Tibbets and his crew posed in front of their plane for a formal photograph. “Okay,” Tibbets said at 2:20 a.m., “let’s get to work.” The crew climbed aboard the plane, waved again, and then closed the hatch. Before starting the engines, Tibbets stuck his grinning face out of the left-seat cockpit window and waved one last time for the cameras. Below the window was stenciled, in black letters, his mother’s name: Enola Gay.
The crowd moved back as the great engines fired up. The long propellers began spinning, the engines roared, and the airplanes taxied to the edges of Runways A and B. The Enola Gay, showing no running lights, started its takeoff run at 2:45. With a 5-ton atomic bomb and a full load of fuel, the strike plane required nearly the entire length of runway to get off the ground. The Great Artiste, the instrument plane, took off exactly two minutes later on Runway B, followed two minutes later by the second observer plane, Necessary Evil. The three planes banked north and began climbing.
With the Enola Gay safely aloft, Captain William S. “Deak” Parsons of the navy, the chief weaponeer, climbed back into the bomb bay and started the intricate process of arming Little Boy. The weapon was 10 feet long and 2.5 feet in diameter; it weighed 9,800 pounds. Parsons inserted the explosive charges into the gun device. He would return several hours later to connect the priming lines.
At 5:45 a.m., the crew caught sight of Iwo Jima, with Mount Suribachi clear in the morning sun. The Great Artiste slipped into formation, just 30 feet off the Enola Gay’s right wing; the Necessary Evil joined up to the lead plane’s left. Two hours north of Iwo Jima, the three planes began a slow climb to 9,000 feet. Several of the crewmen, with no duties to perform, caught a few hours of sleep.
The three weather planes, Straight Flush, Jabit III, and Full House, had taken off earlier and flown ahead to reconnoiter the weather over Hiroshima and the secondary targets, Kokura and Nagasaki. The Enola Gay radioman copied a coded message from Straight Flush, circling above Hiroshima: “Cloud cover less than three tenths at all altitudes. Advice: Bomb primary.” The crew pulled on their flak suits and strapped into their parachutes. Tibbets pressurized the cabin and the Enola Gay resumed its gradual climb, finally leveling off at 32,700 feet. The plane crossed the south coast of Shikoku at 8:50 a.m. No Japanese fighters were in the air, and no antiaircraft fire was seen.
Captain Parsons and his assistant returned to the bomb bay and completed their arming checklist. They removed the safety devices, screwed in the live breech plugs, connected the firing line, and installed the armor plate over these mechanisms. Little Boy was now fully armed. They removed and secured the catwalk and left the bomb bay. They would not return.
Tibbets and his copilot (Robert Lewis) looked down through the Enola Gay’s greenhouse nose at the familiar coastal contours and islands of the Inland Sea. It was a bright, clear morning, with only sparse and scattered cloud cover. They flew directly over the lobster-shaped island of Etajima, site of the Japanese Naval Academy. The port and city of Kure passed below and to their right. Ahead, the densely populated fan-shaped delta of Hiroshima came into view. It was a broad, flat city intercut by diverging tidal estuaries of the Ota River, bordered by the Inland Sea on one side and green ridges on three others. Tibbets made his final turn onto 272 degrees magnetic course. Through a gap in the clouds, he and his copilot had a clear view of their aiming point—the large T-shaped Aioi Bridge, spanning the Ota just north of Nakajima Island. The Enola Gay and its escorts were at 31,600 feet, almost 6 miles above the city. At 8:05 a.m. (Hiroshima time), the navigator announced, “ 10 minutes to the AP.”
At 8:14 a.m., one minute before the drop, Tibbets ordered: “On glasses.” Each member of the crew put on his protective dark polarized welder’s goggles. The bombardier, Thomas Ferebee, checked the Norden bombsight and confirmed that the aiming point was “inside,” meaning that the plane was directly on target. A radio warning signal was sent to the two observation planes. At 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay’s bomb bay doors opened, and Little Boy’s restraining hook was retracted back into its slot. Ferebee told Tibbets, “Bomb away”—but the pilot would have known it anyway, because the plane was suddenly 5 tons lighter, and it lurched upward accordingly. Tibbets banked to the right.
Charles Sweeney, piloting The Great Artiste just off the Enola Gay’s right wing, watched the 10-foot cylinder as it fell from the strike plane. He thought, “It’s too late now. There are no strings or cables attached. We can’t get it back, whether it works or not.”3 Little Boy wobbled or “porpoised” slightly, then steadied on its course, like a missile. It took a steeper trajectory and shrank quickly from sight. It would fall for forty-three seconds to 1,800 feet over the Aioi Bridge, its detonation point.
The Great Artiste released its instrument canisters, which would collect measurements and transmit them back to the plane by radio. Then Sweeney banked sharply to the left, putting his B-29 into the 155-degree diving turn that he and the other 509th pilots had practiced for nine months. The Enola Gay was turning in a similar arc to the right. Tests in Wendover had shown that the Superfortresses could withstand such a turn without undue risk of structural damage.4
Both Tibbets and Sweeney watched their instruments carefully during the turn. Both had trouble reading the panels through the welder’s goggles, so they pushed them up to their foreheads. The Great Artiste was flying away from the epicenter, but the interior of the airplane was suddenly suffused with a blinding silver-bluish light, and Sweeney noted that the sky ahead was bleached to a bright white hue. He instinctively shut his eyes, but felt a sensation of light filling his head. At the same time, he noted a peculiar taste in his mouth, like lead. (This was ozone, caused by gamma rays.) On the Necessary Evil, now 15 miles from the blast, one crew member found the light in the cabin so bright that he could have read the fine print in his pocket bible even through the dark goggles.
Tibbets noticed the metallic taste and the flash at the same time. “I got the brilliance,” he said later. “I tasted it. Yeah, I could taste it. It tasted like lead. And this was because of the fillings in my teeth. So that’s radiation, see. So I got this lead taste in my mouth and that was a big relief—I knew she had blown.”5 His copilot, Robert Lewis, turned back in his seat to look. He shouted wildly, striking Tibbets on the shoulder: “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Lewis later wrote in his log of the mission, “My god, what have we done?”6
About a minute later, the Enola Gay was hit by the first shockwave. The plane’s aluminum skin made a sharp, cracking retort, as if someone had swung a very large sledgehammer at the fuselage from outside. The aircraft jerked and trembled, but held together. Tibbets estimated that the hit was equivalent in force to about two-and-one-half Gs. This first shockwave was followed quickly by a second, moderately less violent—it was an echo of the first, having struck the ground and rebounded upward.
Not having witnessed the TRINITY test, the airmen were unprepared for the sight they beheld as the planes turned back toward the epicenter to take photographs. Sergeant Abe Spitzer, a radio operator on The Great Artiste, thought it looked as if “the sun fell out of the sky and was on the ground.”7 It was an awesome and terrible sight, a fireball ascending with many different shades of purple and amber, amidst a boiling mass of dust and flaming gases. A dirty gray mushroom cloud was forming at the top of a great pillar of smoke. The pillar had already climbed higher than the altitude of the airplanes, so the airmen looked up at the mushroom. No part of Hiroshima remained visible from the air, except the ends of a few of the longer piers on the waterfront. The green ridges to the north and west stood above the devastation, but the carpet of smoke and dust was spreading inland along the meandering paths of the river valleys. “Down below all you could see was a black, boiling nest,” Tibbets said. “I didn’t think about what was going on down on the ground—you need to be objective about this. I didn’t order the bomb to be dropped, but I had a mission to do.”8
The Enola Gay and The Great Artiste circled Hiroshima three times, a
scending gradually in a corkscrew pattern, while the crewmen continued to gape in awe at the unspeakable devastation below. For a long time, no one spoke. The high-speed cameras in the instrument plane snapped hundreds of photos, and the technicians reported that they had made an excellent record. Captain Parsons radioed a coded message back to Tinian, reporting that the blast had been successful and the B-29s were returning to base.
Joe Stiborik, a member of the Enola Gay’s crew, later recalled that everyone aboard remained almost completely silent during the long flight home. “I was dumbfounded,” he said. “It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to bring an end to the war, and we tried to look at it that way.”9
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER, dark rumors had circulated through the city. The Americans were said to be preparing some awful fate for Hiroshima. Why else would the city have been left untouched by bombs, when nearly every other city in the region, including Kure, Iwakuni, and Tokuyama, had been devastated? Two air raid sirens had sounded during the night of August 5–6. Some had risen dutifully and gone to their bomb shelters, but many others had slept through the alarms.
Early that morning, the coastal radar net had detected the weather reconnaissance B-29s that had preceded the Enola Gay. Air raid sirens had churned, summoning the city’s residents to their shelters. An all-clear signal had sounded at 8:00 a.m. Members of the air raid volunteer corps, including many school-age children, were being dismissed from their duties.
It was a clear, hot, still summer morning, with barely a cloud in the sky. The streets were crowded with morning rush hour traffic, including pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, horse carts, automobiles, and streetcars. When the Enola Gay and its two escorts droned in from the south, they could be seen clearly from the ground. Witnesses spotted a cluster of parachutes blossoming at high altitude. They were the instrument canisters dropped by The Great Artiste.
Little Boy exploded at 8:16 a.m., 1,870 feet above the ground, only 550 feet wide of its aiming point. The nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer. The fireball engulfed the center of the city, vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground. Thermal and ionizing radiation killed virtually all people within a kilometer of the surface of the fireball, burning them to death or rupturing their internal organs. Farther out, in successive concentric circles around the epicenter, people were exposed to gamma rays, neutron radiation, flash burns, the blast wave, and firestorms. The initial shockwave raced away from the epicenter at greater than the speed of sound, some 984 miles per hour. Streetcars were lifted from their tracks and scattered like toys. Clothing was torn from bodies. Nearly all wooden buildings within 2.3 kilometers were completely leveled, and about half of all such buildings to a radius of 3.2 kilometers. Later, investigators found the shadows of people caught within the inner radius around the hypocenter. They had been vaporized, but their bodies had left faint silhouettes on the pavement or on nearby walls.
Like the aircrews of the B-29s overhead, surviving witnesses on the ground remembered the flash (pika) and the taste of ozone in the mouth. Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was sitting at home when his living room filled with a bright white light. In the moment before his house collapsed, the doctor wondered whether someone had lit a magnesium flare just outside his windows. Yoshido Matsushige, a photographer for the Hiroshima daily paper, recalled a “brilliant flash of immaculate white, like the igniting of the magnesium we used to use for taking photographs.”10 Father Johannes Siemes, a German Jesuit priest and a professor of modern philosophy at Tokyo’s Catholic University, had been evacuated from the capital to the Novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Nagatsuke, a suburb of Hiroshima. He was sitting in his spartan bedroom, about a mile from the epicenter, when the room was suddenly filled with a “garish light which resembles the magnesium light used in photography, and I am conscious of a wave of heat.”11
Moments later came a great tearing sound, a sudden collapse of ceilings and walls, and a sensation of falling or sliding into an abyss. Dr. Hachiya’s house was filled with swirling dust. He could see only a wooden pillar, leaning askew, and then noted that the roof was caving in. He had been wearing underwear, but a moment after the flash he was completely naked, though he had not noticed the garments being ripped away. Like many others, the doctor first assumed that a conventional bomb had fallen directly on his house. He shouted to his wife, “It’s a 500-ton bomb!”12
