US pilot dropping 1st nuclear bomb in Japan dies

American pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr (C) with rest of the crew of the B-29 bomber "Enola Gay". Tibbets, who dropped the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima during World War II, died in his Ohio home. (File Photo)

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. pilot who dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II, died at 92 on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio.

Paul Tibbets Jr. died in the morning at his East Side home following years of small strokes and heart failure, and he is to be cremated, according to a report of The Columbus Dispatch.

Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone for fear that it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, said a Newhouse News Agency report.

The pilot was born in Quincy, Illinois, on Feb. 23, 1915, but grew up in Miami. At age 12, he became obsessed with flight and joined the Army Air Corps in 1938 after giving up a medical career.

On Aug. 6, 1945, then 30-year-old Tibbets and his crew piloted the Enola Gay, a B-29 that he named for his mother, down the runway on Tinian Island for a six-hour flight to Japan. They dropped the first atomic bomb used in combat at 9:15 plus 15 seconds.

The mission was code-named Special Bombing Mission No. 13.

"The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire," Tibbets once said of the bombing at Hiroshima, leaving 70,000 to 100,000 dead and countless wounded.

Another 40,000 people or so were killed after the second nuclear bomb was dropped on Aug. 9 on Nagasaki. A few days later, Japan surrendered, leading to the end of the war.

Tibbets had been insisting that he felt no regrets about the mission and slept "clearly every night" afterwards.

"I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview.

In a report to memorize the 60th anniversary of the bombings, Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch "we knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible."

Editor:Du Xiaodan