Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Prime Minister Suzuki called Sumihisa Ikeda, chief of the cabinet planning bureau, and asked, “Is the Kwantung Army capable of repulsing the Soviet army?”

  Ikeda replied, “The Kwantung Army is hopeless.” The once-elite army had been stripped of its best troops, equipment, and munitions to reinforce Formosa, the homeland, and other Pacific battlefields. Now it was merely a “hollow shell” of its former self.

  Suzuki let out a deep sigh at these words. “Is the Kwantung Army that weak?” he asked. “Then the game is up.”

  “The greater the delay in making the final decision, the worse the situation will be for us,” said Ikeda.

  To which Suzuki replied, “Absolutely correct.”42

  Stalin’s perfidy in August 1945 was another chapter in a sequence of international betrayals, beginning with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Neutrality Pact of 1939, and the ruthless partition of Poland between the Nazis and Soviets. That insidious covenant had ended with Hitler’s surprise invasion of Russia in June 1941. In the same spirit, Moscow’s faithless pantomime of diplomacy with Tokyo between June and August 1945 provided cover for Stalin’s pending abrogation of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact. The Russian declaration of war, delivered to the Japanese precisely one hour before the planned attack in Manchuria, could be seen as an indirect repayment of the treachery embodied in Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which was likewise planned and prepared under cover of diplomatic talks.

  In Tokyo’s view, the immediate military emergency posed by the Soviet attack was only half the story, and not necessarily the most important half. The peace-seeking faction had placed all of its diplomatic eggs into one basket. Moscow’s sudden declaration of war extinguished their last hope of a negotiated armistice that would preserve some vestige of Japanese sovereignty. Now, the timing of Japan’s surrender would have consequences for the Soviet role in the postwar occupation. Sumihisa Ikeda had observed in his conversation with Prime Minister Suzuki, “The greater the delay in making the final decision, the worse the situation will be for us.” He meant that the Japanese now faced a quandary in which the longer they took to acknowledge the necessity of surrender, the greater the risk that the Soviet Union would claim a role in governing Japan. Many in the regime feared the growth of communist influence in Japan even more than the prospect of surrendering to the Western democracies.

  Huddling with his senior staff at the foreign ministry, Togo said that he would recommend immediate acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration with no conditions, but with an accompanying unilateral declaration that the peace “shall not have any influence on the position of the imperial house.”43 In meetings with Suzuki and Yonai, Togo won their advance support for this approach. Yonai remarked to a colleague at the navy ministry that the bombing of Hiroshima and the Soviet entry into the war were in a sense a “godsend,” because they had created a crisis that might be used to break the deadlock on the SWDC, and because they provided the army with a face-saving way to accept defeat.44

  WHILE THE SOVIET ATTACK was getting underway, the second atomic bomb was being prepared at the 509th Composite Group compound on Tinian, in a cinderblock warehouse off the flight line. “Fat Man” was a big bomb, worthy of its name. It was squat and wide around the middle, shaped like an egg—or as mission commander Charles Sweeney observed, an oversized decorative squash. The weapon weighed more than 5 tons. Painted bright yellow, it had two acronyms stenciled on its nose: “FM1” and “JANCFU.” They stood for “Fat Man 1” and “Joint Army-Navy-Civilian Foul-up.”

  Technicians and scientists had used great care in handling the 11-pound plutonium core. It was an ordinary-looking substance, but it was warm to the touch, as if it were a living organism. In the warehouse, the pieces of plutonium were fitted into the assigned casings. The implosion device contained 5,300 pounds of Composition B and Baratol—which made Fat Man, even in conventional terms, one of the largest bombs ever carried on an airplane. Installing the lensing system was a delicate task, and the specialists took their time. When the mechanism was assembled, the steel plates were bolted shut, and the green safety plugs were inserted into the outer sockets. Once the strike plane was safely aloft and at altitude, the weaponeer would remove these and replace them with the red plugs, at which point the bomb would be fully armed.

  On the afternoon of August 8, Fat Man was rolled out of the windowless, air-conditioned, green cinderblock warehouse on a handcart pulled by three men. They bolted the tailfin assembly to the rear section, then moved the bomb to a specially constructed concrete loading pit. The strike plane, Bockscar, was backed over the pit. Its bomb doors opened. With great care, the men hoisted the bomb into the plane and secured it. It was a snug fit.

  Originally, Colonel Tibbets had planned to lead this second mission and fly the strike plane, as he had on the Hiroshima mission three days earlier. Instead, for unknown reasons, he decided not to go, and assigned the job to Sweeney. Some were surprised by the decision. Sweeney, a twenty-five-year-old army major from North Quincy, Massachusetts, was known as a naturally gifted pilot, probably the second-best pilot in the 509th Composite Group after Tibbets himself. (Before joining the 509th, Sweeney had been assigned to train General Curtis LeMay to fly the B-29.) He had piloted The Great Artiste, the instrument plane, on the Hiroshima mission three days earlier. However, Sweeney had not flown over Germany and had limited experience flying in combat.

  The primary target for the mission was Kokura, an ancient castle town and industrial city near the northern tip of Kyushu, facing the Shimonoseki Strait. The secondary target was Nagasaki, a major seaport and shipbuilding center on the island’s west coast.

  Most of the aircrew on the three planes had flown the Hiroshima mission. Some later said that they were surprised that a second atomic bomb was to be dropped. They had hoped that one would be enough to end the war. Radioman Abe Spitzer of The Great Artiste recorded his sense of dismay: “There was no need for more missions, more bombs, more fear and more dying. Good God, any fool could see that.”45

  In operational terms, the mission to drop the bomb on Hiroshima had been flawless. From the beginning, by contrast, the Nagasaki flight was marred by various snafus and mishaps that nearly caused the mission to fail. The cheeky acronym JANCFU would prove all too prescient. There were technical problems with the bomb, fuel system problems on the strike plane, a missed rendezvous, tumultuous weather, garbled radio transmissions, a near collision, and abysmal visibility over both the primary and secondary targets. These problems were exacerbated by poor judgments by Sweeney and an ambiguous command relationship with the mission’s chief weaponeer. At various points during the Bockscar’s nineteen-hour odyssey, many of the crew apparently despaired of surviving, assuming that their airplane was going to crash or ditch at sea—and the commanders on Tinian were left wondering whether the strike plane with its precious cargo had already gone down. Bockscar survived only by making a wild emergency landing on Okinawa, engines running on fumes, where it nearly took out a row of parked B-24s. Many of these issues did not come to light until decades later. When they did, acrimonious charges were exchanged in print between various participants, including Tibbets and Sweeney.

  Sweeney’s regular plane was The Great Artiste, which he had flown as instrument plane for the Hiroshima mission. Originally, he was to drop Fat Man from that plane, and Bockscar would serve as instrument plane. But that would involve a time-consuming transfer of instruments from one plane to another, which would tax the ground crews. Instead, it was decided that Sweeney and his aircrew would simply fly the Bockscar as strike plane, while Captain Frederick C. Bock and his crew would transfer into The Great Artiste. William Laurence, a New York Times correspondent assigned to fly as a passenger in the instrument plane, was never informed of this switch, and his widely read account reported that The Great Artiste had dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. This error was subsequently repeated in many histories after the war.

  The trouble started before the Bockscar even left th
e ground. At 2:15 a.m. on August 9, as the crew was going through the preflight checklist, the flight engineer discovered that a fuel pump was not working. It needed a new solenoid, a job that would require several hours. The mission would have to be postponed. According to Tibbets, the reserve fuel served mainly as ballast, to balance the weight of the bomb. He did not believe that it would be needed. By Sweeney’s account, Tibbets told him to make the call, and Sweeney announced that they would go.46 The bad pump meant that the mission would have a lower fuel budget, and it would have to be managed accordingly.

  At 3:40 a.m., as Bockscar taxied to the takeoff line, the weather to the north was dodgy. Squalls of rain had been passing through since shortly after midnight, and flashes of lightning were seen on the northern horizon. Stormy weather was forecast along the flight route. At 77 tons, Bockscar was 30 percent heavier than the maximum weight recommended by Boeing. With four engines straining at 2,600 rpm, Sweeney lowered the flaps, pushed the throttle forward, and released the brakes. The heavy plane made a long takeoff run, requiring all the asphalt the runway had to give, and the mighty airplane with its mighty bomb left the ground only about 200 feet before crossing the rocky drop to the beach. Sweeney kept the plane level to give it speed and lift, and then commenced the long, slow climb to altitude.

  Few stars were visible as they droned north at 17,000 feet. The temperature outside was 30 degrees below zero. The planes were tossed sickeningly during their long flight to the rendezvous point south of Kyushu. Aboard The Great Artiste, Laurence noticed an uncanny luminous blue plasma forming around the spinning propellers, “as though we were riding the whirlwind through space on a chariot of blue fire.” When he wondered aloud about it, Captain Bock explained that it was St. Elmo’s fire. A few minutes after five o’clock, a purple glow on the horizon to starboard announced the first blush of dawn. Climbing to the rendezvous altitude of 30,000 feet, the cotton-ball cumulus layer fell away below. “At that height the vast ocean below and the sky above seem to merge into one great sphere,” Laurence wrote. “I was on the inside of that firmament, riding above the giant mountains of white cumulus clouds.”47

  In Bockscar, there was no elaborate process to arm Fat Man, as there had been with Little Boy on the previous mission. The plutonium implosion lensing system was so complex that it had to be set up prior to the bomb’s being loaded onto the plane. Therefore, Captain Frederick L. Ashworth of the navy, the mission’s chief weaponeer, only had to climb into the Bockscar’s bomb bay, remove the green safety plugs, and insert the red live plugs. Now the weapon was armed. For redundancy it had no fewer than eight fuses, which could be triggered by radio, radar, altitude, or contact with the ground. For all the careful preparations on Tinian, however, something was amiss. At about seven, Ashworth and his assistant noted a blinking red light that should not have been on. The light began blinking faster. For a moment they panicked, believing that the bomb might be on the verge of detonating in flight, with unfavorable consequences for the Bockscar and its crew. Working quickly, with adrenaline surging, they unrolled the bomb’s blueprints and studied the circuitry. Then they removed the outer casing and examined the switches. Bizarrely, given the care apparently practiced by the technicians on the ground, two had been set in the wrong positions. They reset the switches, and the warning light went out. The two men replaced the casing, and did not breathe a word of what had happened until decades later.48

  Bockscar arrived at the rendezvous over Yakushima at 7:45 a.m. They were at 30,000 feet. They had been flying for five hours. Within a few minutes, The Great Artiste joined up on the strike plane’s right wing. But there was no sign of the camera plane, The Big Stink. Another twenty minutes passed, with the two planes circling and burning fuel. Fuel consumption was high in the thin air at that altitude, about 500 gallons per hour. Far below, they caught glimpses of Yakushima through the clouds—a round island, green and rugged, with steep mountains and plunging gorges. Sweeney made the controversial decision to keep waiting. Another twenty-five minutes went by; still no sign of the missing plane. Later, it was discovered that The Big Stink was at 39,000 feet, the wrong altitude.

  Finally, after forty-five minutes of circling and burning fuel, Sweeney decided to turn north and fly to Kokura, the primary target. Now the sun was well above the horizon. Bockscar and The Great Artiste flew the entire length of Kyushu, south to north, over some of the largest kamikaze airbases in Japan. The two planes kept radio silence, but the pilot of the wayward camera plane called to Tinian. According to the various accounts, he asked: “Has Sweeney aborted?” and “Is Bockscar down?” This query was garbled, but a fragmentary radio transmission was received on Tinian, and interpreted as “Bockscar down.” For the next several hours, commanders on Tinian believed that the plane and the bomb may have been lost at sea.

  As the two Superfortresses arrived over Kokura, the city was shrouded in smoke and haze. Peering down through the Plexiglas nose section, the crew could identify certain landmarks—but the Kokura Arsenal, the designated aiming point, was obscured. Fires were burning in nearby Yawata, which had been hit by a conventional bombing raid the previous day, and brown smoke had drifted over Kokura. Additional smoke was created by a tar-burning operation at a local steel foundry—a civil defense measure intended to obscure visibility from the air.49 The city’s antiaircraft batteries opened fire on the Bockscar and The Great Artiste shortly after their arrival. At first, the flak bursts were low, but they crept steadily higher as the two planes circled at 30,000 feet. The 509th Composite Group had been ordered to use visual bombing, meaning that the bombardier was to identify the aiming point through his Norden bombsight before releasing the weapon. Sweeney banked around three times, making three successive bomb runs. Each time the bombardier stated that he could not see the aiming point. The antiaircraft bursts were creeping steadily closer.

