Japanese planners realized that only a single battle could be waged and that it must begin and end at the beach. The kamikaze planes would concentrate on the transports and landing barges. Unlike other invasions where aircraft carriers and warships had been singled out, the prime targets this time would be the soldiers and Marines coming in through the surf. The reasoning was simple: Kill as many men as possible and shatter American morale. Any hope of a negotiated peace rested on the infliction of enormous casualties. Beyond that the Ketsu-Go defense plan could promise nothing more. It was a desperate strategy, fashioned by men aware that Okinawa had been the last real opportunity to stop the Americans.
Japanese intelligence experts continually sifted all available data in forecasting both the time and place of attack. Intelligence units listened to radio broadcasts and read newspaper reports for information about troop movements. Though many embassy channels had been closed to them as more and more nations ranged themselves against Japan, analysts in foreign countries interpreted enough material to form a fairly accurate picture of military movements and industrial production figures. Aided by these bits and pieces of data, the intelligence section of the Army General Staff in Tokyo set about predicting D-Day.
Radio monitors in Japan listened to merchant ships steaming in the Pacific from port to port. Most of these vessels spoke in clear language to each other and to authorities on shore. As unusually heavy traffic moved northward toward staging areas in the Okinawa region, as message volume picked up noticeably around the Philippines, the Japanese assumed that preparations were well under way for the move on Japan. Aware of the time patterns shown by the sequence of previous American assaults on Pacific islands, and mindful of the tremendous number of ships and men that would be employed in the ultimate invasion, the Japanese decided the Americans would land in Japan no later than November 1, 1945.
Though opinion was divided as to the actual point of the major thrust, it was finally agreed that Kyushu would receive the first blow. It would have to be seized before any attack on the main island, Honshu. From this vantage point, the Americans could utilize superior air power to cover most of Japan and limit any aerial interference with the main blow at the beaches around Tokyo itself.
In narrowing the choice of a first assault site to Kyushu, the defense strategists realized that they must have troops already in place when the attack came.
The problem, therefore, was to guess the exact invasion beaches. Two were chosen, one at Kagoshima and the other near Ariake. Behind these sandy avenues to the interior, intensive construction was begun. The Japanese pinned their defense of Kyushu on a calculated gamble that the Americans would attempt to walk across these white strips of ground.
They guessed correctly. On May 28, 1945, a document had begun to circulate among the senior officers of the United States Army in the Pacific.
On the cover was a simple title: Downfall, Strategic Plan. It was the blueprint for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Downfall’s aims were boldly stated:
1. To force the unconditional surrender of Japan by lowering the Japanese ability and will to resist by establishing sea and air blockades, conducting intensive air bombardments, and destroying Japanese naval and air strength.
2. To invade and seize objectives in the industrial heart of Japan.
Operations on the Japanese mainland would be divided into two phases. First Kyushu must be taken; then Honshu, particularly the Tokyo plain, must be overrun. The date for the invasion of Kyushu, code-named Olympic, was November 1, 1945. The main beaches chosen for assault were around Kagoshima and Ariake.
General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, spearheaded by the Second, Third and Fifth Marine Divisions plus the First Cavalry Division, would land in the midst of concentrated fire from well-entrenched Japanese defenses. The bloodshed might be enormous.
There was one great omission from both the Japanese and American plans.
In the Imperial General Staff’s estimate of the whereabouts of American units, a notation was appended to the list of B-29 squadrons still assumed to be in the United States. Dated May 8, the notation read: “One other unit is available but its identity has not been ascertained as yet.” The missing squadron was the 393rd, then leaving the United States under the strictest security for its new home on Tinian. The 393rd’s mission was specific. As part of the 509th Composite Group, it was to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Japan.
FOUR
The Project
The bomb had been evolving for over six years. It began with a discovery made in the laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In the fall of 1938, just before Europe went into the convulsions of another war, two scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, repeated an experiment first tried in 1934 by an Italian, Enrico Fermi. The results of bombarding a piece of uranium metal with neutrons led them to conclude that the nucleus of the metal had split into two lighter elements and that a portion of the enormous energy required to hold it together had been released.
They reported their findings to a colleague, Lise Meitner, who had been involved with their preliminary experiments but had recently been forced to leave Germany because she was a Jew. She communicated the startling theory to her friend Niels Bohr, a Danish pioneer in physics, who urged further experiments to validate the conclusions.
It was Bohr who brought the news to the United States. Shortly after he came to New York from Copenhagen in January 1939, he received a telegram from Lise Meitner’s nephew reporting that the theory she had described to him had been confirmed by further tests. The atom had indeed been split. Bohr then went to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and shared the information with scientific colleagues there; he later published a report on it in the magazine Physical Review.
As Adolf Hitler plunged the world into war, knowledgeable men realized the ramifications of the discovery. Because of the fantastic energy potential involved, it was now theoretically possible to produce a weapon which could alter the course of history. It was unthinkable that such a power should fall into the hands of a dictator.
