Killing the Rising Sun

by Bill O'Reilly

  For a moment, the two men speak casually. Then Spaatz hands MacArthur the order. “I didn’t try to explain it,” Spaatz will later recall. “I just handed it to him and thought that he would ask me lots of questions, but instead he talked about that letter for about five minutes and the rest of the hour proceeded to expound the theories of atomic energy to me.”

  The order begins specifically: the first “special bomb” will be dropped as soon after about August 3, 1945, as weather will permit visual bombing on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki.

  Secondly: “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff. Further instructions will be issued concerning targets other than those listed above.”

  The third clause is a warning: “Discussion of any and all information concerning the use of the weapon against Japan is reserved to the Secretary of War and the President of the United States. No communiqués on the subject or releases of information will be issued by Commanders in the field without specific prior authority. Any news stories will be sent to the War Department for specific clearance.”

  The fourth and final directive of the order includes one caveat targeted specifically at Spaatz: “It is desired that you personally deliver one copy of this directive to General MacArthur and one copy to Admiral Nimitz for their information.”

  Nimitz, whose Pacific Fleet is headquartered in Guam, has already read the order.

  So it is that General Douglas MacArthur is the last to know about Japan’s doom. He scribbles his initials—“MACA”—in the right margin to verify that he has received the one-page document.

  The general is not alone among US military leaders in initially opposing the bomb. Generals Hap Arnold and Dwight Eisenhower have gone on record in top secret circles as objecting, as have Admiral William D. Leahy, Rear Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McLoy, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard. The consensus of these men is that the atomic bomb is too destructive and too many civilians will be killed.

  Those in favor of the A-bomb attack, such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, are more closely tied to the White House than actual combat operations in the field.

  But MacArthur’s displeasure runs much deeper than that of the other dissenters.

  The general is a brilliant tactician. He also has a deep understanding of Japanese culture, believing that the nation will never completely cooperate with surrender and an ensuing national occupation unless Emperor Hirohito is allowed to remain in power after the war ends.

  But there is a harsher truth.

  MacArthur is so determined to command Operation Olympic that he has lied about projected casualties to Marshall. In a June 17 cable to the general, meant for the eyes of President Harry Truman, he assured them that losses would be less than a hundred thousand men.

  “Your message arrived with thirty minutes to spare,” Marshall cabled back to MacArthur, having received the erroneous estimate just before a big meeting with Truman, “and had determining influence in obtaining formal presidential approval for Olympic.”

  But now, Operation Olympic will never happen. Douglas MacArthur understands that his dream of conquering the nation of Japan by leading a ground invasion is over.

  This is a cruel blow for MacArthur. Convinced of his own military genius, MacArthur has openly disparaged fellow army generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, stating that they “made every mistake that supposedly intelligent men could make.” In an interview with the New York Herald Tribune in November 1944, MacArthur went on to say, “The European strategy was to hammer stupidly against the enemy’s strongest points.” With “just a portion of the force” given to Patton in North Africa, MacArthur bragged that he “could have retaken the Philippines in three months.”

  General Douglas MacArthur does not want to bomb the Japanese—he wants to crush them up close and personal.

  To his mind, that kind of victory would make him immortal.

  * * *

  As Douglas MacArthur digests the news about the atomic bomb, sailors of the USS Indianapolis are dying. It is day four in the sea for them. The men are blinded by the daytime sun, desperate for food and water. Many are burned, and others are coated in oil from the massive slick that now spreads across more than twenty square miles of the Pacific. Almost all have swallowed oil and seawater, thanks to the rolling swells. Dehydration is making men hallucinate, causing them to see ships, planes, islands, and even hotels that do not exist. In their thirst, some of the crew seal their own fates by drinking seawater. The salt makes them delirious before eventually causing them to slip into comas.

  American planes have flown over the Indianapolis victims several times. But despite the crew’s best efforts to wave their arms and make themselves visible, they have not been seen.

