The Enola Gay’s Pilot

Bob Burns spent his life trying to stay near airplanes. So the Pentagon nearly broke him: his first true staff job put a flier in charge of base libraries and hobby shops. What rescued him was a chance recommendation from one of the most famous — and most weighed-upon — pilots who ever lived: Paul Tibbets, who flew the Enola Gay.

A Desk With Nothing in Common With Airplanes

After the Tennessee Air National Guard and the nine-month Armed Forces Staff College at Norfolk, Bob drew the Pentagon — the office of personnel. An old classmate, Jim Gunn, even found and rented the house next door for the family. Then Bob found out what the job was.

“I found that I was the chief of the Special Services branch of Air Force Personnel. This office had responsibility for such essentials as base libraries, hobby shops, and interservice sports contests such as golf and other meets. This was my introduction to a staff job and had nothing in common with airplanes. As you may have guessed, I wasn’t at all happy with the job.”

For a man who had hand-flown a B-17 through a wall of weather and led bomb groups over Germany, base libraries and hobby shops were a particular kind of purgatory.

The Opry Goes to Europe

The job had exactly one redeeming feature, and it was a good one: Bob used it to assemble a troupe of Grand Ole Opry stars — Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, the comic Rod Brasfield — and take them on a three-week Thanksgiving USO tour of American bases in Europe. It was a logistical headache mostly because of the performers’ feuding over top billing, but he “did get them back to Nashville with no bloodshed.” (That tour has its own story.)

A Word from the Enola Gay’s Pilot

After a year of libraries and hobby shops, an opening appeared in Requirements — real work, planning the Air Force’s future aircraft. The man vacating the seat happened to be one of the most consequential pilots in history.

“After a year in that job, I learned that a job was coming open in Requirements. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay [the A Bomb plane] was leaving. I met him and he was glad to recommend me to the Division head and I got that job.”

It is the most extraordinary thing, told in the most ordinary way. The pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima — a man around whom the entire moral weight of the twentieth century still circles — appears in Bob’s account as a courteous colleague who put in a good word and moved on. No drama, no editorial. Just one officer recommending another for a desk in the Pentagon.

Into the Strategic Future

The job Tibbets handed him was head of the Strategic Division — planning what Strategic Air Command would need years out, and what industry could build. Bob got to know the men from every aircraft company, who “wooed me with golf games at Burning Tree,” the exclusive course near Washington. He spent the most time with Boeing, where the B-47 was in service, the B-52 and its tanker fleet about to launch; and he visited Convair in Fort Worth, where the B-58 Hustler “was being born.” Two years of that, and he was glad to leave it for an overseas posting — the Air Force advisory group in Greece.