  Sweeney and Bock climbed to 31,000 feet, and then to 32,000 feet. The radioman intercepted Japanese chatter on the frequency used by the local fighter command, which meant that they could expect unwanted company. The aircrews watched the fuel needles in consternation—they knew they were cutting it close. Tension rose in the cockpits of both airplanes. Many of the airmen, according to their later accounts, thought the mission was likely to fail, possibly with the loss of both planes.

  Incredibly, there did not appear to be clear contingency plans for this situation. Although poor visibility was a notorious problem over Japan, they did not have authority to employ radar bombing. Given that pinpoint accuracy was hardly needed for an atomic bomb, the oversight seems inexplicable.

  After an hour over Kokura, Sweeney decided to divert to the secondary target. He banked south and asked his navigator for a course heading to Nagasaki. While making the turn, according to Captain Ashworth, the Bockscar and The Great Artiste nearly collided. Then Sweeney’s elbow inadvertently brushed the cockpit selector button which switched the intercom function to the command transmit function. A routine query intended for his own crew was transmitted from the airplane, thus breaking radio silence. The pilot of the missing camera plane, The Big Stink, received this transmission and immediately replied, “Chuck? Is that you, Chuck? Where the hell are you?”50 Sweeney did not reply, knowing that the Japanese were undoubtedly listening in on these wayward transmissions. He also knew that the Bockscar lacked the fuel to attempt a rendezvous with the missing plane.

  It took only twenty minutes to complete the 100-mile flight to Nagasaki. Bockscar arrived over the city at 11:50 a.m., more than two hours later than the planned drop time. The airplane had been in the air for more than eight hours, and its fuel reserve was near the point of no return. Looking down, Sweeney and his copilots saw with dismay that Nagasaki was fairly socked in, with “ 80 to 90% cumulus clouds at 6,000 to 8,000 feet.”51 The plane did not have fuel for more than a single bomb run, but the bombardier could not see the aiming point, the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works. In desperation, Sweeney said that he would authorize a radar drop on his own au
thority. The alternative was to dump the bomb into the ocean. But as the Bockscar entered the bomb run, the bombardier suddenly shouted that he had a visual fix: “I got it! I got it!” Forty-five seconds later, Fat Man fell from Bockscar’s bomb bay, and Sweeney banked hard to the right to evade. The Great Artiste followed.

  Again, as at Hiroshima three days earlier, a burst of blinding silver light flooded the interiors of the two planes, and the sky was blanched white. Two successive shockwaves, stronger than those over Hiroshima, smacked the planes and caused them to shimmy and groan. One aircrewman said that he thought Bockscar would be torn apart.

  Looking down, observers saw a sphere of purple-pink light burst through the cloud ceiling, like an air bubble breaking the surface of a body of water. William Laurence, watching from a window in The Great Artiste, was awestruck. The sphere merged into an ascending column of dirty brown smoke and ash, and “we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”52 As the column rose higher than the altitude of the two planes, a frothing white mushroom cloud formed at the top. Below, Nagasaki had vanished in a churning cauldron of smoke, dust, ash, and fire. Gazing down through the Plexiglas panels beneath his feet, Sweeney said: “All we could see was a blanket of thick, dirty, brownish smoke with fires breaking through sporadically.”53

  The two planes circled the explosion, snapping photos and rolling cameras. As the mushroom cap spread, it appeared that Bockscar might be too close, and would be engulfed by the cloud. A member of the crew shouted: “The mushroom cloud is coming toward us!”54 Sweeney executed a second sharp right turn, away from the explosion. For a few breathless minutes the aircrewmen watched the expanding cloud in dread. The Bockscar cleared the hazard, but the maneuver burned additional fuel that could hardly be spared.