The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  He requested no ceremony upon his return to the United States, for celebration would seem callous in moments of such public agony. He wanted to slip quietly back into the White House, and he worked hard on the trip home. He had flown Judge Sam Rosenman to Potsdam, and Rosenman was now aboard the Augusta to work on a speech with Truman. Rosenman recalled, “The President, coming home from Potsdam, pointed out that practically all of his time had been taken up with foreign affairs in which one crisis after another had come his way; and now that he was coming home from the Potsdam Conference he had to give some attention to domestic affairs.” The speech they worked on together would come to be known as the 21-point program, policies that would launch the Truman era domestically in the postwar world. Aboard the ship, these policies were formulating in Truman’s mind and in Rosenman’s pen. Neither could know yet how explosive these twenty-one points would prove to be.

  The tumult of postwar reconversion on the home front had already begun. The administration canceled tens of millions of dollars in war contracts in the months of June and July, leaving tens of thousands out of work. Truman’s new Treasury secretary, Fred Vinson—just days into his tenure—had begun sending near-panicked memorandums to the president while Truman was at Potsdam. Vinson was predicting coal and food shortages, devastating transportation breakdowns, and labor problems—essentially, economic chaos.

  Meanwhile, the world was beginning to digest the Potsdam accords, which were excerpted in newspapers around the globe. Here was a record of the work the Big Three had accomplished. Thus far, the reaction was lukewarm at best, especially in Europe, which faced more economic upheaval than the Americans did. “The Potsdam communique was not greeted with unquestioning enthusiasm over here,” CBS’s Edward R. Murrow reported from London, his voice piping into millions of American homes. “The comment was restrained. There was a tendency to point out the many matters that were not solved . . . There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that President Truman acquitted himself well.”

  In the Far East, Japan continued to burn. On August 1, Curtis LeMay issued a warning to Japanese citizens in twelve cities to leave their homes and jobs to save their lives, as their cities were top on what was being called in the press LeMay’s “death list”—Mito, Fukuyama, Ōtsu, among others. On August 2, the day Truman met with the king of England and then started the transatlantic journey home aboard the Augusta, the Twenty-First Bomber Command struck the enemy with what the New York Times called “the greatest single aerial strike in world history.” Nearly 900 B-29s pounded targets with 6,632 tons of conventional and incendiary bombs. The flames engulfed miles of Japanese cities. “The sight was incredible beyond description,” recalled one B-29 crewman. These attacking planes saw no opposition. “They knew we were coming but they didn’t do anything about it,” said one officer.

  As the Augusta pushed deeper into the Atlantic, Truman’s curiosity over the bomb grew excruciating. Given the secrecy of the mission, he received no updates. He was in the dark. At one point, the Augusta’s Advance Map Room cabled the White House inquiring about any news of “the Manhattan Project.” White House Map Room operatives responded that they could find no evidence of any such project. The Augusta cabled again to say, “Captain Vardaman [a Truman naval aide and close friend] has now indicated matter is so secret he wants no, repeat no, inquiries of any sort made by the Map Room on this project.”

  Truman did meet with the press aboard the ship, briefing them on the incredible story of the atomic bomb, under the condition that it was still a war secret and nothing could be published. It was an extraordinary leap of faith, to inform reporters of the bomb’s existence before knowing what Little Boy’s results would be. Merriman Smith of the United Press remembered that Truman “was happy and thankful that we had a weapon in our hands which would speed the end of the war. But he was apprehensive over the development of such a monstrous weapon of destruction.”

  Truman also answered reporters’ questions about Joseph Stalin. The Man of Steel was “an S.O.B.,” the president said, while on the boat headed home. “I guess he thinks I’m one too.”

  ///

  From his headquarters on Guam in the South Pacific, at 2 p.m. on August 5, Curtis LeMay gave the final go-ahead for the 509th wing to fly the secret mission the following day—August 6. LeMay had been a busy man. His firebombing campaign had laid waste to nearly sixty square miles in and around Tokyo, plus vast sections of Nagoya, Kōbe, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kawasaki. As the official U.S. Army Air Forces history of World War II would later read: “The six most important industrial cities in Japan had been ruined.”

