The Final Storm

by Jeff Shaara

  Ferebee interrupted him.

  “Nope. That kind of fire came from the bomb load. Incendiaries. I heard about the mission. It was just like last night. That’s mostly all they’re using now. General LeMay likes his bonfires.”

  Tibbets didn’t like the talk, felt the gloom, the edginess spreading through all of them.

  “Leave it be. That’s not us, and it’s not our problem. Those birds are old and beat to hell. We don’t have that problem. Remember that.”

  In the darkness, another voice, familiar, the newest member of the crew to arrive on Tinian.

  “That’s right. Don’t give it a second thought. As many hours as those planes have logged, it’s a wonder more of ’em don’t come apart. But we won’t have anything to worry about.”

  Tibbets moved closer to the man, said, “Not now, Deak. Save it for the briefing.”

  To the others, Tibbets knew it was one more hint of mystery, this new man arriving along with the C-54s that brought part of the special cargo that sat now under intensely heavy security nearby. Tibbets put his hand on the man’s shoulder, said, “My quarters. Let’s have a chat.”

  They moved through darkness, away from the others, and Tibbets glanced out toward the guards, ever present, silhouetted against the lights from the distant runways. The sirens had grown quiet, little for any rescue worker to do, the wrecked B-29 likely no more than a pile of ash, along with its crew. The crashes were too common, and he knew that Ferebee was right, that the incendiary bombs meant that a plane’s failure, whether from a fuel leak or impact with the ground, could produce a spectacular disaster. The crashes were common during the day as well, but those were the return flights, the planes wounded by anti-aircraft fire, or more likely, mechanical failure. Some of those never made it at all, adding to the casualty counts of those flight crews lost at sea, or the fortunate, rescued by the navy’s flying boats or submarines. Some were more fortunate still, finding the landing strips on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  He led the new man into the Quonset hut, to his own office, then past, to his quarters, where the pipe tobacco waited, along with a bottle of bourbon, a gift from General LeMay. The door was locked, and Tibbets pulled the key from his pocket, pulled it open, allowed the man to move inside, then closed the door behind both of them. Tibbets locked the door again, motioned to a small metal chair.

  “Take a seat.”

  Captain Deak Parsons had been involved with the Manhattan Project from its earliest days, and some had said he was more qualified than General Groves to run the entire affair. He had spent most of the past month at Los Alamos, had witnessed the test explosion of the first bomb, but his role on the primary mission was something brand-new. The bomb’s largest mechanism, the cannon that would drive the two pieces of the uranium together, the very act that would produce the atomic explosion, had to rely on the simplest of devices. The cannon was, after all, a cannon, and cannons were no more sophisticated than the explosive charges that made them fire a projectile, any projectile. Every artillery piece required a loader, even if that piece was centered inside the casing of the atomic bomb. Here the man who would load the cannon had been given the official title of Weaponeer and Ordnance Officer. Unlike the rest of Tibbets’s crew, the man chosen for this job was navy, a captain, William Parsons. Everyone who knew him well knew him as Deak. And those who knew the hierarchy of the crew assembled at Tinian knew that Parsons was also Commander of the Bomb. If there was any doubt what that meant, no one had asked.

  Parsons was forty-four, older than Tibbets by nearly fifteen years, and was one of the first men involved with the Manhattan Project that Tibbets actually met face-to-face. Whatever technical questions Tibbets or anyone else had about the bomb, Parsons knew the answers. With most of the physicists remaining stateside, Parsons was the one man Tibbets would need close to him throughout the entire mission. That meant that Deak Parsons would be aboard the B-29 when the actual mission began.

  “Anything wrong, Paul?”

  Tibbets poured from the bottle, handed one shot glass to Parsons, sat back in his own chair.

  “I hate the crashes.” He paused. “Well, hell, everybody hates crashes. But, dammit, every time my crews see a bird go up in flames, it has to dig their doubts a little deeper. I don’t need any little speeches from you explaining all the technical reasons a B-29 can come apart. When the time comes, I’ll have enough to keep me busy without my crew sweating out the takeoff.”

  “I’ve got news for you, Paul. I’m sweating out the takeoff right now. Anyone with a brain ought to be sweating it out. You know what will happen if we don’t clear the ground?”

  “Yeah. The mission is scrubbed.”

