Leading up to the bombing, General Tibbets had meetings with J. The crew carried an atomic bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" and its target was Hiroshima, a city chosen because it was a military center and had no prisoner-of-war camps. The Enola Gay, named after his mother, took off from Tinian Island, near the Pacific island of Guam, in the predawn hours of Aug. In late 1944, Tibbets, then a colonel, was selected for the top-secret bombing mission over Japan, the culmination of the Manhattan Project. "It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die," he said. In a public television documentary, "The Men Who Brought the Dawn," which aired on the 50th anniversary of the bombings, General Tibbets said the bomb "saved more lives than we took" because an alternative would have been an invasion of Japan's home islands. In rarely granted interviews, he expressed little remorse over the more than 100,000 Japanese killed or injured at Hiroshima and said he slept easily knowing of his role. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, a historical turning point of the last century. General Tibbets became a military celebrity with the Aug. He was 92 and reportedly had suffered strokes in recent years. Tibbets Jr., who piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb in combat in an attack that helped end World War II and usher in the atomic age, died yesterday at his home in Columbus, Ohio.