Colonel Tibbets was the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B29 Superfortress that dropped the world‟s first atomic weapon on Hiroshima. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Tibbets was asked how he felt about his role in the world-altering events of August 1945:
“I was anxious to do it… I wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan. I wanted to kill the bastards. That was the attitude of the United States in those years…I have been convinced that we saved more lives than we took. It would have been morally wrong if we‟d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”
-“The Men Who Brought the Dawn: The Atomic Missions of Enola Gay and Bock's Car”, Smithsonian Channel (1995)