In subsequent months, Fuchs handed over further details, including a sketch of the bomb. His reports, in conjunction with details about high-explosive lenses supplied by the machinist David Greenglass, who was busily casting the explosives to be used in the lenses, were welcomed in Moscow as "extremely excellent and very valuable." They convinced Kurchatov to recommend to Stalin that the Russians too should pursue an implosion plutonium bomb. Fuchs also told Gold that if the testing of the plutonium bomb was successful, there were plans to drop it on Japan.
· · ·
Japan's own nuclear program was struggling. Yoshio Nishina had reported to the Imperial Navy the scientists' conclusions that although an atomic bomb was feasible, it might take ten years to build and would require immense resources. After a series of meetings culminating in March 1943, about which the naval representative reported that the more the scientists debated the issue, "the more pessimistic became the atmosphere," the navy, unsurprisingly, lost interest. Instead, they asked the scientists to focus on shorter-term projects such as radar.
However, just as the navy had taken the lead when the army's commitment to nuclear research had waned, so, in May 1943, the army intervened to fill the nuclear vacuum. It decided to subsidize what it called the "N-Project," in tribute to Nishina, and left it to him to decide howr best to direct his research. He decided to focus the work of his group at Tokyo University on the separation of the fissile U-235 from U-238 by the use of thermal diffusion. However, he made slow progress, and it was only with great difficulty that his group manufactured small quantities of uranium hexafluoride gas. In July 1944 they made their first attempts at isotope separation using a thermal diffusion column, wherein they hoped the effect of heat would separate the U-238 in the hexafluoride gas from the U-238. The lighter U-235 would rise to the top of the column, and the heavier U-238 would fall to the bottom. Yet however hard they tried and whatever modifications they made, Nishina and his team could not get the apparatus to work.
Japan's military situation had also not prospered. Two years earlier, on £ June 1942, it had suffered its first major reverse when an attack by a large Japanese carrier task force on Midway Island, a stepping-stone to the planned conquest of Hawaii, was beaten back by American naval airpower. Japan lost 332 aircraft and four aircraft carriers, three of which had taken part in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although the United States had also suffered losses, its industrial power had allowed it to replace them much more easily than Japan. Japanese expansion had reached its high-water mark, and slowdy the Allies began to push back its armies in the Pacific, in New Guinea, and on the frontiers of India. In April 1943 the naval commander in chief, Isoroku Yam-amoto, had died when the aircraft on which he was traveling on an inspection visit was shot down in the South Pacific by an American fighter as a result of an intercepted and decoded message.
In July 1944, U.S. marines took Saipan. Thirty thousand Japanese troops and fifteen thousand Japanese civilians died, many by their own hands to avoid capture. Tinian fell quickly thereafter. Saipan was the first piece of what had been Japanese territory before the war to be lost. The Japanese did not admit the loss until twelve days later when they praised the garrison, which had "fought victoriously to the last man." Tokyo Radio then continued, on behalf of the government, "The American occupation of Saipan brings Japan within the range of American bombers but we have made the necessary preparations."
That summer, the cinemas began to show a newsreel entitled The Divine Wind Special Attack Forces Take Off, glorifying the first kamikaze pilots as, before their one-way missions, the young suicide bombers vowed fealty to their emperor and, smiling, climbed into their cockpits. The "divine wind," or "kamikaze," was a reference to the winds said to have been sent by the deities to protect their favored country, Japan, at critical times in its history. In particular, in 1281 the "divine wind" had destroyed an invading Mongol fleet.
In Hiroshima, neighborhood associations began to organize air-raid drills and to give guidance on rallying areas in the case of attack. The associations distributed little brown-and-white pottery cups with bracing inscriptions such as "Neighborhoods unite and resist." Those whom neighborhood leaders observed or overheard engaging in defeatist talk or activity were reported to the feared secret police—the Kempei-Tei, based in Hiroshima castle. Schoolchildren of thirteen years and older had already been conscripted to work for up to eight hours a day in weapons factories. Now, in their spare time, they were ordered to dig trench shelters in hillsides surrounding the city as protection against the bombers. Everyone, young and old, male and female, had to drill with bamboo spears.
