On 3 August Tibbets received the formal targeting order. The operation was to be code-named "Centerboard," and Hiroshima was the primary target; if it was covered with clouds, the secondary target was Kokura, with Nagasaki as the fallback.
The main briefing for the crews of the seven Super Fortresses to take part in the operation was held on 4 August. Many smoked cigarettes nervously as in the afternoon heat they filed into a tin hut with closed curtains and under armed guard. According to one of those present, "It was so hot and sticky just breathing was difficult." Soon everyone was wet with perspiration. Deak Parsons was flying on the raid as senior weapons officer. Pale and tight-lipped and pausing frequently to wipe the sweat from his brow and bald head, he gave the lead presentation. He spoke slowly and softly: "The bomb you are going to drop is something new in the history of warfare. It is the most destructive weapon ever devised." He paused and cleared his throat. "We think it will wipe out almost everything within a three mile area, maybe slightly more, maybe slightly less." Next he showed a film of the Trinity test.
Afterward Parsons told his visibly stunned audience that no one knew what the exact effect of such a bomb dropped from the air would be; it had never been done. However, a flash of light much brighter than the sun was expected, against which crews would need to protect their eyes. For that purpose he distributed sets of goggles like those wrorn by welders. They had adjustable lenses, and the crews were told to switch them to the darkest setting. Paul Tibbets told the crews that "he was personally honored, and he was sure all of us wrere, to have been chosen to take part in this raid wrhich, he said—and all the other bigwigs nodded when he said it—would shorten the war by six months." Everyone was told, "No talking . . . no talking, even among yourselves. Loose lips sink ships. Be quiet. Say nothing. And over again, each phrase half a dozen times. And no letters. No writing home. Not to anyone, our wives, our mothers. . . . The newrs, when it was released wrould come from Washington, from President Truman himself."
Neither Tibbets, Parsons, nor anyone else mentioned the word nuclear or atomic in connection with the bomb. A subdued Leonard Cheshire and William Penney sat at the back, excluded at this late stage from taking part as observers almost certainly by General Groves, who wanted the first use of the atomic bomb to be an all-American affair.
Deak Parsons had seen a number of bombers crash and burn on Tinian's runways on takeoff. On 5 August, the day before the scheduled first mission, he decided it would be unwise to arm the bomb until the aircraft was in flight in case it exploded in a crash on takeoff and destroyed the island and the twenty thousand service personnel on it. A similar proposal had previously been rejected by General Groves. Although Parsons consulted Groves's deputy, General Farrell, the senior Manhattan Project officer on Tinian, who agreed that the bomb should be armed in flight, neither informed Groves of the change of plan. Groves later wrote, "They just didn't have the nerve that was required, that was all. There had been quite a few crashes, but after all we had probably the best pilot in the air force, Colonel Tibbets. . . . If I had known about it in advance they would have had a very positive order over there." Parsons practiced the necessary maneuvers in the bomb bay, cutting his hands as he worked in the restricted space amid much sharp metal, but was able to satisfy himself that he could arm the bomb in flight.
On the afternoon of 5 August, in what to Leonard Cheshire resembled "a military funeral cortege," a tractor moved Little Boy, painted a dull gunmetal gray, on a trailer covered with a tarpaulin under armed guard from the technical area to be winched aboard Tibbets's plane. Several messages to the Japanese had been scrawled on the bomb's casing, including one of vengeance for those lost on the Indianapolis. Like the bomb, the plane had gained a name—Enola Gay—after Tibbets's mother's first names. He had consulted some of his crew but not Bob Lewis. Lewis had flown the plane much of the time in training and on 4 August had had the difficult task of telling his regular bombardier and navigator that they had to make way for Thomas Ferebee and "Dutch" Van Kirk respectively. When a day later he saw the name Enola Gay freshly painted on the plane he was, he recalled, "very angry" and confronted Tibbets, but the name stayed. Less controversially, Tibbets had also had the arrow on the tail fin noted by Tokyo Rose painted over so that Enola Gay no longer looked any different from any other plane on the base. A little later the Los Alamos scientific team was ordered to move to another part of the island in case of an accident on takeoff. Knowing the power of the bomb, they realized how futile this would be and stayed put.
During the evening, the crew made their personal preparations. Some prayed or, if Catholics, went to confession. Others, including Ferebee, played poker and blackjack. Whatever else they did, most ate. Tibbets shared several plates of his favorite pineapple fritters with Van Kirk and Ferebee. However, he did not share with them that in his pocket he had a tin of cyanide capsules so that he and the crew could, if necessary, choose to die rather than face capture and torture. Tibbets, whose own "tightly wound nerves vetoed the idea" of sleep, held a short final briefing around midnight, at which the Lutheran chaplain said a special prayer. Included were the words "Guard and protect them. . . . May they as well as we, know thy strength and power, and armed with thy might bring this war to a rapid end." Jacob Beser, who was Jewish, reflected that in his religion it was more usual to give thanks after coming through than "to ask a special favor beforehand."