  Captain Charles McVay is fortunate, having secured a spot in a raft rather than floating in a life jacket. He once commanded a warship with a crew of twelve hundred, but now his authority is limited to a rectangular raft and a handful of men who still revere him as their skipper.

  Within hours of the sinking, hungry sharks added to the horror.

  “The day wore on and the sharks were around, hundreds of them,” sailor Woody James later remembered. “You’d hear guys scream, especially late in the afternoon. Seemed like the sharks were the worst late in the afternoon than they were during the day. Then they fed at night too. Everything would be quiet and then you’d hear somebody scream and you knew a shark had got him.”

  A massive shark with a white dorsal fin has made Captain Charles McVay’s raft his focus, swimming underneath it and circling. Rather than focus on the danger, McVay maintains hope by using a small hook and length of line from the emergency kit to fish, firing a flare gun to alert passing airplanes, and doing his best to calm the men aboard his life raft.

  As for the sailors in the water, McVay can do nothing. They are a collection of floating groups and individuals spread out over miles of open ocean. On the first night, light winds blow men in rafts northeast, away from the Philippines, even as ocean currents push those in life jackets in the opposite direction. Now, on the fourth day since their ship sank, two-thirds of these floating men are already dead.

  Those who remain alive are enduring torture. At first, some sailors killed each other while fighting over buoyancy vests. But now so many men are dead that there are life jackets to spare.

  The current has carried the men far from the Indianapolis’s resting place. Some sailors have drifted more than fifty miles. All across the sea, dead men bob on the surface. Many corpses are just torsos, the legs and lower bodies already eaten away by sharks. Other men are still alive, but some have given up hope that help will arrive. A few commit suicide by slipping out of their life vests and descending into the ocean.

  One sailor counts twenty-five shark attacks on his group. Another counts eighty-eight. So far from land, the ocean is a clear blue. In daytime, the sailors can look beneath them and see the predators circling below. There is no logic to the shark attacks, with one exception: sailors who eat the Spam rations in the emergency kit are hit first, the sharks attracted to the smell of the salty meat product. But the reality is that no one is safe. The tactic of holding absolutely still when a shark is spotted seems no more or less effective than splashing the water and making a commotion to drive it away—the sharks are relentless, no matter what the terrified sailors do.

  On the fourth day in the ocean, time is running out. Only providence can save the remaining men.

  It does.

  * * *

  Four days after the Indianapolis disappears beneath the waves, Brigadier General Bill Ritchie lingers in Douglas MacArthur’s office as yet another delegation from America finishes paying its respects. MacArthur’s schedulers have cryptically informed their boss that Ritchie will remain behind for a short chat.

  Ritchie is a forty-three-year-old
Arkansas native and West Point graduate who has just flown six thousand miles to the Philippines from the Potsdam Conference in Germany. Like General Spaatz two days ago, he is weary from the long hours of travel that have taken him a fourth of the way around the world in the hold of a cargo plane.

  Soon it is just Ritchie and MacArthur in the general’s office. The two men know each other well, having worked together in the past. The door is closed. A tropical breeze wafts in from the balcony.

  In calm, lucid tones, the easygoing Ritchie confirms that Douglas MacArthur knows about the atomic bomb.

  He also confirms that the bombing may take place as soon as tomorrow.

  * * *

  The Indianapolis rescue operation begins by accident. PV-1 bomber pilot Wilbur G. Gwinn left his base on Peleliu on the morning of August 2 in search of enemy submarines. Instead, a surprised Lieutenant Gwinn radios back to his base that he has found “many men in the water.” A PBY-5A Catalina is immediately dispatched to investigate the findings. The pilot is twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant R. Adrian Marks, a man who has been part of the war in the Pacific since its very first day, when he survived the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

  As Marks flies to the scene, he alerts the destroyer USS Cecil J. Doyle about his emergency mission. Immediately, the Cecil J. Doyle changes its course and races toward the survivors.

  Marks and his eight-man crew soon spot survivors in the water. He is stunned to see sharks openly attacking some of the men. Three life rafts are dropped down to the sailors, but Marks accurately assesses that this will do little good. He can clearly see the wounded men, their arms and faces covered in oil to protect them from the sun, rising and falling on the twelve-foot swells. The sharks seem to be ignoring those sailors clustered in groups, instead targeting men who have drifted off alone.

  Lieutenant Marks knows he must act.

  Navy regulations prohibit him from landing the “Dumbo,” as his seaplane is nicknamed, on anything but calm waters. But Marks wants to land anyway. He polls his crew, knowing that if he crashes their lives will be on his hands. To a man, they agree to land, despite the fierce seas.

  On his first pass, the Dumbo bounces off a swell, soaring fifteen feet in the air before landing hard in the trough. Immediately, Marks directs his plane across the ocean surface, focusing first on rescuing lone survivors. Each time his plane draws near a man in the water, his crew tosses a life ring attached to ropes, then pulls the man in.

  Marks and his crew work feverishly. The interior of the plane is soon filled. Word reaches the cockpit that these men are from the Indianapolis, a fact especially poignant to Lieutenant Marks, for he grew up in a small Indiana town close to that city.

  By nightfall, the courageous work of Marks and his crew has resulted in fifty-six men being saved. However, the Dumbo will never fly again because of the damage it received on landing in the sea. Instead, it is now a refuge from the sharks and the oil, allowing the men of the Indianapolis to finally get a fitful night of sleep—some of them lashed to the wings with parachute cord.

  The sea once again turns stormy, and Marks becomes worried that his overloaded aircraft might sink.

  “Scores of badly injured men were softly crying with thirst and with pain,” Marks will later recall. “And then, far out on the horizon, there was a light.”

  The USS Cecil J. Doyle has arrived.

  * * *

  Captain Charles McVay and the men in his raft are not among those rescued by Lieutenant Marks or the Cecil J. Doyle. As the sun rises on their fifth day in the water, McVay’s group can see the rescue operations in the distance, but they despair that they are too far away to be found.

  On Friday, August 3, at 11:30 a.m., McVay spots another plane.

  This time, it sees him.

  An empty metal ammunition can on board his raft has miraculously been picked up by a search ship’s radar, and rescue planes are quickly dispatched.

  After five days in the ocean, without a drop of water to drink, Captain Charles McVay and the men in his life raft are rescued. More than eight hundred of his men leapt into the water on the night the USS Indianapolis sank. The tally of survivors is listed as 317 officers and sailors.

  In actuality, it is one less.

  Twenty-three years from now, unable to blot out these memories and considering himself to blame for the deaths of nearly nine hundred men, Captain Charles McVay will place his navy service revolver to his head and pull the trigger.6

  17

  HIROSHIMA, JAPAN

  AUGUST 3, 1945

  7:30 A.M.

  The angry drone of B-29 bomber engines is not an unusual sound for the people of this densely populated port city. On a heavily overcast morning, air-raid sirens once again announce the arrival of the silver behemoths, thundering overhead unopposed at an elevation of twenty thousand feet. Since Hiroshima has not been bombed during the war, most citizens think the sirens are just another false alarm. There is no stampede to take refuge in the bomb shelters.

  But this raid is different. It is rush hour in Hiroshima, and as commuters on their way to work by streetcar, bicycle, and bus can clearly see, bombs are tumbling out of the warplanes, soon to inflict the same horrific damage on Hiroshima that has been visited on almost every other major city in Japan.

  Until today, this city located at the mouth of the Ota River delta has been spared, even as B-29 raids have systematically destroyed most of Japan. Major cities like Tokyo were bombed first. Now General Curtis LeMay is directing his bombers toward secondary targets, such as Toyama, a hub for ball-bearing and aluminum production. Four days ago, 182 B-29s literally leveled Toyama by dropping 1,466 tons of conventional and incendiary bombs on the city. No home or industry was left unpunished, with one estimate showing 99.5 percent of Toyama wiped off the map.

