Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. (February 23, 1915 – November 1, 2007), was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force. He is best known as the pilot who flew the Enola Gay (named after his mother) when it dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.Tibbets enlisted in the United States Army in 1937 and qualified as a pilot in 1938. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he flew anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic.