Colonel Paul W. Tibbets of the Army Air Forces standing next to the Enola Gay

Paul W. Tibbets held a unique distinction in the annals of history. He was the pilot of the Enola Gay (which was named after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets) and thus was the man who carried out the command to drop the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, making him the first person to detonate an atomic bomb in warfare. As was the conventional view for Americans of his time, Tibbets never expressed any pangs of regret about the act of killing upwards of 60,000 people in a matter of minutes, tending instead to emphasize the combat fatalities averted by bringing the World War II to a speedier end.

It is likely that he was even less apologetic about his participation in an air show 31 years later in which he re-enacted the Hiroshima bombing using a restored B-29 Superfortress (the same model as the Enola Gay) named “Fifi,” a reference to the co-pilot’s girlfriend. This event took place on October 10, 1976, in front of a large paying crowd reported as 18,000 (but possibly as large as 40,000) in Harlingen, Texas. Tibbets reenacted his historic Enola Gay mission—the event actually included a “simulated” atomic explosion—and repeated the flight twice the next day.

The impetus of the event was to raise money for a WWII aircraft preservation group called the Confederate Air Force—today the group goes by the name the Commemorative Air Force. Fascinatingly, the U.S. Army supplied a detonation team to assist with the “atomic-bomb simulator,” in other words “a barrel of explosives” that produced the crowd-pleasing mushroom-shaped cloud, which you can see in the news article reproduced below.
 

 
This was not the first time the Hiroshima bombing had been re-enacted. On October 27, 1945, the Los Angeles Coliseum hosted an event called “Tribute To Victory.” According to Daniel Tiffany’s book Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric, “this early simulation of an atomic blast hinted at the ‘devastation’ associated with Hiroshima—an image ‘almost too real’ for the crowd.” That event, however, did not garner a crowd of forty thousand—it drew roughly a hundred thousand! Considering that the Coliseum event was just a few months after the end of World War II, the morbid curiosity and willingness to offend the Japanese were a little bit more understandable.

It’s doubtful whether many of the spectators in attendance found the 1976 air show in Harlingen to be in poor taste, but in any case it did cause a minor international incident. Understandably, when the citizens of Japan learned of this event, they were none too happy about it.

The mayor of Hiroshima at that time was a man named Takeshi Araki, and apparently it took some doing to get him to believe that the incident had actually taken place. Araki called the re-enactment “a blasphemy” and “grotesque.” In a later press release he addressed the organizers of the air show: “What you have done insults the Japanese people who suffered from the bomb. I feel real rage and we shall protest to the U.S. government and all concerned.” Here was the reaction of Foreign Minister Zentaro Kosaka: “A bomb and a mushroom-shaped cloud is a real nightmare for the Japanese. Although it was a civilian air show, I cannot refrain from feeling badly. They lacked consideration for the feelings of others.”

October 10 was a Saturday; on Wednesday, October 14, 1976, the U.S. Embassy in Japan issued an apology for the Texas air show, triggering this memorable headline:
 

 
Right-wing nuts insist that Barack Obama apologized for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks, but that’s not true. The United States has still not apologized for those events—but at least we apologized for the fake Hiroshima bombing! One out of two ain’t bad!

The U.S. government may have apologized but of course the CAF did no such thing, issuing a statement that included these words: “We feel that this demonstration was altogether proper and presented in an appropriate manner. We do not owe an apology to anyone.”

‘MURICA DON’T GIVE A SHIT…

You can see actual footage of Tibbets participating in the re-enactment—complete with the mushroom cloud effect—by jumping to the 1:50 juncture of this video, which we unfortunately can’t embed.
 
via Conelrad

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Wish you were vaporized: Charming postcards from the atomic age
Relive the heady era of ‘Uranium rock’ with Doris Day’s ode to the Geiger counter and more!