He was a student at the University of Cincinnati's medical school when he decided to withdraw in 1937 to enlist in the U.S. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., and spent most of his boyhood in Miami. We were at war.You use anything at your disposal." "You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. "I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview. Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible." "We knew it was going to kill people right and left. "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background," he said. 6, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the bomb. "I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told the Columbus Dispatch newspaperfor a story on Aug. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war. Three days later, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, immediately killing an estimated 40,000 people. Tens of thousands more died in the ensuing months and years from injuries and radiation. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others. The plane and its crew of 14 dropped the bomb, dubbed "Little Boy," on the morning of Aug. It was the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime. Tibbets' historic mission in the plane Enola Gay, named for his mother, marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. In a 2005 newspaper interview, Tibbets said he wanted his ashes scattered over the English Channel, where he loved to fly during the war. Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, Newhouse said. Tibbets suffered from a variety of health problems and had been in decline for two months. Tibbets died at his home in Columbus, Ohio, said Gerry Newhouse, a long-time friend. Tibbets died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. Paul Tibbets stands beside the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress bomber he piloted over Hiroshima to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan.