Had Halsey declined to expend scores of fliers and 100 aircraft in a needless exercise, his chances of being replaced approached absolute zero. But rather than take counsel of the Task Force 38 staff, The Bull was eager to comply with orders that gratified his vanity at the expense of eighty-three young men who died at Kure attacking impotent, immobile ships.
Halsey’s seeming indifference to casualties drew sharp criticism from subordinates. One aviator spoke for many when he noted, “Halsey is going wild on publicity and we are all fed [up] to the teeth listening to all the crap he is putting out. . . . Halsey is a big disappointment to me as he is to most of us.”
Typhoon weather brewed up at the end of July, and Third Fleet steamed eastward for an extended period of refueling. From August 3 to 9 the force reprovisioned at sea, conducted training, and coped with worsening weather.
Meanwhile, Nimitz directed Halsey to steer clear of southern Japan. Honoring the peculiar directive, Third Fleet remained north of the 37th parallel, striking northern Honshu. The mystery was soon made clear with word of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
August 9
The harbor war continued on August 9. It featured significant actions by two of the U.S. Navy’s allies: the British Royal Navy and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
On Okinawa Lieutenant Colonel Edwin H. Hawes commanded the veteran 38th Bomb Group. The “Sun Setters” had been in combat for three years, still flying the B-25. The first aircraft to bomb Japan also was among the last.
The 38th’s specialty was shipping strikes, and Hawes declared, “If we ever find a Jap carrier in our range, we are going after it.”
Reconnaissance flights had found a flattop in Beppu Bay on Kyushu, 115 miles east of Nagasaki. The Sun Setters wanted her.
She was Kaiyo, the 16,000-ton escort carrier damaged by naval mines and bombs two weeks previously. Inactive since July, she was painted green and strewn with camouflage netting and artificial trees, giving the appearance of a floating garden. She sat upright but mired on the bottom, useful only as an antiaircraft platform. In truth she was not worth a load of bombs but aerial photos showed her “afloat.”
Ed Hawes didn’t have to fly again. He had orders to return home but “he wanted to get that carrier so bad,” recalled a subordinate. Hawes was thirty-four, a ten-year veteran with 4,700 flying hours, including nearly 1,000 in combat. Known for his aggressiveness (he had three Purple Hearts), he could not pass up a shot at a carrier.
Hawes led twelve B-25s away from Okinawa at 6:00 A.M. on the 9th, relying upon his lead navigator, Captain John W. Long, Jr., to plot the 530-mile flight. Organized in three-plane flights, each Mitchell carried two 1,000-pounders with delay fuses to permit trailing aircraft to escape the blast pattern.
Over Kyushu heavy clouds caused serious problems. Descending from 6,000 feet, one flight became separated and another veered slightly off course in the haze. As one pilot recalled, “The weather was lousy and the visibility was terrible.”
Nevertheless, Hawes glimpsed the target and led his formation down a fairly steep slope, approaching the bay from inland. The bombers leveled off less than fifty feet above the trees.
Flying as copilot for the second flight leader was Lieutenant Chuck Crawford, who had a good view of Hawes’s lead section. He saw the CO’s two bombs leave the aircraft, aligned with the carrier amidships. Then the lead bomber took a fatal blow.
Crawford recalled, “It must have caught a direct hit in the right engine. His B-25 did a snap roll to the right, one and a half times around, and dove into the water, inverted and nose down. Until I saw that happen I didn’t think a B-25 could roll that fast!” He knew the crew could not have survived.
Racing in about twenty seconds behind, Crawford punched off his bombs, which he believed smashed into Kaiyo’s hull. He had no time to watch the other Mitchells, though four of the remaining five aimed their bombs at the ship. Then they turned for home, three and a half hours southwest.
After the 38th’s attack, the last of Kaiyo’s caretaker crew dismantled the AA guns and left the ship.
Ed Hawes, the erstwhile math teacher and tennis coach, left a widow and two sons. He received a belated Silver Star in 1990, as the paperwork had been neglected in the excitement of V-J Day.
Another airman also received a posthumous decoration for an August 9 mission as British planes attacked airfields and Onagawa Bay on Honshu’s northeast coast, 170 miles north of Tokyo. Mines had bottled up half a dozen ships that lay vulnerable, though their military value was minimal. Their total tonnage barely represented a single cruiser.
Leading an eight-plane fighter strike was Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray, a Canadian flying off HMS Formidable. A former art student from British Columbia, Gray had a year’s fleet experience, including attacks against the German battleship Tirpitz in Norwegian waters. The twenty-seven-year-old flier made a specialty of Axis shipping, having helped sink an escort two weeks before. Now he deployed his Corsairs by two-plane sections, diving in from 10,000 feet.
Sweeping low over the bay, Gray went for a “destroyer” among the small craft and auxiliaries. Actually she was the 870-ton sloop Amakusa.
The sky erupted in flak bursts and tracers from at least four ships and the shoreline. Hit repeatedly, Gray’s fighter spurted flames, and another pilot saw one of his 500-pounders shot off its rack. Nevertheless, “Hammy” pressed his run to minimum altitude, dropping his remaining bomb from perhaps fifty feet. It penetrated the hull, blowing a huge hole in the starboard side.
Gray’s Corsair pulled off target, streaming smoke and flames as it swerved into the water. He perished with his victim, which sank quickly with seventy-one sailors. Other pilots sank an escort and left a minesweeper damaged.
Gray was likely the last Canadian killed in action in World War II. Admiral Sir Philip Vian lauded his “brilliant fighting spirit and inspired leadership” and nominated him for a posthumous Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest honor. The presentation was made to Gray’s parents in Ottawa in February 1946. It was the sixteenth VC awarded a Canadian in World War II; only the second for a Fleet Air Arm aviator.
With the sacrifices of fliers such as Hawes and Gray, the harbor war largely ended on August 9, the same day that continued a rain of ruin upon Japan undreamt of by even airpower’s most flamboyant visionaries.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“A Most Cruel Bomb”
THE WEAPON STREAKED down through six miles of sky, accelerating to its terminal velocity at 32 feet per second. From the instant the 8,800-pound bomb left the belly of a bomber with the radio call “Dimples 82,” an irrevocable sequence had begun.
Ordnance engineers had computed that the most damage would be inflicted upon the target by an explosion 1,900 feet above ground level. The Mark 1 weapon’s fusing was designed accordingly. As the device dropped from Dimples 82, an electrical plug was stripped from an aircraft socket, beginning a timer delay of fifteen seconds, at which point the bomb’s onboard battery kicked in. The electrical circuit activated a barometric altimeter that sensed the outside atmosphere as the blunt-nosed shape plummeted through the 6,000-foot mark. For utmost precision, a radar-controlled detonation was required. Therefore, at the designated height the barometer actuated four radar altimeters, all linked to one another. When at least two registered 1,900 feet altitude, the ignition sequence began.
The workings of the device, though requiring twentieth-century precision, were centuries old in principle. The Mark 1 was a simple “gun” concept built around a six-foot tube containing a gunpowder charge that fired a six-and-a-quarter-inch diameter uranium slug at a “target” four inches in diameter. The 85-pound projectile smashed into the 56-pound target at 1,000 feet per second. Ten-thousandths of a second later, compressed between tungsten-carbide reflectors, the entire U-235 assembly reached critical mass and erupted in a chain reaction, the nuclear fuel feeding upon itself.
Almost perfectly aimed by a twenty-six-year-old bombardier, after a forty-three-second fall from 31,0
00 feet the bomb missed its aim point by fewer than 200 yards. There, southeast of the juncture of two rivers, it burst with the energy of approximately 15 metric tons of TNT.
First came the light—red-hued purple—then the heat, vastly searing in its intensity as the raging fireball surpassed 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Beneath an enormous blast wave exceeding 12 pounds per square inch, a stone and concrete building at ground zero was either vaporized or driven vertically into the earth.
