My dad was flying B-29’s from Tinian with the 9th BW. We always celebrated (yes, celebrated for you weak sisters out there) this day in our household growing up.
Dad was convinced it was only a matter of time before he went down and became a POW so the A-bomb was his deliverance.
He never stepped foot in a cockpit again after he came home. Sold insurance and made a fortune.
I once met a P51 pilot who had flown in Europe. We had a lot of Bourbon, so I was drunk enough to ask him about the war and he was drunk enough to talk about it.
He said his favorite target were trains, because he would strafe his way up to the engine and then kaboom! a big steam explosion.
But then his face fell, and he said that on the long flight back to base you thought about the guys on the ground and you didn't feel so good anymore.
In contrast, I've read transcripts of German pilots who boasted about strafing civilians. That was the difference between us and them.
He flew some planes back to the US, but after leaving the service, like your father he never flew again.
Paul Tibbets did. He used to visit the Enola Gay in the Udvar-Hazy wing of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and was allowed to sit in the cockpit to reminisce.
Before the Hiroshima mission they stripped out everything that wasn't essential to save weight, even the padding in the crew seats, so the pilots on that mission sat on their parachutes. When Tibbets had got old a bony he brought a seat cushion with him to make the PIC's seat more comfortable, and they let him keep it there. It (allegedly) was the only thing on the whole airplane that wasn't period-authentic.
The Smithsonian had a 3-d virtual tour of the cockpit and you could see the Tibbet's cushion. I checked it a couple of days after he died in 2007 and the cushion was gone.