by Ray Monk
fn55 ‘Hymne to God, My God, in My Sicknesse’.
fn56 ‘Holy Sonnet 14’.
fn57 Given the experience of bombing up to that point, this is perhaps a natural assumption. However, as the ‘air raid’ in question would consist of a single aeroplane, there was little reason to suppose that the city’s occupants would realise they were about to be bombed. In fact, the inhabitants of Hiroshima did not pay much attention to the plane that dropped the bomb that destroyed their city, precisely because they did not – could not – imagine an air raid that did not involve a great number of aeroplanes.
fn58 The date of the poll is a little uncertain because of a confusion in the record. The memo containing the results of the poll is dated 13 July 1945, but it gives the date of the poll as 18 July. Assuming that the memo was not, in fact, written five days before the events it describes, it seems most likely that the first date is an error and that the poll did indeed take place on 18 July.
fn59 This was probably an exaggeration.
14
Los Alamos 3: Heavy with Misgiving
ON 23 JULY 1945, barely a week after the Trinity test, the US Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, recorded in his diary a conversation he had had that day with George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, in which the two had agreed that ‘now with our new weapon we would not need the assistance of the Russians to conquer Japan’. The following day, Truman told Stalin about the atomic bomb. Or rather, as Truman later recalled it: ‘I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force.’ To Truman’s great surprise, Stalin showed little interest. ‘All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make “good use of it against the Japanese”.’ Stalin, of course, already knew a great deal about the Manhattan Project, and the Soviets had been told by Fuchs in May that a test of the bomb was being planned for July. What Truman and his advisors did not know was that the Soviet Union’s own atomic-bomb project was already well under way, accelerated by the information provided by Fuchs, Greenglass et al.
On the same day that Truman had this strangely muted exchange with Stalin, a directive – drafted by Groves and approved by Marshall and Stimson – was issued to General Carl Spaatz, the new commander of the Strategic Air Forces, which would be responsible for delivering the bomb. The air force, the directive stated, ‘will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.’ Two days later, the Potsdam Declaration was issued, calling for the Japanese to surrender and defining the surrender terms acceptable to the US and the UK, which, on that very day, had a new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee having decisively beaten Churchill in the UK’s general election.
‘The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China,’ the declaration announced, ‘are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan.’ And therefore: ‘We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now that unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.’ Truman instructed Stimson that the directive of 24 July, ordering General Spaatz to deliver the bomb as soon after 3 August as the weather permitted, ‘would stand unless I notified him that the Japanese reply to our ultimatum was acceptable’. On 28 July, Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese government would continue to fight. The official Japanese response was ‘Mokusatsu’, the meaning of which has been much debated by historians. It was interpreted by the US to mean ‘ignore’, but it can also mean ‘treat with silent contempt’. Neither meaning, of course, would constitute a response that Truman was likely to regard as acceptable, and so Japan had now to face the ‘prompt and utter destruction’ promised by the Potsdam Declaration.
At Los Alamos by this time the euphoria of the Trinity test had given way to a sombre mood, as they went about the task of preparing the bomb. In the minds of many was the dreadful realisation that, as Sam Allison put it: ‘They’re going to take this thing and fry hundreds of Japanese!’ The High Noon strut that Rabi had seen in Oppenheimer immediately after Trinity was no longer in evidence. His secretary, Anne Wilson, recalls that he looked depressed rather than triumphant, as if he were thinking: ‘Oh God, what have we done! All this work, and people are going to die in the thousands.’ One day, noticing that Oppenheimer seemed particularly distressed, Wilson asked him what was wrong. He replied: ‘I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.’
On the day of the Trinity test, the Little Boy casing was shipped to Tinian, an island in the western Pacific, south of Japan, from where the US air force had decided the atomic bombing raids would be launched. Soon afterwards the enriched uranium to be placed in the casing was flown out, the final assembly of the bomb to be performed by a team of about sixty people from Los Alamos, including Deak Parsons, Luis Alvarez, Phil Morrison and Robert Serber. For this specific task the scientists were put in uniforms and given ranks: Serber was, to his great pride, made a colonel, Alvarez a lieutenant colonel and all the others captains. Two huts at the air-force base served as ‘laboratories’, one for Little Boy, one for Fat Man.
Which of the four Japanese cities mentioned in the directive to General Spaatz would be the first to be bombed was not decided until a few days before the raid. On 30 July, Spaatz cabled Washington to say that he had heard that Hiroshima was the only one of the four that did not have Allied prisoner-of-war camps. In reply, he received orders that ‘Hiroshima should be given first priority’. That day, the assembly of Little Boy was completed and General Farrell reported to Groves that the mission could be flown the following day, 1 August. This, however, proved to be impossible because of the weather, a typhoon making flying impossible.
