But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. His family was also a proud military family. It is the name of the main character in the novel Enola or, her Fatal Mistake (1886) by Mary Young. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. This name first appeared in the late 19th century. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.
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