  Only recently had LeMay learned of the bomb. A special messenger had flown to his headquarters on Guam to brief him on the Manhattan Project. “I didn’t know much about this whole thing and didn’t ask about it, because it was so hot,” LeMay recorded. “Didn’t wish to have any more information than it was necessary for me to have.” He had orders as to the first bomb’s primary target: Hiroshima. According to intelligence sources, Hiroshima was “an Army city . . . a major quartermaster depot” with warehouses full of military supplies—guns and tanks, machine tools, and aircraft parts. “Residential construction is typically Japanese. There are two types of warehouses. The Ujina Port region is congested with both fireproof and combustible warehouses, open stores and open factories.” Intelligence sources also found that Hiroshima had no POW camps, so the Americans could be relatively sure they would not be bombing their own men.

  LeMay’s command had not yet hit Hiroshima. It was a thriving city and a virgin target, with a population of 318,000, according to American intelligence.

  On the afternoon of August 5, on the island of Tinian, army officials pushed the Little Boy bomb out of a warehouse at the airfield. A dozen men in short-sleeved tan uniforms gathered around it wearing expressions of concern, wheeling Little Boy on a platform as if it were a patient on a hospital gurney. It was roughly egg-shaped, with a steel shell and a tail poking out the back to guide its trajectory. One of the men working at Tinian that day described it as looking like “an elongated trash can with fins.” When it came to the Manhattan Project, everything was experimental. Little Boy employed a different gun mechanism than the one used in the Trinity shot, so there was no certainty that this weapon would go off.

  The air base at Tinian was in itself an industrial marvel, and an emblem of American ingenuity. A year earlier, most of this little island was covered in sugarcane. Now the island was home to an airfield howling day and night with heavy flight traffic. “Tinian is a miracle,” noted one writer who saw it at the time. “Here, 6,000 miles from San Francisco, the United States armed forces have built the largest airport in the world . . . From the air this island, smaller than Manhattan, looked like a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers.” The airport was fully ready. It had been built to serve one purpose above all others: Little Boy. On the afternoon of August 5, army personnel eased the weapon through open bomb bay doors into the belly of a B-29 Superfortress, using a hydraulic lift.

  That very afternoon the pilot of this B-29, Paul W. Tibbets, had named the airplane Enola Gay, after his mother. Surely Mrs. Tibbets had never dreamed that her legacy would carry such historical import, for the Enola Gay was about to become the most infamous military aircraft ever flown. A sign painter had placed the letters of her name beneath the pilot’s window, at an angle in foot-high black brushstrokes. The airplane had been built in a factory in Omaha, Nebraska, completed earlier in the year. It would fly as part of a seven-plane task force—all B-29s—including three weather recon aircraft (one over Hiroshima, two over secondary targets), one plane carrying blast measurement equipment, one plane for camera equipment and observation, one spare aircraft, and the delivery machine itself, the Enola Gay.

  “By dinnertime on the fifth,” Tibbets recorded, “all [preparations were] completed. The atom bomb was ready, the planes were gassed and checked. Takeoff was set for [2:45 a.m.]. I tried to nap, but visitors kep
t me up.”

  The final briefing for the seven flight crews was at midnight, in a room by the runway where the aircraft would take off. Less than forty-eight hours earlier, the crew members of these ships had learned of the atomic bomb for the first time, the secret behind the mission for which they had been training for months. They were shown aerial photographs of the targets—the primary, Hiroshima, and secondaries, Kokura and Nagasaki. They were told details of the Trinity shot, and while they were supposed to see footage of Trinity, the motion picture machine had broken, and so the visual effects of the bomb remained a mystery to them. They had known that they had been training for something special, but still, they were amazed. “It is like some weird dream,” said one crew member, radioman Abe Spitzer of Wendover, Utah, “conceived by one with too vivid an imagination.”