On October 11, 1939, Franklin Roosevelt entertained an old friend, Alexander Sachs, a director of the Lehman Corporation, an influential economist and a friend to scientists. Sachs came to the White House with a terribly important message contained in a letter he began to read:
Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the near future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration.… It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.… It is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.…
The letter was signed by Albert Einstein.
Though impressed, Roosevelt seemed preoccupied with other things, He broke off the discussion, but asked Sachs to come back again the next day for breakfast.
The economist returned on Columbus Day to renew the assault. Well aware of the President’s personality, he had decided on a different tactic in presenting the “atomic” plea.
Sachs told Roosevelt a story. He brought the President back to the year 1805 when Napoleon hungered to invade England but lacked the means to navigate the English Channel. An American inventor, Robert Fulton, came to the dictator and proposed building a fleet of steamboats which could easily make the crossing. Napoleon considered the idea for just a few moments, then threw Fulton out as an idiot.
Alexander Sachs paused in his story, then asked Franklin Roosevelt the crucial question: How might the history of the world have been altered if Napoleon had listened to this inventor?
Roosevelt got the point immediately. He looked up at his f
riend. “Alex,” he said, “what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” To his secretary, “Pa” Watson, Roosevelt added, “This requires action.”
Accordingly, Roosevelt formed a committee to explore the potential of the uranium atom. He installed Lyman Briggs, a Government scientist, as its head, and Commander Gilbert Hoover and Colonel Keith Adamson as members. The greatest scientific brains in America became involved in the race to build the bomb before Germany could achieve it—among them, James B. Conant, Harvard’s lean, sober president; Ernest Lawrence, brilliant, aggressive leader of the University of California Science Laboratories; Enrico Fermi, whose earlier work was the basis for so much that followed; Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist; Kenneth Bainbridge, a Harvard professor recently returned from observing similar efforts in Britain; Arthur and Karl Compton, genius brothers, Karl the President of M.I.T. and Arthur chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Chicago. The work of these men was coordinated into the Office of Scientific Research and Development under the direction of Dr. Vannevar Bush. This office was also to take under its wing Roosevelt’s original Uranium Committee. From then on, the project had direct access to the President for guidance and money.
Almost two years to the day after Alexander Sachs first approached the Chief Executive with Einstein’s letter, Dr. Bush met with Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace and outlined the latest findings. He told them that British physicists were confident that they had determined the approximate amount of uranium needed to make a bomb. He gave the President the tentative cost for a production plant needed to concentrate the metal and an estimate of the time needed actually to achieve a weapon. Together, Roosevelt, Wallace and Bush conferred on the urgency of moving the program past the theoretical stage. They discussed military policy, the probable state of German research, and even the problems associated with postwar control of the new power. Franklin Roosevelt agreed that work on the bomb must be expedited and told Bush that money could be made available from secret funds within the governmental budget. Vannevar Bush left the White House knowing that he and his colleagues must proceed with all possible haste toward making certain that an atomic bomb could in fact be produced.
Two months later, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the war, Roosevelt released emergency monies into the bomb program. Thousands of men were recruited for a unit officially known as the Manhattan Engineering District, later called the Manhattan Project. The Project included a vast building program necessary to the manufacture of bomb ingredients. General Leslie Groves, a forty-six-year-old West Point engineer who had recently played a key role in the construction of the massive Pentagon, was chosen as coordinator of this building program. Blunt and unreasonable in his demands, Groves had acquired a reputation for being difficult. At his first meeting with Dr. Bush, he got off to a bad start. Unfortunately, Bush had not been informed about Groves’ new status and quickly resented the general’s probing questions. Groves was dumbfounded by the scientist’s lack of cooperation and left the office wondering exactly what had gone wrong. Bush in turn telephoned and tried to find out just what Groves’ position was in the hierarchy. When he was told that the general would oversee the operation of plant facilities, he expressed strong doubts about Groves’ ability to work with people. He said, “I’m afraid we’re all in the soup.”
Despite this memorable first confrontation between the two men, they managed to work out an excellent relationship based on mutual respect for each other’s abilities. A committee of four, including Bush, Conant, General William Styer and Admiral William Purnell, sat in judgment of Groves during the next three years as he guided the Manhattan Project toward its elusive goal. The four found General Leslie Groves a remarkable man, as they watched him proceed with the formidable task of creating a new industrial complex across the American landscape.
Research and production were centered at three remote places: Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. In Los Alamos the workable weapon was to be designed under the supervision of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, a shy, frail scholar, a theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer was a man versed in Oriental literature, an aesthete who abhorred the violence of war. In his earlier life, he had associated with various Communist organizations, contributed to left-wing groups, and been intimate with many “fellow travelers”—in his time, completely predictable in an academic community espousing the utopia being preached by Moscow. When he first became involved in the security-ridden life of the Manhattan Project, his past produced violent opposition to his appointment. At this point, General Groves personally insisted that Oppenheimer be cleared immediately as “essential to the project.” Oppenheimer went on to prove beyond doubt Groves’ wisdom in selecting and championing him.