One of the crew of the plane that would carry the scientific monitoring equipment remembered how the last hours felt: "It's a little difficult to explain the emotions experienced just before a mission, when you know you're going and at what time and how far it is and what opposition is expected and when, (if of course, always if although you never admit that, even to yourself, especially to yourself) you'll return. It's a little like going to the dentist's office. Once you've made the date, you relax a little. . . . You know it's just a matter of sweating out the patients ahead of you, and you can't (or won't) run away; everything's set. It's irrevocable, and you accept it."
Bob Caron, the Enola Gay's rear gunner, recalled: "It was about i a.m. . . . when we piled out of the trucks that drove us to the flight line. The Enola Gay was bathed in a flood of lights and the hardstand looked like a Hollywood movie set. A crowd was on hand, consisting of military brass, other interested military personnel, and some civilians whom we knew to be scientists. Cameramen—still and newsreel—seemed to be everywhere. Frequently our preparations for take-off were interrupted to have our pictures taken. Even the photographers did not know why they were taking pictures; they were just following orders. I recall wondering whether we were being photographed for historical interest—or because they didn't think we were coming back."
After some time and many photographs, the crew climbed the ladder into the plane and strapped themselves in. Caron took his place in the tail turret, not for fear of attack, but rather because "there was a marginally better chance of survival in the tail" in the event of a crash on takeoff. At 2:4.1; a.m. Tibbets let go of the brakes and opened the throttles. Enola Gay moved down the mile-and-a-half-long chopped-coral runway lined by fire and rescue vessels. Loaded with the 9,700-pound Little Boy and the 7,000 gallons of aviation fuel necessary for the long flight, Enola Gay weighed about sixty-five tons, around seven tons more than the usual takeoff weight for a B-29. Consequently, she picked up speed only slowly. To those on the ground, it seemed that Tibbets was never going to pull back the stick and take off. It seemed so too to Bob Lewis, who, from the adjacent copilot's seat, urged Tibbets to lift off. But Tibbets wanted maximum speed to lift his heavy load with a "cushion of safety in case we lost an engine at this moment of maximum strain." Tibbets was, in his words, "little more than ioo feet from the end of the pavement" when he eased Enola Gay from the ground safely and steadily into her climb before she vanished from the view of onlookers into the velvet northern sky.
TWENTY-FOUR
"IT'S HIROSHIMA"
TEN MINUTES AFTER TAKEOFF, the Enola Gay
was passing over Saipan and, flying at an airspeed of 213 knots (247 mph), was climbing to 4,700 feet, the initial cruising altitude for the first leg of the six-hour journey—three hours north-northwest to Iwo Jima.
Two minutes earlier, at about the time rear gunner Bob Caron tested his guns, Parsons and his assistant, Morris Jeppson, had, after securing Tibbets's permission, made their way to the bomb bay. Parsons climbed down through the hatch in the floor, squeezing himself into the small place behind Little Boy's tail to begin his delicate task of arming the bomb. Using only wrenches and a screwdriver, he had to remove a series of protective shields and then insert an explosive charge. When triggered, the charge would propel a slug of uranium down the gun barrel into the uranium rings fitted into the nose of the weapon to achieve the critical mass necessary to begin the explosive chain reaction.
While Jeppson shone a torch from above, Parsons worked quickly in the confined, cold, and unpressurized space of the bomb bay, trying not to cut himself on the sharp steel casings, as he had done in practice. As Parsons worked, Jeppson used the intercom to tell Tibbets of his progress, and Tibbets, in turn, informed Tinian over his low-frequency radio. Only twenty-five minutes after starting, Jeppson reported the task complete. Because of static interference, Tibbets could not get this final message through to Tinian, but, he recalled, "Progress was such by this time, they had no doubts of Parsons' success."
Parsons left three green safety plugs in position. He would have to replace them later with three red arming plugs to unlock the weapon's fusing circuits, which he would carefully monitor using a bank of electronic equipment. The detonation of the live bomb would then depend on a series of triggers. The primary one was a kind of proximity fuse, a simple radar unit built into the bomb which closed a switch, firing the explosive charge when the bomb fell to a predetermined height of some two thousand feet above ground.* The second was backup clocks activated mechanically on the bomb's release and preventing detonation for at least fifteen seconds after that time. Finally, there was a barometric pressure switch, which would not close until the air pressure had increased to that found at a maximum of seven thousand feet above ground. Both the backup systems would give some protection to the aircraft if the primary system were to be activated too early for any reason. All three triggering systems contained duplicates to overcome an individual instrument failure.
The Enola Gay
Tibbets checked with the plane carrying the scientists and their instruments and then with the photographic plane. Receiving confirmation that all was well aboard them, he made a quick tour of inspection of the Enola Gay, crawling back along the communication tunnel to talk to Caron and others. Satisfied that all was in order, and "having had little sleep in the past forty-eight hours," he sensed he was "operating on nervous energy alone" and so, making himself as comfortable in his seat as he could with the help of his life jacket and parachute pack, he dozed for about an hour. Copilot Bob Lewis took a bite to eat while he kept an eye on the green-lit instrument panel and on the automatic pilot known in this and in other aircraft as "George."