  During the final briefing, each member was given dark glasses to protect the eyes from the blast, which, they were told, would be like a new sun being born. A weatherman briefed the crew on what to expect—smooth flying—then a chaplain gave a blessing, asking the Almighty Father “to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies.”

  Thousands of miles away aboard the Augusta in the Atlantic, at nearly this exact moment, Truman was attending his own church services in the ship’s forward mess hall, for it was still August 5—a Sunday. Truman was the butt of jokes that morning, because he had “overslept”—remaining in bed past five thirty. With Byrnes and the Augusta’s skipper, Captain James Foskett, by his side, Truman prayed as the ship’s chaplain, Kenneth Perkins, led the group in a hymn:

  Faith of our fathers, we will strive

  To win all nations unto Thee

  And through the truth that comes from God

  Mankind shall then indeed be free.

  They sang “Come Thou Almighty King” and “The Old Rugged Cross.”

  At 2:27 a.m. on Tinian, Tibbets sparked the Enola Gay’s four Wright Cyclone engines, and the plane pushed forward onto a runway. He would recall the feeling of the aircraft’s yoke in his hands; the plane felt torquey, yearning for flight. The Enola Gay had been given the code name Dimples 82. Tibbets called to flight control. The quick conversation as he later remembered it: “Dimples Eight Two to North Tinian Tower. Taxi-out and take-off instructions.”

  Orders returned: “Dimples Eight Two from North Tinian Tower. Take off to the east on Runway A for Able.”

  Tibbets was cleared for takeoff. The copilot, Robert Lewis, counted down: “Fifteen seconds to go. Ten seconds. Five seconds. Get ready.”

  At 2:45 a.m., the Enola Gay’s wheels left the ground.

  ///

  By the time Truman sat down to dinner in the Augusta’s wardroom with the ship’s officers, at six o’clock on the night of August 5, the Enola Gay was rendezvousing with two escorts over the island of Iwo Jima at 9,300 feet. In the South Pacific, the sun was just rising on August 6. At 7:30 a.m., William Sterling Parsons—the ordnance expert who had worked on the bomb at Los Alamos beside Robert Oppenheimer, and who was now aboard the Enola Gay as the weaponeer—climbed down to the bomb bay and armed Little Boy, pulling out green plugs and replacing them with red ones. Weather was clear, so Tibbets decided to gun for the primary target. “It’s Hiroshima,” he announced over the intercom, throttling the Enola Gay upward to 31,000 feet. The crew slipped on heavy flak suits, and Tibbets reminded them to don their heavy glasses at the moment of detonation.

  At 8 p.m. on August 5 aboard the Augusta, the evening’s film presentation began—The Thin Man Goes Home, starring the comic duo William Powell and Myrna Loy. Again, Truman did not attend, according to the ship’s log. He might have been playing poker, or staring at the ceiling of his cabin, or perhaps still praying, alone. Around the time the film began, Little Boy’s target came into focus. “I see it!” yelled the Enola Gay’s bombardier, Thomas Ferebee. The airplane was traveling at 328 miles per hour on automatic pilot at 31,000 feet when Ferebee took aim in his bombsight. Hiroshima lay below. Copilot Robert Lewis was taking notes in a logbook during the mission. Looking down at Hiroshima, he wrote the words “perfectly open target.” Ferebee let the bomb loose. “For the next minute,” Lewis wrote, “no one knew what to expect.”

  Tibbets recalled: “I threw off the automatic pilot and hauled Enola Gay into the turn. I pulled antiglare goggles over my eyes. I couldn’t see through them; I was blind. I threw them to the floor. A bright light filled the plane. The first shock wave hit us.”

  Copilot Lewis recorded: “There were two very distinct slaps on the ship, then that was all the physical effects we felt. We then turned the ship so we could observe the results and then in front of our eyes was without a doubt the greatest explosion man has ever witnessed . . . I am certain the entire crew felt this experience was more than any one human had ever thought possible . . . Just how many Japs did we kill? . . . If I live a hundred years I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.”

  In the moment, Lewis was writing in his logbook, scribbling with difficulty since it was dark in the vibrating aircraft. He wrote, “My God, what have we done.”

