B-29 Enola Gay

[sc_rufctr]

Brigadier General Paul Tibbets interview part 1 and 2... This is worth your time.

(Feb 25, 2021)



(Mar 4, 2021)

[Joe Bob]

Coolio....but first link connects to Leno's garage, 1931 Shotwell threewheeler...

[sc_rufctr]

Ummm.... I don't know how that happened.

[drcoastline]

I had the honor of meeting General Tibbets in the early 2000's while he was on a book tour. He came to my home town where we have a Military aviation museum. The airport where the book signing occurred was a Hellcat training facility during WWII.

This picture was taken that day. It was funny a moment. This was in the days before digital cameras where we had the one-hour developing at places like CVS. I went early in the signing bought his book and a few other items including the Enola Gay stamp that was never adopted and a photo of the Enola Gay which he is autographing. We took this picture, I ran to the nearest place that had one hour developing and came back with the photo and stood in line again. When he saw the photo he turned to I believe his wife that is just out of the photo and said look this was taken today.

He graciously autographed my photo. He was very gentlemanly and soft spoken. It was a great honor to meet him and I will never forget that day.

[Danimal16]

I found this book to be excellent. Many insights into Paul Tibbets.

https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Father-His-Son-Man/dp/0380814110

[450knotOffice]

Awesome to see this interview from 2000. The interviewer is annoying me though because he can't seem to stop interrupting General Tibbets, and Tibbets himself seems to be a bit annoyed at the constant interruptions, although he is being very graciously patient with his interviewer.

[Tervuren]

Did not have Kermi Weeks book marked on this computer.
Time to fix that.

[mjohnson]

And his grandson, Paul Tibbets IV, was a bomber pilot in the USAF (Wiki claims one of the few to be B-52, B-1 and B-2 qualified) and very active in the nuclear side of things. There's a B61-12 bomb (mock of course) down the hall from my office that he autographed on a visit to Los Alamos.

Kinda makes doing powerpoint less impressive...

[DRONE]

We refurbished the engines (Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone) here in the basement of the San Diego Air and Space museum before the bomber was put on display back when I was volunteering

[Jolly Amaranto]

I visited Tinian in 1967. It was still pretty much a backwater with the old B29 runways all but grown over with thick vegetation. Did manage to find the bomb loading pits.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by Jolly Amaranto

I visited Tinian in 1967. It was still pretty much a backwater with the old B29 runways all but grown over with thick vegetation. Did manage to find the bomb loading pits.

I think they've been restored now. A colleague's been there and they recovered tons of spare parts from the two bombs that were just dumped into the surf at the end of the runway. Allegedly the leftovers were supposed to be dumped a few miles offshore but some young enlisted guy probably figured "hey, sooner this is done, sooner I go home..."

I guess they're also restoring, or at least have preserved, much of the stuff at Wendover Field in UT. That's where they did all of the testing with the B-29s and inert Fat Mans. I've never been there but I plan to.



Rambling side note on the era's relevant history:

As part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park the DOE and the NPS have restored much of the WW2 era stuff here in LA, or at least that which survived our huge 2001 forest fire. Most of it's inside the fenceline but they're working on ways to get the public in to see it. Oak Ridge and Hanford are also part of the park and are doing similar restorations of public and non-public areas.

Gun Site, where they tested the internals for Little Boy (which was basically a naval artillery barrel), is still waiting for restoration.

V Site, had/has a mockup of the B-29 bomb bay where they did numerous checks to make sure Fat Man would interface properly with the aircraft. Another building that was preserved was used to assemble Fat Man. Both have been restored.

Pajarito Site is where the famous criticality experiment that killed Louis Slotin is located. Interestingly enough it's where we did criticality experiments up until about ten years ago when DOE moved the fissile material to a facility in Nevada. It's part of the park too.

Not part of the park, but the quanset hut where they built many of the Fat Man and Trinity internals still stands at Trap Door (TD) site, the current location of the detonator design, testing and manufacturing facilities. I worked there for 10 years and never got into it as it's sealed due to being filled with asbestos and plague/hantavirus infested mice. It was built to be "temporary" - yeah, people were working in it until the early '90s.

Not in original buildings but I think we still have some of the candy kettles used to cast the explosives for FM. Actual commercial-style candy cookers were used!

What's so cool is that these sites are collocated with our operating facilities now. Gun Site is about 100 yds from the lab's radiography facilities. V Site is where we still do explosives assembly and testing. Kinda humbling to cruise past these places every day...


There are already other places in areas open to the public so if you're a history geek or just in the area (Hanford WA, Oak Ridge TN, LA NM) drop by. I think nearly all of the publicly accessible areas are free as well.

https://www.nps.gov/mapr/index.htm

[rcooled]

I got to see the Enola Gay at the Udvar-Hazy air museum just outside of Washington DC. It's huge...bigger than I expected.

[sc_rufctr]

Thanks for the input guys. The historical details are really interesting.

Originally Posted by 450knotOffice

Awesome to see this interview from 2000. The interviewer is annoying me though because he can't seem to stop interrupting General Tibbets, and Tibbets himself seems to be a bit annoyed at the constant interruptions, although he is being very graciously patient with his interviewer.

I felt the same way. The interviewer got right in his face and he doesn't know when to shut his mouth.

[KNS]

A good film to get an idea of the pressure and secrecy Tibbets was under is "Above and Beyond" with Robert Taylor (I think it can be found on Amazon Prime). Another plus is the use of actual B-29s and not silly Hollywood models.

[mjohnson]

Ponderous point -

The bomb the Enola Gay and Gen. Tibbets dropped had never been tested. Crazy! Who would go to war with an untested weapon?

It says something that the first test was over the enemy on 6 Aug 1945. That's how confident our engineers and scientists were.

[doug_porsche]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

Ponderous point -

The bomb the Enola Gay and Gen. Tibbets dropped had never been tested....

Always wish I had writing talent.
i think it could make good James Bond/Alternate Reality story of:
Tibbets drops the bomb. Nothing happens. Now we have to go get it back before the Japanese find/fix and drop the bomb on us.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by doug_porsche

Always wish I had writing talent.
i think it could make good James Bond/Alternate Reality story of:
Tibbets drops the bomb. Nothing happens. Now we have to go get it back before the Japanese find/fix and drop the bomb on us.

Probably wasn't a concern then - we can have confidence it'd at least have blowed up so you'd need tweezers and cotton balls to get the residue.

Sorry Tom Clancy.

[nota]

my dad worked at wright-patterson on the design of the hydraulic system for the B-29 nose wheel
that wheel system both steered and was powered to moved the aircraft on the ground without a tractor

[nota]

the U235 bomb untested but simple gun type bomb was sure to work
dead simple two parts fire bit 1 into bit 2 and it goes bang

hard part then as now is getting the near pure 235 out of the 238

the plutonium bomb is far more complex but the stuffing is just chemistry
once you have a big pile of 238 in a reactor and let it cook awhile

[rattlsnak]

I visited Los Alamos last year and it was so surreal being in the same buildings where those things were conceived..