  On August 1, during attacks focusing on Japan’s ability to transport men and matériel, the rail hub of Hachioji was obliterated by the Army Air Corps’s 58th Bomb Wing. In addition, the 313th Bomb Wing decimated the rail hub of Nagaoka, and the 314th vaporized the tiny rail center of Mito.

  Since the Tokyo firebombings in March, the full scope of LeMay’s aerial attacks has emerged: one million Japanese have died in sixty-six targeted cities. Ten million more have been made homeless.

  But as the B-29s open their bomb bay doors over Hiroshima this morning, it is not fire that falls from the sky. Instead, unarmed five-hundred-pound canisters hurtle toward the ground. At four thousand feet, an altitude charge automatically opens them. Hundreds of thousands of four-by-eight-inch slips of paper known as “LeMay bombing leaflets” are released into the sky and flutter to the ground.

  “Civilians!” they read in Japanese. “Evacuate at once!

  “These leaflets are being dropped to notify you that your city has been listed for destruction by our powerful air force.

  “This advance notice will give your military authorities ample time to take necessary defensive measures to protect you from our inevitable attack. Watch and see how powerless they are to protect you. Systematic destruction of city after city will continue as long as you blindly follow your military leaders whose blunders have placed you on the very brink of oblivion. It is your responsibility to overthrow the military government now and save what is left of your beautiful country.

  “In the meanwhile, we encourage all civilians to evacuate at once.”

  One week ago at the Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman issued a simple warning that if Japan did not surrender immediately it would face “prompt and utter destruction,” which soon became known as the Potsdam Declaration. Many citizens throughout Japan know of this ultimatum because of American radio broadcasts delivered in Japanese.1

  As the leaflets reach the ground, the people of Hiroshima open them to see aerial photographs of five B-29s unleashing scores of bombs on Japan. A series of small circles form the border, each representing a city that has been targeted. B-29s have been dropping these leaflets on cities all over Ja
pan for more than a week.

  By any estimate, Hiroshima is a perfect target. Japanese authorities are so convinced of this that they have already evacuated almost a hundred thousand citizens to safer locations.

  Hiroshima is entirely flat and just a few feet above sea level, meaning that an explosion will expand outward with maximum effect. The city is also the headquarters of Japan’s Second Army, whose twenty-five thousand soldiers will be vital to thwarting the American invasion. In addition, Hiroshima possesses a massive armament storage depot. It is a thriving port and communications hub, and—as American intelligence was relieved to report on July 30—not a single Allied prisoner of war is being held within the city’s twenty-six square miles.2

  As American B-29s pass over the city, then out over the Sea of Japan and back to their bases in the Mariana Islands six hours from now, the people of Hiroshima are left to wonder what these leaflets really mean.

  * * *

  On the island of Tinian, 1,500 miles southeast of Hiroshima, final preparations for the dropping of the atomic bomb are in place. Today, August 3, might have seen the B-29 crews release the bomb known as Little Boy instead of warning leaflets. But a typhoon approaching Japan made flying conditions less than ideal.

  Little Boy has been ready to go for three days. The five-ton explosive device rests on a special trailer, covered in canvas to conceal its appearance. All Little Boy lacks to be activated are the four cordite charges that will initiate the explosion. These will not be secured in the bomb until the B-29 carrying it to Hiroshima has taken off, just in case the plane crashes on the runway.

  The pilot flying the bombing mission is Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, a thirty-year-old career officer from Quincy, Illinois. During the early part of the war, he served as the personal pilot for General George S. Patton in Europe. As part of his assignment, Tibbets also went on to fly more than forty combat missions over the Third Reich. He has been flying the B-29 since its debut in 1943. At this moment, the aircraft he will fly has no catchy name, no artwork emblazoned across its nose. Right now, it is only known by the number painted on its fuselage: 82.