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In the late 1920s, business issues forced Tibbets's family to return to Alton, Illinois, where he graduated from Western Military Academy in 1933. In 1927, when he was 12 years old, he flew in a plane piloted by barnstormer Doug Davis, dropping candy bars with tiny parachutes to the crowd of people attending the races at the Hialeah Park Race Track. One day his mother agreed to pay one dollar to get him into an airplane at the local carnival. As a boy he was very interested in flying. When he was eight, his family moved to Hialeah, Florida, to escape from harsh midwestern winters. When he was five years old the family moved to Davenport, Iowa, and then to Iowa's capital, Des Moines, where he was raised, and where his father became a confections wholesaler. was born in Quincy, Illinois, on 23 February 1915, the son of Paul Warfield Tibbets Sr.
![the crew of the enola gay the crew of the enola gay](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/08/06/PDEM/808041ba-eec9-4dc3-83c8-32e4851d22ce-AP45010101335.jpg)
In February 1942, he became the commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group, which was equipped with the Boeing B-17. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he flew anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic. Tibbets enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938. 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. (23 February 1915 – 1 November 2007) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force.