Those caught in the open were lifted off their feet and carried through the air. Michiko Yamaoka, a fifteen-year-old girl on her way to her job at the telephone exchange, was looking up at the planes overhead when the bomb exploded. “You can’t really say it washed over me,” she recalled years later. “It’s hard to describe. I simply fainted. I remember my body floating in the air. That was probably the blast, but I don’t know how far I was blown.”13 Fragments of glass and wooden splinters tore into flesh. Eiko Taoka, a twenty-one-year-old mother carrying her infant son, was on a streetcar approaching the center of the city when the car was filled with “a strange smell and sound.” She looked down and saw that a shard of glass had pierced her child’s head. He was bleeding, but did not comprehend what had happened, and did not seem to be suffering any pain. He looked up at his mother and smiled through the blood on his face.14 Hatsuyo Nakamura, another young mother, worked frantically to dig her children out of the wreckage of their home. Her five-year-old daughter was shrieking in pain. “There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not,” she replied, and yanked the girl free. She was cut and bruised, but otherwise uninjured.15 Futaba Kitayama, a thirty-three-year-old woman serving on a firebreak demolition team, was buried under the remains of a home that she had been working to pull down. Extracting herself from the wreckage, she noted that she was bleeding. There were embers in her hair, and shards of glass had torn into her flesh. She found a towel and began wiping blood from her face. “To my horror, I found that the skin on my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove.”16
The smoke and dust hung so thick over the city that the sun was blotted out, and it was as dark as night. Nakamura’s daughter kept asking questions as they ran from the wreckage of their home: “Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?”17 A procession of refugees—a tide of human wretchedness and misery—was fleeing before the fires, headed away from the epicenter, or pressing down to the river banks. They moved jerkily, with arms held away from their bodies; many had lost most of their skin, and were avoiding the painful friction of their arms rubbing against their torsos. Many were naked, and seemingly unaware of their nakedness—and many were also barefoot, because their shoes had lodged in the burning asphalt and been wrenched off. Their faces were hideously blackened and swollen, and their hair singed and frizzy. Those trapped beneath wreckage called out to passersby, begging for assistance or a drink of water. Everywhere, the plaintive mantra was heard: “Mizu, mizu, mizu!”18 (Water, water, water!)
When she regained consciousness, Yamaoka realized that she was badly burned. “My clothes were burnt and so was my skin. I was in rags. I had braided my hair, but now it was like a lion’s mane. There were people, barely breathing, trying to push their intestines back in. People with their legs wrenched off. Without heads. Or with faces burned and swollen out of shape.”19 Yoshido Matsushige had taken his camera out to the street, intending to take photographs for his newspaper, but at first he could not bring himself to record the ghastly scenes. “People’s bodies were all swollen up,” he said. “Their skin, burst open, was hanging down in rags. Their faces were burnt black. I put my hand on my camera, but it was such a hellish apparition that I couldn’t press
the shutter.”20
Fires spread, mounted in strength, and merged into fast-moving firestorms. They advanced quickly over the devastated landscape, consuming wreckage and engulfing refugees on foot. In this respect, the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing was similar to the earlier incendiary raids on Tokyo and other cities. Many who might otherwise have survived died by the inhalation of dust, ash, and smoke. The flames whipped up powerful whirlwinds, like tornadoes, and sections of roofing, doors, tatami mats, and various other debris were lifted and carried away. The odor of burning flesh settled like a pall over the city. According to Matsushige, “the fat of the bodies was bubbling up and sputtering as it burned. That was the only time I’ve seen humans roasting.”21
Instinct drove people toward the bridges and riverbanks, either to soothe their wounds or to take a drink of water. They ran down the stone embankment steps to the narrow, muddy banks, where they found impossibly large crowds of refugees. As in the firebombed cities, the rivers became mass graves. Futaba Kitayama, badly injured, made a beeline for the nearby Tsurumi Bridge—but when she looked down into the water, she drew back in horror. “People by the hundreds were flailing in the river. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women; they were all in the same state: their faces were puffy and ashen, their hair tangled, they held their hands raised and, groaning with pain, threw themselves into the water. I had a violent impulse to do so myself, because of the pain burning through my whole body. But I can’t swim and I held back.”22 The decision probably saved her life. Many others leapt from the bridges, onto the heads of others—or they climbed down to the banks and waded into the water, pushing the floating dead aside. Hiroshima was an alluvial plain, and the rivers were tidal estuaries: the water was brackish, and not potable. Those who drank it vomited it back up, and blood was often intermixed in their vomit.
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