Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. (23 February 1915 â 1 November 2007) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. He is best known as the aircraft captain who flew the B-29 Superfortress known as the Enola Gay (named after his mother) when it dropped a Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Tibbets enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938. After Pearl Harbor he flew anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic and went on to flying B-17âs in daylight raids over Germany. He returned to the United States in February 1943 to help with the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.
In September 1944, he was appointed the commander of the 509th Composite Group, which would conduct the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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