The man chosen to pilot the B-29 bomber that would deliver the bomb was Colonel Paul Tibbets, who, on 4 August, after three days of anxious weather-watching, called a briefing for the crews of the seven planes that would be used during the mission (one for the bomb, three for a cloud-cover assessment the day before the drop, two to photograph and observe the bombing, and a seventh as a spare in case the first malfunctioned). The crewmen were astonished when they arrived at the meeting to find the briefing hut surrounded by military policemen armed with rifles. They were even more astonished when Tibbets introduced Deak Parsons, who told them that the bomb they were about to drop was the most destructive weapon ever made. When Parsons had finished, Tibbets took over to tell the men how honoured he and they were to be taking part in a raid that would ‘shorten the war by at least six months’.
The following day, Tibbets named the plane he had chosen to fly after his mother – Enola Gay – and hurriedly found a sign-writer to paint the name in foot-high letters immediately below the pilot’s window. A few hours later, at 2.45 a.m. on 6 August, the newly named Enola Gay set off from Tinian on its way to Hiroshima. Mid-flight, Tibbets announced to the crew that the weapon they were carrying was in fact an atomic bomb. The journey took more than six hours. At 9.14 Tinian time (8.14 a.m. local time), the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima. ‘Fellows,’ Tibbets announced on the Enola Gay’s intercom, ‘you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.’ What the crewmen experienced was a blinding glare, followed by two shock waves so intense they thought they had been hit by heavy guns. After the second shock wave, Tibbets has recalled: ‘We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.’
As they looked back, the crewmen were awestruck to see that where, two minutes earlier there had been a city, there was now what one of them likened to ‘a pot of boiling black oil’. The tail gunner, Robert Caron, had the best view:
I was trying to describe the mushroom, this turbulent mass. I saw fires springing up in different places, like flames shooting up on a bed of coals. I was asked to count them. I said, ‘Count them?’ Hell, I gav
e up when there were about fifteen, they were coming too fast to count. I can still see it – that mushroom and that turbulent mass – it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city, and it seemed to flow outward up into the foothills where the little valleys would come into the plain, with fires starting up all over, so pretty soon it was hard to see anything because of the smoke.
With a yield of 12,500 tons of TNT, the Hiroshima bomb was a good deal less powerful than the Fat Man tested at Trinity. To the people of Hiroshima, however, it was a destructive force the like of which none of them could previously have imagined. The temperature at the hypercentre of the explosion was an inconceivable 5,400ºF, enough to inflict primary burns on everybody within a two-mile radius. But it was not only the heat and power of the blast that terrified and confused the population of the city (estimated to have been about 255,000), but also the instantaneous suddenness of that power. ‘I just could not understand,’ one witness later said, ‘why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant.’ The appalling horror experienced by the inhabitants of Hiroshima was conveyed with searing intensity and vividness by the writer John Hersey in a long article, based on eyewitness accounts, that was published in the New Yorker in August 1946. Indeed, the magazine devoted its entire issue to the piece, something it had never done before and has never done since. It did so on this occasion, the editors explained, ‘in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use’.
The article was a publishing sensation. The issue sold out within hours of publication, the entire text was broadcast on the radio and a book version was rushed out, which became a best-seller. To some extent, Hersey’s account of Hiroshima was a fulfilment of the hope that Bohr had instilled in Oppenheimer and which became, in the absence of a genuine possibility that the Germans would build an atom bomb first, Oppenheimer’s rationale for building the bomb and recommending its use on civilians: the hope, that is, that the shock of seeing just how powerful the bomb was would be so great that the people and governments of the world would demand international cooperation to end war.
Certainly few things could be more shocking than the scenes described, with a restraint that makes them even more powerful, in Hersey’s article. Rather than attempting a synoptic overview of the destruction, Hersey concentrates on the stories of particular individuals, such as the Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who, at the time of the explosion, was helping a friend to move some belongings to a house two miles out of town, where they would be safe from the bombing raids that they, like everyone in Hiroshima, feared and expected to come soon (Hiroshima being the only important city, other than Kyoto, that had thus far not been heavily bombed). Along the way, the two men heard the air siren that warned of the approach of American planes, and then the all-clear that was sounded when it was realised that only three planes were approaching. Then, just outside the house (so about two miles from the centre of the explosion), they saw a tremendous flash of light. Mr Tanimoto dived to the floor. When he stood up again, he saw that his friend’s house had collapsed. He ran into town, thinking he could help people. As he approached the city centre, he passed hundreds of badly burned people fleeing in the opposite direction. There were collapsed buildings, fires and desperate, wounded people everywhere he looked. Wanting to rescue people trapped on sandspits in the river, he took a boat, which had been surrounded by a group of five nearly naked and badly burned men, and began to ferry the wounded away from the fires. At one sandspit Tanimoto saw a group of about twenty men and women, and, writes Hersey:
He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge glovelike pieces.
