just a half-mile from her home in Hiroshima, burying her mother and herself under their home. BAR HARBOR - Peace activist and prominent atomic bomb survivor Koko Tanimoto Kondo will give the keynote speech at College of the Atlantic’s commencement on Saturday, June 8 at 2 p.m.