  “The whole damn island will be scrubbed. Every tree, every building, every B-29, every crewman. General Groves and I have been debating something for weeks now, and he’s sticking to his guns. But I’m sticking to mine. Groves says that most of the physicists want the bomb assembled completely before it goes into the belly of your plane. They’re concerned that every little bow should be tied, every screw tightened, before the bomb is handed off to air jockeys. General Groves has to listen to that, but I don’t.” Parsons lowered his head, said slowly, “I’ll mention this in detail at the briefing if you want me to. The flight crew has to know exactly what I’ll be doing to the bomb. Once the secret’s out, there’s no reason to keep anything quiet.”

  “Agreed. That will only happen when we’re airborne.”

  “I understand that, Paul. But first, we have to get airborne. You know damn well that if we go down on takeoff, there are a number of things that can happen, none of them good. But the only way the bomb will ignite is if the two halves of the uranium collide. A crash won’t guarantee that. But even without a crash, there are other possible problems. The bomb is going to be wired with two dozen circuits, every kind of sensor, monitoring every electrical signal, every battery … well, hell, you know all that. Point is, there’s one system I’m not too happy with.”

  Tibbets leaned forward, the bourbon forgotten.

  “What system?”

  “The charges that fire the cannon. We’ve built in a duplication, two separate cordite charges. Obviously, if the cannon fails, so does the bomb. The redundancy is designed to cut the odds of the cannon’s failure in half, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But if there is a short circuit, or the bomb jostles in some unexpected way, if turbulence on takeoff tosses the thing back and forth, any of that … there’s always the chance that one of those cordite charges could be fired accidentally. If we crash-land, a fire in any one of the electrical circuits could ignite the cordite and fire the cannon. If that happens, we will be the least of anyone’s worries. But I can’t see the sense in risking this whole damn island, and several thousand men.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Arm the cannon on the plane, once it’s airborne, and clear of the island. If there’s an accident, the only … um … issue will be how much dust is left of us. But … just us.”

  Tibbets sat back again, could see the perfect logic in Parsons’s reasoning.

  “Groves doesn’t like this idea?”

  “Groves is listening to the physicists who insist it will be too difficult to insert the cordite into the bomb once the plane is in the air. Mind you, not one of those boys has ever flown in a B-29, most likely. All it involves is a little … maneuvering. Can’t say I’ve ever thought of being a contortionist, but that’s what I’ll have to do. Once we’re clear of the island, I’ll climb down into the bomb bay and insert both drums of explosives … on the fly, so to speak.”

  “Have you tried doing that before now?”

  “Paul, no one’s tried any of this before now. I’ll work on it on the ground, practice the technique. It has to be this way.”

  “What about Groves?”

  “He’ll need to be briefed, I understand that. But you make sure he’s briefed so close to takeoff, he won’t have time to respond.”
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  Tibbets tried to imagine the scene, Parsons sliding down into the bomb bay, perched on the bomb.

  “You’ll have to sit on the damn thing.”

  “Yep. Straddle it.”

  “Like it’s a horse.”

  “Or a torpedo. Done that a couple times in training. One thing about becoming an engineer, you get to do things most people think are completely nuts.”

  Tibbets downed the bourbon, looked at Parsons, saw no smile, the man completely serious.

  “This qualifies, Deak. But it’s your call.”

  Parsons sipped at the bourbon, then downed it in one quick gulp. He shook his head, seemed to fight off the burn, said, “Ride ’em cowboy.”

  The choice of target came from LeMay’s office. There had been considerable discussion between everyone who had the authority, communications between LeMay and Groves, Hap Arnold and George Marshall. The meetings had continued on both Tinian and Guam, the discussions involving LeMay and Tibbets, along with Parsons, Ferebee, and LeMay’s own high-ranking staff, including the much-humbled Butch Blanchard. The list of potential targets had been narrowed to three cities, but the final choice could only be made en route, once the weather conditions over each city were determined. Once Kyoto had been eliminated by the president, the most favored site had become Hiroshima. There were several reasons, but Tibbets understood that militarily that city held a number of important targets, installations and barracks for Japanese troops, as well as a network of smaller factories and plants that continued to provide assistance to the Japanese war effort. But there was one more reason why Hiroshima seemed ideal. The city was situated in something of a valley, mountains framing one edge, so that the blast would be contained, and not allowed to dissipate over a wider, flatter area. Though no one was certain just what the bomb would do, the geography of the city suggested that the blast would be more compact, and thus more effective.