The resulting firestorm measured two miles across, jumping both natural and man-made barriers. Where the rampaging blast overpressure leveled buildings, the ravenous fire consumed most of the ready-made fuel in its path. Further out, where more buildings survived than collapsed, the effects were diminished by distance. However, humans died beyond that radius, from blast, flames, and the invisible killer called radiation. The exact number of dead will never be known.
Its mission accomplished, Dimples 82 banked away from the destroyed city of Hiroshima, having completed a process that began with a letter from a scientist to a politician six years before.
Gadgets and Firecrackers
On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote President Roosevelt, citing “recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard . . . [which] leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy.”
The German-born physicist postulated a nuclear chain reaction producing enormous amounts of power. He said, “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs,” though he thought such a device would be too heavy for an aircraft to carry.
Einstein closed by noting that Germany had recently stopped selling uranium from Czech mines, and that research was being conducted in Berlin. One month later Germany attacked Poland and the Second World War began.
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly dismissed relativity theory as “the Jewish science” and thereby drove many of the world’s leading physicists to America. Consequently, little came of the German program, though that was not known until war’s end. But the American bomb could not have succeeded without the Jewish scientists.
The colleagues whom Einstein mentioned were the Italian Enrico Fermi and the Hungarian Leo Szilard, who, in 1942, would create the first atomic chain reaction. They became crucial members of the Manhattan Engineering District (MED), the cover name for America’s atomic bomb program.
Other nations were involved, including British, Australian, and Canadian scientists and engineers. There was even a German, Hans Bethe, a leading theorist who had emigrated in 1935.
Chosen to oversee the scientific portion of the project was a first-generation American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose Jewish parents had moved from Germany in the 1880s. Tall and thin to the point of being gaunt, he wore himself down to 114 pounds during World War II.
When the Manhattan Project began in August 1942, the assemblage of raw brainpower was still amazingly youthful. Of the leading lights, Szilard was the eldest at forty-four. Edward Teller was probably the youngest at thirty-four; Oppenheimer was thirty-eight. Fermi, then forty-one, had begun his doctoral work at seventeen. A Czech researcher, Frederic de Hoffmann, was invited to participate at nineteen.
Commanding the Manhattan Project was Colonel Leslie R. Groves, a driven taskmaster who graduated fourth in the West Point class of ’18. He had supervised construction of the Pentagon building and, considering the crucial importance of the MED and its immense budget (over $2 billion in 1945), he was surprisingly junior. He was promoted to temporary brigadier general in September 1942 and temporary major general two years later.
Groves and Oppenheimer made an odd couple: the gruff, portly general and the often eccentric, rail-thin scientist. But they made Manhattan work. At times it was difficult for Groves to support “Oppie,” who made a bad situation worse by refusing to cooperate with security agents investigating his prewar Communist affiliations. (It was not known until much later that the Soviets had collaborators inside the project.) Yet Groves recognized Oppenheimer’s unique ability to manage the soaring intellects and often clashing egos of so many geniuses and keep them moving toward completion of the task.
A crucial early decision was what kind of bomb to build: uranium or plutonium. Not knowing the status of the German project, America produced both types of weapons, though far more effort went into the plutonium design, which scientists called “the gadget.” LeMay glibly referred to either bomb as “the firecracker.”
MED had three primary facilities: Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. The brain center was “Los Al,” in the high desert north of Santa Fe, established on a former boys ranch. From 1943 onward Oppenheimer directed the efforts of the physicists, scientists, and engineers who tackled the theoretical and practical aspects of building an atomic bomb.
The raw materials came from Oak Ridge (uranium) and Hanford (plutonium). Both places were subject of much speculation, though some “explanations” leaned toward the whimsical. Student naval aviators at Pasco, Washington, were threatened with “death or worse” for overflying Hanford. Recalled one pilot, “ ‘Rumor Control’ had two theories as to Hanford’s purpose. Republicans said it was a secret factory making Roosevelt campaign buttons. Others said, ‘No, they’re making the front ends of horses for shipment to D.C. and final assembly.’”