  Tibbets recalled: “We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall. No one spoke for a moment; then everyone was talking. I remember Lewis pounding my shoulder, saying ‘Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!’ Tom Ferebee wondered about whether radioactivity would make us all sterile. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission. He said it tasted like lead.”

  Another member of the flight crew, navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, thought to himself in this moment the same thought that would rush through the minds of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in the coming days: “Thank God the war is over and I don’t have to get shot at anymore. I can go home.”

  On the ground, it was 8:15 in the morning. The city was bustling, as forty-five minutes earlier, citizens were alerted with an “all clear” message, that it was safe to go outside. When the bomb detonated, many thousands of citizens of Hiroshima disappeared off the face of the earth, instantly and without a trace. Survivors would remember the flash of light first, followed by a sound that had never been heard by human ears. “We heard a big noise like a ‘BOONG!’ ‘BOONG!’ Like that. That was the sound,” Tomiko Morimoto, who was thirteen at the time, later recalled. And then, “everything started falling down; all the buildings started flying around all over the place. Then something wet started coming down, like rain. I guess that’s what they call black rain. In my child’s mind, I thought it was oil. I thought the Americans were going to burn us to death. And we kept running. And fire was coming out right behind us.”

  Only one person reported to be within a 100-yard radius of Hiroshima’s ground zero survived the blast. His name was Goichi Oshima. Ten years later he described what he saw: “A sudden flash, an explosion that defies description, then everything went black. When I came to, the Hiroshima I knew was in ruins.”

  Aboard the Augusta, Truman went to bed that night likely within an hour or two after detonation. At 1 a.m. (now August 6), the ship crossed into a new time zone in the Atlantic and the officers set clocks back one hour. Truman awoke to a beautiful quiet day at sea, the sun bright and warm. The ship’s officers shifted to warm-weather uniforms: khaki and gray, with the crew in white, due to the Gulf Stream’s temperate breezes. After breakfast, Truman relaxed on the deck and listened to the ship’s band play a concert, unaware at this moment that Hiroshima had been all but wiped off the planet.

  ///

  Lunch aboard the Augusta. Truman sat down in the aft mess hall at 11:45 a.m. Also at the table: Jimmy Byrnes and members of the ship’s crew, George T. Fleming of Thompsonville, Connecticut; Edward F. Place of Woodhaven, New York; Edward Clifford of San Francisco; Tony Torregrossa of Northville, New Jersey; F. C. Roaseau of Bald Knob, Arkansas; and Eino Karvonen of Two Harbors, Minnesota. Minutes before noon—some sixteen hours after the destruction
of Hiroshima—Frank Graham, a captain in the navy working in the Advance Map Room, hurried into the mess hall and handed Truman a message. The president looked down and focused his eyes:

  Following info regarding Manhattan received. “Hiroshima bombed visually with only one tenth cover at 052315A. There was no fighter opposition and no flak. Parsons reports 15 minutes after drop as follows: ‘Results clear cut and successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than in any test. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery.’”

  Truman jumped to his feet and shook hands with the messenger. “Captain,” Truman said, “this is the greatest thing in history! Show it to the Secretary of State.” Graham handed the message to Byrnes, who read it and belted out the words “Fine! Fine!”

  Minutes later Graham returned with another message, this one from Henry Stimson in Washington. Truman read:

  To the President

  From the Secretary of War

  Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 p.m. Washington time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.

  Holding the two messages in his hand, Truman turned to Byrnes and shouted, “It’s time for us to get on home!” Then he signaled to the crowd in the mess hall to quiet down, banging a piece of silverware against a glass. The sailors hushed, and Truman announced the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The room exploded in applause, feeding off the president’s excitement. With Byrnes at his heels, Truman marched quickly to the wardroom, where the Augusta’s officers were lunching. In a voice “tense with excitement,” according to one man present, Truman said, “Keep your seats, gentlemen. I have an announcement to make to you.” The officers stared at him with puzzled faces, and Truman continued: “We have just dropped a bomb on Japan which has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It was an overwhelming success.”