At Oak Ridge, a sprawling complex in the isolated mountains of Tennessee, the task was to pry the highly fissionable U-235 from U-238, the predominant isotope in natural uranium. Two separation methods, gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic, were employed to extract the vital material. Mammoth buildings were erected in two valleys for the purpose of collecting this rare metal that could be measured in thimblefuls. Thousands of men and women labored at their assigned duties in a contest against time. Most of them were as ignorant of the final purpose as mystified local onlookers. No product emerged from an assembly line. No trucks carried off goods. The only tangible evidence of achievement was the two huge cities of brick created for the scientists.
At Hanford, in the scrubland of eastern Washington, another sprawling factory complex was constructed. There, the most amazing part of the atomic quest was enacted. Inside windowless buildings, a man-made element was separated from uranium by chemical means. Plutonium was produced.
In the spring of 1940, Drs. Edwin M. McMillan and Philip H. Abelson had identified a new element in their laboratory at Berkeley. Neptunium, element 93, was born through the emission of an electron by U-239, which in turn had been produced by the capture of a neutron by U-238, an isotope in natural uranium. The scientific report of the discovery stressed that another element, 94, was undoubtedly present, since neptunium “had been observed to emit an electron.” The new force was too minute to detect.
When the work of Abelson and McMillan was interrupted by other duties, Dr. Glenn Seaborg, another researcher at Berkeley, had asked to continue the job of finding the elusive element. On March 1, 1941, he, Dr. Joseph Kennedy, Arthur Wahl and Dr. Emilio Segré bombarded one kilogram of uranium with neutrons. The experiment lasted six days. Suddenly the uranium was turned into neptunium and then metamorphosed into the exciting discovery, element 94, plutonium.
Twenty-two days later, the same scientists bombarded one-half microgram of plutonium with slow neutrons. They were jubilant on finding that it split its atoms just like uranium U-235. Man had manufactured his first element in nature’s periodic table. Instead of depending on the rare uranium U-235, he could now produce practically limitless quantities of fissionable material. When the Manhattan Project got under way, scientists realized that, in plutonium, the United States had the ingredient to manufacture a bomb in time to alter the balance of power. The major problem was to build the facilities to create it.
On December 2, 1942, scientist Enrico Fermi supervised the first self-sustaining, chain-reacting atomic pile. It had been built on a squash court at the University of Chicago. Later that day, Arthur H. Compton telephoned his friend James Conant at Harvard and said, “Jim, you’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.” Conant asked whether the natives were friendly. Compton assured him that they were.
At Hanford, several plants rose up on the south bank of the Columbia River. Inside them, there was no sound, only an eerie silence that belied the incredible drama going on behind thick, lead-shielded walls. No human eye witnessed the strange alchemy. Through a complicated system of control panels, metal moved through various stages to the final process. Huge atomic pi
les, the first atomic power plants on earth, generated cosmic fires as microscopic amounts of plutonium were created. Here at Hanford, man reached a summit of intellectual and utilitarian attainment as the material for the bomb was prepared.
Satisfied with the progress of his industrial facilities, General Groves put into motion the next phase of the Manhattan Project: Operation Silver Plate, leading ultimately to the bomb drop itself. From bases scattered around the world men were summoned to a secret installation in the Utah desert—fifteen hundred of them by the end of September 1944. Wendover Field, code-named Kingman or W-47, was a desolate oasis, only 125 miles west of Salt Lake City but a light year away from civilization. It was a sinkhole, a dusty, hot scar in a bleak, forbidding landscape.
Commander Fred Ashworth, a weapons specialist who would help to field-test the new bomb and who was to supervise ballistics design improvements at Wendover, first saw the base on a Sunday afternoon and was appalled. Since he would be commuting between Los Alamos and Wendover, he requested that his family be allowed to live in New Mexico rather than endure the hardships at the new airfield.
Personnel at Wendover included military specialists of all kinds. They formed the newly created 509th Composite Group. As group commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, twenty-nine years old, was responsible for perfecting the ability of the 509th to carry out the mission flawlessly.
Tibbets’ credentials were impressive. He was one of the first pilots to fly a B-17 over Europe when the Luftwaffe still dominated the air. Decorated several times, he eventually returned to the United States to lead modification work on a new bomber, the B-29, just then beginning to come off the assembly line. In the summer of 1944, an urgent telephone call ordered him to report to General Uzal Ent in Colorado Springs. There Tibbets met Captain William Parsons, chief of weapons development under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, and Dr. Norman Ramsey, a Harvard professor and a specialist in bomb development. The three men briefed him on the job the Government wanted him to do—a job that required him to train the newly formed 509th Composite Group to drop the product of billions of dollars of research monies on an unnamed target at an unannounced date.
The World War II Chronicles Page 6