“He would place items on the dining room table and then we would spend most of our day together discussing them in detail,” Lewis’s youngest son, Steven, recalled.
Lewis, later a settled family man with five children, spent a lifetime reflecting on the mission.
Tibbets, selected Lewis to join him in a combat force-the 509th Composite Group-training in secret to use the bomber to deliver a weapon of unprecedented power. Another pilot in the B-29 program, Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Lewis had enlisted in the Army Air Corps early in the war electronics experience got him a gig testing weapons systems on a bomber under development, the B-29 Superfortress. In August 1945 the confident and rambunctious Lewis was 27, with sturdy, all-American good looks and a reputation as a skilled pilot and determined ladies’ man. Lewis wrote shortly after the B-29 he was copiloting, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. IF I LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS, I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind,” Robert A.
Enola Gay: Pilot's-eye View | HistoryNet Close
