World War II – Page 2 – Now I've Heard Everything

Tomorrow, August 6th, is the 75th anniversary of the first-ever use of a nuclear weapon in war, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

At the controls of the B-29 called the Enola Gay was a young pilot named Paul Tibbetts.

After the war, Tibbetts returned to a very humble and private life in Ohio.

As the 1990s were drawing to a close, Chicago Tribune columnist and author Bob Greene was finally, after years of trying, to get Paul Tibbetts to talk about his history-making flight.

The result was Greene’s book “Duty.”

So here now, from 2001, Bob Greene.

Paul Tibbetts died in 2007 at age 92.

Bob Greene is 73 now. He left thre Chicago Tribune in 2002. His last book was publsihed in 2009.

Sixty years ago this week, May 1960, a team of Israeli Mossad agents quietly traveled to Argentina, where they found and captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who was instrumental in organizing the extermination of millions of Jews during World War II.

A key member of that Israeli team was a young man named Peter Z. Malkin.

I met him in 1990, around the 30th anniversary of that famous episode. He had just published a book called “Eichmann In My Hands.”

And as he told me in that interview, the man he had been sent to capture had escaped from post-war Germany in the first place because of a mispronunciation of his name.

So here now, from 1990, Peter Z. Malkin:

Adolf Eichmann was brought back to Israel by Malkin and his team. Eichmann was tried and found guilty of war crimes, and was executed by hanging in 1962.

Peter Z. Malkin spent his final years in New York with his wife and children. He died in 2005 at age 77.