The Japanese Steel Products Group organized a conference in Hiroshima to encourage increased productivity to retaliate against the Anglo-Americans. "The beasts are desperate, we must strike back," the workers were warned. However, lack of the very raw materials, such as oil and iron ore, that the Japanese had gone to war to obtain meant that there were no longer private cars or taxis, only trams or bicycles. There were few trucks and much less shipping in the harbor. Nearly 80 percent of the Japanese merchant fleet had been lost, as had nearly 5o percent of Japanese naval tonnage. Lack of steel meant that replacements for the merchantmen were being made of wood. Lack of fuel meant that pilots received less training and that the coastal patrol boats were almost invariably in Hiroshima Harbor rather than at sea. Lack of fuel, coupled with American attacks on the few fishing trawlers that did find enough to sail, also meant that fish—a staple of the Japanese diet—was becoming scarcer.
Fish, like other food, was tightly rationed and "canned" in patent earthern-ware jars to save metal. In a single week the ration for a family might be a cake of bean curd, one sardine or small mackerel, two Chinese cabbages, five carrots, four eggplants, half a pumpkin, and a little rice. Most meals consisted mainly of watery soup with a few vegetable shreds. The citizens grew and collected what extra food they could. Schoolchildren, digging the shelters on the hills, brought back the excavated earth, which they laid in layers on flat roofs or piled in old containers to grow vegetables such as sweet yams. Bramble shoots were stripped of their prickles and chewed. Reeds from the city's rivers were boiled and eaten. Anyone who had the opportunity to leave the city took a heavy stick with them so that they could hunt down the few remaining wild rabbits. Their meat was a tasty supplement to the diet, and their fur was collected by the neighborhood associations for use in lining pilots' flying jackets. When the rabbits were gone, worms, grubs, and insects were spitted and barbecued over such small fires as the shortages of coal and coke allowed.
Necessities such as real soap and toothpaste were available only on the black market, and there were continual reminders of severe penalties for those trading there. Most people made do with an ersatz soap of rice-bran and caustic soda, and with a gritty, salty paste for their teeth. Now that the Japanese forces had mainly departed for overseas and their return was largely prevented by Allied aircraft and submarines, there was little trade for the kimono-clad prostitutes collected in Hiroshima's red-light districts' "houses of joy." Their few customers were asked to pay in food, not cash.
* After the war, as the gaseous diffusion technique was perfected, it would replace electromagnetic separation—rejected as too costly and cumbersome for mass production—and become the sole technique used by the United States. In 1991 Western scientists were surprised by evidence that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was attempting to build a bomb using "old-fashioned" electromagnetism.
*The scale of experiments on humans came to light in 1996 in a report by the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Describing tests on some fifty people, the report concluded that "patient subjects . . . were never told that the injections were part of a medical experiment for which there was no expectation that they [would] benefit, and [to which] they never consented."
TWENTY
"THIS THING IS GOING
TO BE VERY BIG"
ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1944, on a U.S. Air F
orce base in New Mexico, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets climbed into the pilot seat of one of the new B-29 Super Fortresses, the world's first pressurized bomber, which had been designed for long-range conventional bombing attacks against Japan.* His destination was Colorado Springs. The twenty-nine-year-old had taken his first flight seventeen years earlier in Florida. At that time pilots were hired to make low advertising runs over public gatherings, and a barnstormer had taken the eager eleven-year-old aloft with him to rain promotional chocolate bars on the crowds on the local racecourse. This, the greatest thrill of young Tibbets's life, inspired him with the wish to fly, and in 1937 he joined the U.S. Air Corps. After the United States' entry into the war, he had flown twenty-five combat operations in a B-17 Flying Fortress over occupied Europe and North Africa. In so doing, he had acquired a high reputation as an excellent and unflappable pilot before returning to the United States to spend nearly a year as one of the test pilots for the Super Fortress.
