The transcript records Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29 Superfortress, stating that the mission was shrouded in secrecy and that the crew had been issued with handguns and cyanide tablets in case they were shot down. Enola Gay was the name of Colonel Tibbets' mother. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. It has become urban legend that he went insane because of remorse following Hiroshima. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966. They added that the recordings and documents are historically important to the overall story of the attack on Hiroshima because they reveal what was happening inside the aircraft during the mission as well as the feelings of the crew. One of the crew members had a depressive personality and suffered an un-related nervous breakdown later in life. Officials of the museum told the Mainichi newspaper that it had been feared that the recordings had been subsequently lost. The 27 tapes cover 30 hours of interviews and are accompanied by 570 pages of typed transcripts that were collected by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts before the publication of their book, “Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima”, in 1977. Taped recordings and transcripts of interviews with the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay have been donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, 40 years after they were apparently lost and 73 years after the aircraft dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on the city.
