The Enola Gay’s pilot, Paul Tibbets was interviewed by Studs Terkel in The Guardian. He tells what how the bombing felt from his altitude:
We get to that point where I say “one second” and by the time I’d got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I’m in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great.
I tell people I tasted it. “Well,” they say, “what do you mean?” When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.
He has no regrets, and offers some advice on how to conduct the War on Terror:
ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, “Let’s nuke ’em,” “Let’s nuke these people,” what do you think?
PT: Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: “You’ve killed so many civilians.” That’s their tough luck for being there.