  Once the bomb left the bomb bay, the electronic connections would be severed, the bomb then controlled by automatic systems Parsons would be monitoring. The switches that would fire the cannon had to engage while the bomb was still in the air. A ground-impact explosion was out of the question, primarily because the delicate mechanisms that controlled the inner workings of the bomb would be shattered to rubble, making the entire system unpredictable. In the many tests and studies, the various calculations made by mathematicians and physicists, it had been decided that the bomb would be programmed to explode at an altitude of 1,890 feet. At that altitude, the explosion, if it occurred at all, would spread out in a pattern that would cause a wider devastation zone over the heart of the city. Certainly, detonating the bomb at such a precise altitude was an engineering feat all its own, but there was one nagging problem that had plagued the test runs of various dummy bombs from the first training exercises over Utah. No matter the expertise of the men like Parsons, the proximity fuse that would determine exactly when the bomb exploded had been notorious for its failures. During test runs, two of the electronic fuses had ignited immediately after the bomb left the bomb bay, an unnerving experience for a flight crew even with a bomb weighted with concrete and charged with nothing more than TNT. Occasionally the fuse had failed altogether, the dummy bombs never exploding at all. That was certainly better for the crew, but far worse for the entire mission, the “pumpkins” of TNT impacting the Utah desert without any ignition at all. Once the test runs began out of Tinian, the bugs with the proximity fuses seemed to work themselves out. That gave great comfort to the engineers, especially Parsons. But the crews knew that a failure on a training run was a frustrating annoyance. If the fuse failed during the actual mission, the threat to the crew would be a minor problem, compared with the collapse of the entire program. Keeping the Manhattan Project secret would become much more difficult if the Japanese suddenly had pieces of some strange new device littered about the streets of Hiroshima.

  In studying the aerial photos of Hiroshima, Tibbets and his bombardier, Tom Ferebee, had noticed a peculiar landmark at the city center, a T-shaped bridge that would be clearly visible at even the highest altitudes. For a bombardier, it was a perfect AP: Aiming Point. As long as the skies were relatively clear, everyone involved in the decision agreed that Hiroshima was the primary target, and now Tom Ferebee, the man who would guide the plane into position for their sole opportunity for a successful strike, knew exactly what to look for.

  The strike plane for the mission had come from the Martin assembly plant in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a natural decision, based on the problems of airworthiness of so many of the heavily used B-29s, that the primary aircraft chosen for this unique mission would be brand-new, well tested, and would be handpicked by the man who would fly her. Tibbets had gone to Omaha himself, touring the assembly plant, learning more about the nuts-and-bolts construction of the planes than he had ever thought possible. Once his choice had been made, Tibbets had left the job of ferrying the new plane to his co-pilot, Captain Bob Lewis. While Tibbets continued with his various jaunts between Los Alamos, Utah, and Washington, Lewis had piloted the new plane to its training bases, first to Wendover, then on to Tinian. With a myriad of details to occupy every moment of his day, Tibbets had not paid any attention to rumblings from Lewis that Lewis actually expected to fly the primary mission himself. Tibbets was, after all, the man in charge, in command of several crews, all of whom had a specific part of the mission. From plotting the routes of weather observers to putting rescue planes in position, Tibbets had embraced every part of the operation. This planted the notion in Lewis’s mind that Tibbets would remain on Tinian as the chief administrator, while Lewis, who had flown the specially equipped B-29 on many practice runs, would actually drop the atomic bomb. It was only when the plane had been given a name, with no input from Lewis, that the controversy had come to a head. For Tibbets it was one more piece of the aggravation trying to keep the cap on the psyches of men who had endured an astonishing amount of stress, training for a mission whose details they did not fully understand. Tibbets set Lewis straight. Bob Lewis would co-pilot the plane, with Tibbets in the pilot’s seat.

  Throughout the training, the strike plane had undergone modifications that most pilots who flew the big bombers would have found strange, if not completely unnerving. Tibbets himself had observed that a plane without machine guns maneuvered with far more dexterity and could actually reach an altitude nearly four thousand feet higher than a typically armed bomber. The strike plane thus would carry only a pair of fifty calibers in its tail. In addition, there was a panel of electronic switches and gauges installed in proximity to the bomb bay itself, separate from the usual radio and navigational panels. The strange configuration included heavy electrical cables that fed from the panel directly down into the bomb bay. Two dozen wires would feed from these heavy cables and be attached directly to the casing of the bomb itself. There was only one man who understood the importance of the wires and the panel that would monitor them: Deak Parsons.