That day in Colorado began with a grilling from a security officer about his personal life. Tibbets began to suspect that the possible new assignment, which was the subject of his visit, was "considerably more important than I had imagined." The last question was whether he had ever been arrested. Tibbets confessed that when he was nineteen, a nosy policeman had interrupted what Tibbets called "a love-making episode" in a parked car on "a secluded beach in Florida." With this confession Tibbets satisfied the security officer, who identified himself as Colonel Lansdale. Lansdale took Tibbets to meet another group of men, including Deak Parsons, who was introduced as an explosives expert. One of the men asked Tibbets whether he had ever heard of atomic energy and then went on to tell him that "the United States has now split an atom. We are making a bomb based on that. The bomb will be so powerful that it will explode with a force of 20,000 tons of conventional high explosive." Tibbets had been chosen to command the air force operation to drop the bomb. He was told that although it had the potential to end the war, the weapon was an unknown quantity that might not be ready for twelve months. If it exploded successfully, the bomber might suffer structural damage or even be thrown out of control, unless it put at least eight miles between itself and the explosion.
It would be up to Tibbets to lead a team to modify the B-29 aircraft to carry the bomb, which might weigh as much as ten thousand pounds, and to develop tactics for the operation. He would be given the 393rd Bomb Squadron as an operating nucleus but should recruit other men as he thought necessary. Tibbets was given a choice of three remote locations as his base. He chose Wendover Field in Utah, "only" 125 miles from Salt Lake City and "surrounded by miles and miles of salt flats" in a "virtually uninhabited" part of the state. It was, however, within easy flying distance of Los Alamos and of suitable test-bombing ranges.
The next stage in Tibbets's briefing included a meeting with General Groves, whom he described as "of bulldozering efficiency." Tibbets summed up his own position as he began his task as "we would be organized for the purpose of dropping a bomb that hadn't been built on a target that hadn't been chosen."
Undaunted, Tibbets recruited further personnel. A key choice was that of Major Thomas Ferebee, a farmer's son from North Carolina, as his bombardier. They had flown in the same crew in Europe, and together they co-opted others from their previous crews. In particular, from their European tour of duty, they chose navigator Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, tail-gunner Staff Sergeant George "Bob" Caron, and flight engineer Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenberg, and from Tibbets's B-29 testing days, pilot Robert Lewis from New Jersey. Among those from 393rd Bomb Squadron whom Tibbets chose to involve closely in the project was the squadron radio officer Jacob Beser.
Beser had enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and had secured some of the top marks in his training class. He would be responsible for the sophisticated radio and electronic equipment being developed to forestall any Japanese attempt to detonate the bomb prematurely or confuse the aircraft's navigational systems. On 19 September 1944 he was at Los Alamos with Tibbets, being given further details of the project. To Beser it was "the most fantastic day in my life" being introduced to scientists such as Bethe and Oppenheimer and learning the importance of the work in which he was engaged. Leaving the offices for the guest house in the late evening, he took a wrong turn and walked straight into Oppenheimer's quarters, where he found his wife, Kitty, alone and stark naked lying on a sofa sipping a cocktail. Considerably less embarrassed than Beser, she gave him directions and continued with her drink.
As he made further visits to Los Alamos, Tibbets became increasingly at ease with the scientists, recalling, "Although some did indeed have their heads in the clouds, others had the same interests as the normal everyday citizen." He was particularly impressed by Oppenheimer, whom he thought "unpretentious . . . highly-nervous," and so able he could do at least three things at once. Tibbets remembered how Oppenheimer once glanced into a room and saw a puzzled scientist staring at a blackboard covered in scribbled formulae. After going a few steps farther, Oppenheimer turned back, entered the room, erased a few numbers from the board, inserted some more, and left the scientist exclaiming, "My God, how did you do it? I've been looking for that mistake for three days."
