TOKYO - Japanese survivors of the world's first nuclear attack on Hiroshima voiced regret Friday that the American pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb died without saying sorry.
Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., whose B-29 bomber dubbed the Enola Gay dropped the 9,000-pound "Little Boy" bomb on August 6, 1945, died Thursday at his home in the midwest city of Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.
Tibbets never expressed regret for the bombing that led to the end of World War II but at a horrific price: 140,000 dead immediately and 80,000 other Japanese succumbing in the aftermath, according to Hiroshima officials.
"He did not apologise, arguing, like the American government, that the bombing saved millions of American and Japanese lives by ending the war," said Nori Tohei, 79, who survived the bombing of the western Japanese city.
"But I wanted him to visit Hiroshima and take a direct look at what he did as a human being," said Tohei, who co-chairs the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Suffers Organisations and now lives in Tokyo.
"He was following orders as a military man but I wanted him to recognise it (the bombing) was a mistake and apologise to those who were killed or were long suffering side effects," Tohei told AFP.
Tohei turned 17 on August 9, 1945, three days after the Hiroshima blast and the day a second atomic bomb was dropped on the southern city of Nagasaki. The United States has never formally apologised for the attacks.
Although Tibbets saw little of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima, he would walk the streets of Nagasaki a few weeks after the second atom bomb was dropped there.
"A couple of the streets we walked had swelled," he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003, as he described the buckling of the earth caused by the intensity of the blast. "Damnedest thing you've ever seen."
He had been suffering from heart problems, manager and publisher Gerry Newhouse told AFP.
mis/dr/lh
11/02/2007 03:32 GMT