Iowa Almanac
Iowa Almanac -- Tuesday, August 06, 2024
The first atomic bomb, more from the Iowa Almanac in a moment. Aloha! Attached at the island! Right here in Iowa, hi there. Auntie Peterson joined Kerry Dolphin and I as we host the annual Tate and Dottie Cummins Memorial Pineapple Gala to benefit Camp Courageous. It's Friday August 16th at 6 p.m. at the Double Tree Convention Center in downtown Cedar Rapids. Enjoy a Hawaiian dinner, live in silent auction, and more. To view auction items or for tickets simply go to kibkerages.org and we'll see you there. As a young boy, Paul Warfield Tibbetts Jr. lived in Cedar Rapids. The family later moved to Des Moines where Paul attended Roosevelt High School for a time. Then it was off to Florida, but Paul returned each summer to Iowa to stay on his uncle's farm. Paul Tibbetts enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1937 at the age of 22. His ability as a pilot was apparent, and he was quickly tabbed for special projects. One included flying over Hiroshima, Japan in the pre-dawn hours of August 6th, 1945. The top secret mission included dropping a new bomb, one which weighed four and a half tons and carried the name "Little Boy." Well, coming up on the bomb run, the city was visible to us. Our aiming point, the military headquarters, stayed out very clearly. After the bomb had exploded, and by the time we could turn around and get a look at it, the city was a mass of dust. To me it appeared that it was exactly the same as any aircraft fire. As a matter of fact, I was fooled even though I was expecting a reaction to the airplane from the black. When it did happen, my first reaction was that it was black. That was Paul Tibbetts speaking with legendary journalist Jack Shelley just two days after the mission. Tibbetts flew a plane called the Enola Gay, named after his mother, Enola Gay Haggard Tibbetts, who hailed from Glidden, Iowa. Some 130,000 Japanese were killed, and a 10-square-mile area was obliterated. When a former Iowa resident, Paul Tibbetts, piloted the plane that dropped the world's first atomic bomb on this date in 1945. And that's Iowa Almanac for August 6th. Follow us on Twitter @IowaAlmanac. Until tomorrow, I'm Jeff Stein.