As a history teacher, one of the things of which I am acutely aware is that history is all around us -- and today's current events are tomorrow's history. Our public figures and pop culture icons will be remembered tomorrow as the folks who shaped history and culture for an era. And each day, a little bit of history dies as we lose the participants in key events of earlier generations.

Yesterday was one of those days when there was no doubt that we lost a major figure in an important event.

Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the commander and pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the final days of World War II, died today at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.

His death was announced by a friend, Gerry Newhouse, who said General Tibbets had been in decline with a variety of ailments. Mr. Newhouse said General Tibbets had requested that there be no funeral or headstone, fearing it would give his detractors a place to protest.

In the hours before dawn on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off from the island of Tinian carrying a uranium atomic bomb assembled under extraordinary secrecy in the vast endeavor known as the Manhattan Project.

Six and a half hours later, under clear skies, then-Colonel Tibbets, of the Army Air Forces, guided the four-engine plane he had named in honor of his mother toward the bombÂ’s aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima, the site of an important Japanese army headquarters.

At 8:15 a.m. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy dropped free at an altitude of 31,000 feet. Forty-three seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno that left tens of thousands dead and dying and turned much of Hiroshima, a city of some 250,000 at the time, into a scorched ruin.

Colonel Tibbets executed a well-rehearsed diving turn to avoid the blast effect.

In his memoir “The Tibbets Story,” he told of “the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city.”

“The giant purple mushroom, which the tail-gunner had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,” he remembered.

It is easy for us today to question the morality of dropping the atomic bomb when and where we did. That said, there was no question that those in 1945 saw it as an appropriate decision, one that would shorten the war and ultimately save American lives. That there are those today who would revile Paul Tibbetts and his crew is symptomatic of a fundamental conceit that prevails in modern society -- the assumption that contemporary moral outlooks are somehow morally and intellectually superior to those made by other people at other times. Rather than place ourselves in the shoes of those intimately involved in historical events and seek to understand the, too many people would instead look askance at the failure of men and women of an earlier age to act and think like men and women living in the early twenty-first century.

This is not to say that we shouldn't question the morality or wisdom of the actions of historical figures -- indeed, we debated just such issues during a discussion of the slave trade in my classes this week. But as students of history, it is more important that we understand what was done and the reasons why, and to draw lessons accordingly.

And so America now bids farewell to a hero -- one whose deeds helped to end the most horrific conflict of the twentieth century. And if there is room for questioning the wisdom and the correctness of the policy decision that led Paul Tibbetts and his crew to drop the first atomic bomb ever used as a weapon, there can be no question of the importance of the men of Enola Gay -- or their heroism and love of country.

Posted by: Greg at 09:58 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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