  On the outside of the plane, Tibbets had put into motion the handiwork of the bomber group’s chief artist, the man charged with adding the distinctive decorations to each one of the planes. Until now, the strike plane was simply known as Number Eighty-two. But Tibbets knew that every plane in the group carried its primary pilot’s distinctive mark, some piece of the man himself, his personality, his background. Tibbets had given that decision of naming the plane a great deal of thought. He recalled Miami, his first flight, the decision to become a pilot, to fly when few around him thought he would survive his first week. The greatest doubt had come from his father, but through all of that, it was his mother who had supported every decision the boy had made, even if it meant putting his life at risk by taking to the air. It was the perfect choice, to thank her, to memorialize her, to dedicate this special plane and its unique mission to the woman who had been his most ardent supporter. Her name was Enola Gay.

  30. TIBBETS

  The word came with little fanfare, the usual matter-of-fact reporting
that every senior officer expected. That word was passed from the offices of General LeMay on Guam, directly to Tinian, first to General Tom Farrell, the ranking officer associated with the Manhattan Project, a man who, like Tibbets, answered only to Leslie Groves. The word had been passed quickly through the offices to Tibbets, who read the teletype dispatch with a hard knot tightening inside him. The report was as simple as every report of its kind. The weather over Japan had cleared, and there was minimal cloud cover over all of the three target cities. The time was now. The mission was a go.

  NORTH TINIAN FIELD

  AUGUST 5, 1945, NOON

  They moved at an agonizing crawl, the trailer rolling down into the specially dug pit. It had been a requirement from the first time Tibbets had seen the size of the bomb, that a hole had to be dug, the bomb placed below the surface of the ground, so that the B-29 could then be rolled over the top of it. There was simply no other way to load the massive bomb into the plane’s bomb bay. Inside the bomb bay, the shackles that held a typical bomb load were long gone, replaced by a massive steel hook. He watched, moving closer as the bomb was rolled down into the pit. Only then, with the bomb hidden from any distant eyes, was the tarpaulin on the trailer removed. Tibbets stood close beside the pit, stared at the amazing sight, four tailfins encased in a thin steel box, attached at the rear of a massive gun-metal gray trunk, ten feet long, more than two feet wide. The bomb weighed nearly nine thousand pounds, far larger than any single weapon ever dropped by an airplane.

  With the bomb now in place in the pit, the Enola Gay was towed over the hole, precisely in place, and immediately the technicians were at work, chaining the bomb to the hook in the bomb bay, the crew working in rhythm to raise the bomb slowly upward, until it disappeared into the great plane. Tibbets watched it all, felt frozen to the spot, numbers still running through his head, all of those specifics given him by Oppenheimer, the others. There had been a great deal of talk about just what this weapon would do, and Tibbets had heard often that the bomb carried the punch of twenty thousand tons of TNT. He marveled at that still, though the impact of just what that meant was no more than a fog. There was one piece of the math he could relate to, that this bomb was the equivalent of two hundred thousand of the bombs he had dropped over Europe and North Africa. But the numbers were just exercises now, dancing around the brains of the physicists. Tibbets brought himself back to the moment, watched as the bomb disappeared upward, the bomb bay doors closing, the Enola Gay just one more aircraft in a vast field of hundreds more. The plane’s mechanics were there, the specially picked men, seeing to the last details of the loading, the men who already knew the plane’s every screw. As soon as the bomb bay doors were closed, one more man came forward. He had given barely a nod to Tibbets, had boarded the plane holding a hard stare that told anyone around him to leave him be. Tibbets complied, knew that Deak Parsons was headed straight for the inside of the bomb bay, and in short minutes would begin practicing the arming of the cannon inside the bomb, a job that no one had ever attempted. Tibbets still watched the plane, the tractor’s empty trailer now up and out of the pit, most of the men moving off to tackle another task, seeing to the other planes in the group. But Tibbets stayed put, bathed in the warmth and the urgent silence, knew that inside the bomb bay the heat would be stifling, getting worse by the minute, and that a sweating Parsons would suffer for it, cutting and nicking fingers, drawing blood and cursing as he probed and twisted and clamped wires together, inserting the dummy canisters into the cylinder until they were perfectly situated. Then Parsons would pull the canisters out, disconnect the wiring, and do it all again. He would keep up the practice until there was no time left. Tibbets glanced at his watch, a little after noon. You’ve got a couple hours, Deak. Then I need you.