Tibbets took quiet pride in the job he had done, said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, 'Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.' 'You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. 'I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did,' he said in a 1975 interview.
He said it was his patriotic duty and the right thing to do. Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role. 'History has shown there was no need to criticize him.' armed forces and Japanese civilians and military,' Jeppson said. Morris Jeppson, the officer who armed the bomb during the Hiroshima flight, said Tibbets was energetic, well-respected and 'hard-nosed.' But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.' We knew it was going to kill people right and left. 'We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. 'I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing,' Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published on the 60th anniversary of the bombing.