Many more eyewitness accounts have subsequently been published, confirming and adding to the details in Hersey’s terrifying and horrible account. One man recalls that the streets were full of people whose skin was black and hanging from their bodies. ‘Many of them died along the road – I can still picture them in my mind – like walking ghosts.’ Other horrors described include ‘a woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth’, ‘people with their bowels and brains coming out’, a ‘dead child lying there and another who seemed to be crawling over him in order to run away, both of them burned to blackness’. To one person who saw many such dreadful sights, however, the most shocking experience was of climbing a hill and looking down and seeing ‘that Hiroshima had disappeared . . . Hiroshima didn’t exist – that was mainly what I saw – Hiroshima just didn’t exist’. Almost all the buildings in the city (the official estimate was 70,000 out of 76,000) were damaged or destroyed by the bomb. As for casualties, there has been some dispute, but the best estimate seems to be 135,000, of which 66,000 died and 69,000 were injured. In other words, the casualties amounted to more than half of the total population. Of the people who were 3,000 feet or closer to the centre of the blast, the bomb killed more than 90 per cent.
It would be some weeks before the harrowing details of the suffering inflicted upon the people of Hiroshima were known to the scientists who made it possible. Indeed, it took nearly a day for the bare fact of the bombing to reach most of them. Two notable exceptions were Deak Parsons, who was aboard the Enola Gay during its fateful mission, in order to carry out, mid-flight, the very last stages of assembly, and Luis Alvarez, who was aboard one of the two observation planes that accompanied Enola Gay. The first person to hear the news who was not actually on one of the planes was General Farrell, who was on Tinian island. At about 9.40 a.m. local time – twenty-five minutes after the explosion – Farrell received a radio message from Parsons, who was on the Enola Gay, heading back to Tinian:
Deak to Farrell: Results in all respects clear-cut and successful. Immediate action to carry out further plans [that is, prepare for the second bomb] is recommended. Greater visible effects than at Alamogordo. Target was Hiroshima. Proceeding to Tinian with normal conditions in airplane.
The remark about the visible effects being greater than at the Trinity test gave Farrell the impression that the yield of the bomb was at least 20,000 tons of TNT.
The time difference between Tinian and Washington is fourteen hours, so when the Enola Gay left Tinian at 2.45 a.m. on Monday 6 August, it was 12.45 p.m. on Sunday 5 August in Washington. That morning Groves had arrived at his office to find a cable telling him that take-off was scheduled for that day. He therefore waited for the report of the take-off. By 2 p.m. he had heard nothing, so, to relieve the tension, he went out to play tennis. That evening at 6.45, while having dinner at the Army-Navy Club, he was called to the phone and told that the plane had left on schedule. In fact, this was just half an hour before the bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima, but of course neither Groves nor whoever he spoke to in Tinian would have known that. After dinner, Groves went back to his office to spend the night there, awaiting news from the Pacific. ‘The hours went by,’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘more slowly than I ever imagined hours could go by, and still there was no news.’ At 11.30 p.m. – nearly four hours after the original message – Groves received a copy of the report of the bombing that Parsons had sent to Farrell from the Enola Gay. After he received this message, Groves remembers, ‘I went to sleep on the cot that had been brought into my office, after telling the Duty Officer to call me when the next message came in.’
At about 3 p.m. local time on 6 August (1 a.m. in Washington), the Enola Gay returned to Tinian. It arrived in triumph, with 200 or more soldiers, technicians and scientists there to greet it and cheer the crew. General Spaatz was there to pin the Distinguished Service Cross on the breast of Colonel Tibbets’s overalls. Afterwards, in the briefing room, Parsons was awarded the Silver Star. Four and a half hours later, Groves was awakened to be told that a cable had arrived from General Farrell, reporting
‘additional information furnished by Parsons, crews, and observers on return to Tinian’. Parsons and other observers, Farrell reported, ‘felt this strike was tremendous and awesome even in comparison with New Mexico test’.
President Truman had not yet arrived back in the States from the Potsdam conference. He heard the news midway across the Atlantic Ocean on board the USS Augusta. As he tells the story in his Memoirs: ‘I was eating lunch with members of the Augusta’s crew when Captain Frank Graham, White House Map Room watch officer, handed me the following message’:
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.
‘I was greatly moved,’ Truman writes. ‘I telephoned Byrnes aboard ship to give him the news and then said to the group of sailors around me, “This is the greatest thing in history. It’s time for us to get home.”’
In Truman’s absence, it fell to Groves, with the assistance of William L. Laurence, the New York Times journalist whom he had invited to witness Trinity, to prepare a statement about the bombing. The announcement, read out by the President’s press secretary, was made at 11 a.m., Washington time. Containing, as it did, the first public acknowledgement of the atomic-bomb project, it had a sensational impact throughout the world. ‘Sixteen hours ago,’ it began:
an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT . . . It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.