Oppenheimer the enthusiastic horseman ramrodded a scientific herd containing numerous mavericks. As Los Alamos historian Jennet Conant observed, the site “was thick with experts and know-it-alls, with more arriving every day, so Oppenheimer spent an inordinate amount of time settling disputes and preventing work from being disrupted.”
Certainly there were eccentrics. Szilard, who held patents for refrigerators and microscopes, conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for a London traffic light to change.
Given the professional rivalries amid some immense egos, personality clashes were inevitable. Physicist Seth Neddermeyer, who made the crucial recommendation for an implosion trigger for plutonium, could not get along with his section head, Commander William S. Parsons. The Navy ordnance officer had alienated Neddermeyer by denigrating implosion in favor of the gun assembly that would be used in the Hiroshima bomb. To keep the project moving, Oppenheimer replaced Neddermeyer with George Kistiakowsky, an imposing Harvard chemist and explosives expert. But the new arrangement worked no better—Parsons and the Ukrainian-born Ph.D. took vastly different approaches to problem solving.
However, at least “Deke” Parsons got along well with his military colleagues. Almost nobody got along with Edward Teller. His enormous talent was largely wasted during the war, as he could not be diverted from his obsession with “the super,” the hydrogen bomb finally tested in 1952.
Manhattan’s first two products were named “Little Boy” (uranium) and “Fat Man” (plutonium). Because the uranium bomb’s gun assembly was relatively simple, it was deployed to combat without testing. The plutonium weapon, requiring exquisite symmetry in its implosion trigger, required proof of concept. That proof was delivered at the New Mexico “Trinity” site on July 16, 1945. Its yield, some 20 kilotons, proved perhaps 40 percent greater than Little Boy.
By then the Manhattan targeting committee had already selected six Japanese cities as candidates for nuclear incineration.
The Road to Total War
President Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bombs was based upon two related principles: a desire to end the war as quickly as possible; and the demonstrated willingness of Japan’s population to resist to the last man, woman, and child. The enemy’s military ferocity was well known, but the scenes of Japanese mothers throwing their infants off Saipan’s cliffs, and the bitter resistance at Okinawa provided additional convincing arguments.
Furthermore, by spring of 1945, U.S. intelligence knew the full extent of Tokyo’s measures as the war had forced itself upon the population far beyond closed shops and rare commodities. In March, school classes were canceled above the sixth
grade, presumably until victory ensued. Meanwhile, students and teachers were assigned vital tasks from growing food to moving supplies and preparing defenses. That same month the war cabinet established the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps, a “volunteer” mobilization involving civilian males from fifteen to sixty and females seventeen to forty.
Consequently, in July the U.S. 5th Air Force inserted a note in its Weekly Intelligence Review: “The entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target . . . THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN. We are making War and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which War is and seeks to bring about an enduring Peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.”
Total war had come of age.
For years Japanese civilians had been force-fed an unrelenting diet of propagandistic pap as victory claims escalated from optimistic to absurd. Even faced with mounting evidence of a losing battle (naval blockade, frequent air attacks, loss of the Marianas, Philippines, Iwo Jima, and the invasion of Okinawa), some senior Japanese officials maintained a state of denial. At a POW camp in Manchuria, captives were told that the outcome would be “a matter of generations.” After the war a colonel on the 18th Army Staff in New Guinea related his astonishment at the capitulation, believing the war would continue into 1948 or later. Others predicted that the climactic battle for the homeland would result in an Allied defeat or a stalemate. In February 1945—the month of the first U.S. carrier strikes, the initial B-29 firebombing, and the landings at Iwo Jima—former prime minister Hideki Tojo informed the emperor that because the Soviet nonaggression pact ran until 1946 “there was no need to be pessimistic, and Japan’s cause was righteous.”
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