Paul went to work, and pretty soon, we were eating chicken every day instead of K-rations, which was a wonderful thing, especially with that gasoline garnish he put in there! This went on for a while, and we were running out of money because these Arabs were robbing us blind. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk: When we were in Africa, Paul Tibbets got the idea we could cook chickens in the empty five-gallon gasoline cans. Paul Tibbets and Dutch Van Kirk, navigator for both the Red Gremlin and the Enola Gay, took a moment to look back at their unique flying careers. She was joined by Glacier Girl, a P-38 recovered from more than 260 feet of Arctic ice in Greenland and a restored C-47 in formation flights around Atlanta. During the day, members of the Tibbets crew rode in the Liberty Belle, one of only 14 of the 12,000 B-17s manufactured that’s currently flying. Aviation entrepreneur Pat Epps invited Tibbets to Atlanta for a surprise reunion with surviving crewmembers of his B-17, the Red Gremlin, and his B-29, the Enola Gay.
This past winter, Paul Tibbets turned 90 years old. On August 10, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally, and World War II was over. In August of 1945, Tibbets would fly the B-29 Super-fortress named after his mother, Enola Gay, to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In 1943, just six years after he learned to fly, Tibbets returned to the United States to become one of the few people in the world to be briefed on one of America’s most highly guarded secrets-the Manhattan Project, led by nuclear scientist Robert Oppen-heimer. He flew the B-17 Flying Fortress with the 340th Bomb Squadron Bombardment Group in Europe and later flew missions to support the Allied invasion of North Africa. In 1942, Tibbets joined the 97th Bomb Group in the Bolero Mission, ferrying B-17s, P-38s and C-47s from Bangor, Maine, across Greenland and Iceland to the European Theatre. Paul Tibbets joined the Army Air Corps at Fort Thomas, Ky., in 1937.