General Groves had some private reservations that Tibbets was "too young" for the job, and he was unconvinced of his abilities as a commander, as distinct from those as a pilot. He therefore took particular care to impress Tibbets with the need for strict security and provided him with a security group of about thirty men, led by Major William "Bud" Umana. His job, according to Tibbets, was "literally to spy on our people to be sure there was no information leak." In addition to monitoring mail and phone calls and eavesdropping, Umana went so far as to deploy his men as agents provocateurs. They accosted airmen as they left the Wendover Field for leave, asking seemingly innocent questions about the base's work. Those who blabbed always received a severe dressing-down from Tibbets and often a posting to Alaska.
Among Tibbets's first tasks was to supervise modifications to the B-29S chosen to carry the atomic bombs.* The modifications were code-named "silver-plate" and were accorded the highest priority by material command. To allow the aircraft to fly higher than the limit of about thirty thousand feet that antiaircraft flak could reach, and to provide extra speed to outrun enemy fighters, Tibbets ordered all the guns except the two twenty-millimeter cannon in the tail turret, as well as the armor plating, to be stripped from the planes. By so doing, he saved seven thousand pounds in weight and achieved his goals of increased height and speed.
The B-29's two bomb bays had already been turned into one, and two twenty-seven-foot pneumatically operated bomb doors replaced the four twelve-foot ones. Bomb hooks of the type used to hold the largest conventional bombs—the British Lancaster's ten-thousand-pound "Tallboys"—were then installed to hold the atomic bombs in the enlarged bay.
Tibbets specified to his pilots how best to make the 15-degree diving turn he thought necessary after they had released the bomb to get them away from the much-feared shock wave. He had carefully worked out that the bomb would take only forty-three seconds to fall from thirty-one thousand feet to its explosion height of around two thousand feet. The shock wave would take about forty seconds to travel eight miles, the minimum distance at which the plane was advised to meet the wave. However, the B-29 would need two minutes, not one minute twenty-three seconds, to fly eight miles, so the sharp diving turn was necessary to pull the plane eight miles diagonally from the detonation before the wave struck. (The plane was fastest in a dive.)
Paul Tibbets (standing seventh from left) and the 509th Composite Group
Tibbets then moved his crews on to practice bombing using casings simulating the likely shape of the atomic bomb. Tibbets tried to hide his frustration as the scientists regularly varied the weight and shape, seemingly oblivious to the impact on the performance of the plane and the mode of delivery.
In December 1944 Tibbets's command was redesignated the 509th Composite Group
to reflect that, in addition to the 393rd Bomb Squadron's B-29S, it contained a scientific group and other elements to make it self-sufficient in communications and supply. In January 1945 many of Tibbets's planes flew down to Cuba for four weeks to continue their training from Batista Field, twelve miles from Havana. In the better weather of the Caribbean they could practice long flights over water and the transition from flying over water to over land, which would be important on approaching enemy coasts. In March Captain Deak Parsons visited Wendover to give Tibbets his first briefing on the detailed mechanics of the bomb and its fusing. The premature explosion of a dummy unit carrying only a small amount of black powder did not improve the crew's feelings about the safety of their mission.
At the end of June 194 c, reequipped with new, stripped-down planes with improvements such as fuel-injection engines and reversible-pitch propellers to replace the older models worn out by months of testing, the group took off for the Pacific. Their destination was the airfield on Tinian, one of the northern Mariana Islands. Captured by U.S. marines less than a year earlier, the field was only thirteen hundred miles from Japan.
Tibbets had had the rare privilege of choosing his own aircraft off the assembly line at Omaha, Nebraska, on 9 May, the day after the German surrender. A foreman assured him that the workmen had been so careful to check and recheck everything that "even the screws on the toilet seat were given an extra turn."
On 27 June Robert Lewis piloted Tibbets's as yet unnamed plane to Tinian. Tibbets, Ferebee, and Van Kirk, as commander, group bombardier, and group navigator, were not with him, as they did not fly frequently themselves, though when they did, it was nearly always with Lewis. A nineteen-year-old radio operator named Richard Nelson had joined Lewis's crew at the end of April. He was both thrilled and scared when Lewis buzzed the Wendover base in a hair-raising good-bye gesture.
Before the Fallout Page 32