Soon Iwo Jima was in sight, and, according to the official log, they reached it at c: cc a.m. Tinian time. In the pink light of dawn Tibbets circled the island's highest peak, Mount Suribachi, at 9,300 feet so that his instrument and photographic planes could take closer formation.
As they left Iwo Jima at 6:07 a.m., there were still three prospective targets: the primary target, Hiroshima, and the secondaries, Kokura and Nagasaki. The final choice would depend on reports from the three weather planes that had taken off from Tinian about an hour earlier than the Enola Gay, each assigned to a particular city. At 7:30 a.m. Deak Parsons and Jeppson made their way back to the bomb bay and carefully removed each of the green safety plugs, substituting the red plugs that activated Little Boy's internal batteries. Bob Lewis, who was keeping some authorized notes for a New York Times journalist, wrote, "The bomb is now alive. It is a funny feeling knowing it is right in back of you. Knock wood." He worried that if they hit bad weather or turbulence, the bomb might detonate. Tibbets calmed himself by smoking his pipe "with," in his words, "a little more intensity than usual" as the Enola Gay climbed slowly to the bombing altitude of 30,700 feet.
At just after eight o'clock Tinian time—seven o'clock Japanese time—the weather plane assigned to Hiroshima, Straight Flush, piloted by Claude Eatherly, made a run toward the city. The plane approached, bumping through cloud cover, but then, directly over the city, came a large break in the clouds through which shafts of sunlight illuminated Hiroshima. At his request, Eatherly's radioman sent a signal consisting of the numbers and letters Q53, B-2, C-l. Aboard Enola Gay, the young radio operator Dick Nelson picked the transmission up, decoded it, and reported the result to Tibbets. The cloud cover at all altitudes was less than three-tenths. "Advice to bomb the primary target." Tibbets recalled, "Over the intercom I gave the word to members of our crew, 'It's Hiroshima.'"
Soon the Enola Gay crossed the first of the Japanese islands. Deak Parsons tested the bomb's electrical circuits with his instrument console yet j one more time. Jacob Beser reported that he could detect no Japanese radio countermeasures. Tibbets recalled, "We were eight minutes away from the scheduled time of bomb release when the city came into view. The early morning sunlight glistened off the white buildings in the distance." Tibbets reached the initial point of the bomb run. Surrounded by plexiglass panels in the exposed nose of the plane, Tom Ferebee crouched over the bombsight as Tibbets began the three-minute bomb run. There was no antiaircraft fire. Soon the aiming point—the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the central Salugakucho district—was clearly visible in Ferebee's bombsight. The bombardier activated a sixty-second radio tone to alert the Enola Gay's crew and the two accompanying planes to the imminent release of the bomb. Bob Lewis scrawded on his notepad, "There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target." Tibbets remembered that at the end of the tone, at 9: i £ Tinian time and 8:15 local time in Hiroshima, the bomb doors opened automatically and "out tumbled Little Boy." Tibbets immediately pushed the Enola Gay into the 1 cc-degree turn required to take her to safety. Bob Caron recalled, "The manoeuvre felt like being on the cyclone rollercoaster ride at the Coney Island amusement park."
In making the diving turn, the plane lost 1,700 feet in height. Tibbets was focusing so hard on the controls that the flash of the explosion did not have the effect he expected, but at the instant of the blast he had "a tingling sensation in my mouth and the very definite taste of lead upon my tongue." According to Tibbets, scientists later told him that this was caused by an interaction between the fillings in his teeth and the radiation released by the bomb.
Among the Enola Gay's crew, only Bob Caron, holding a camera alone in his tail turret as the plane raced away, sawr the explosion direct—bright even through the very dark goggles Tibbets had ordered him to don, like the rest of the crew, a minute before the attack. He saw7 the shock wave develop and seemingly rise toward the Enola Gay as if "the ring around some distant planet had detached itself and was coming up towards us." He yelled to warn the pilots. As he did so, the shock wave engulfed the Enola Gay, throwing her about and creating a massive noise. Both Ferebee and Tibbets thought the effect was that of an antiaircraft shell exploding, while Lewis compared the shock to a giant striking the plane with a telephone pole.
Almost immediately, Caron saw another wave approach. This wave was the reflection of the first from the ground, and its impact was less dramatic but still sufficiently violent to propel Dick Nelson half out of his seat. Once the second wave had passed, the air grew still once more, and Tibbets circled the stricken city as Caron photographed the mushroom cloud, which seemed to rise sixty thousand feet into the air. Tibbets asked Beser to take around to each man a portable wire recorder he had been given and to ask them to record their impressions.
The recordings have been lost, but to Bob Caron it was "beautifully horrible." He recollected his description in the following words: "A co
lumn of smoke rising fast. It has a fiery red core. A bubbling mass, purple-grey in color, with that red core. It's all turbulent. Fires are springing up everywhere. Like flames shooting out of a huge bed of coals. I am starting to count the fires. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . fourteen, fifteen. . . . It's impossible. There are too many to count. Here it comes, the mushroom shape that Captain Parsons spoke about. It's coming this way. It's like a mass of bubbling molasses. The mushroom is spreading out. It's maybe a mile or two wide and half a mile high. It's growing up and up and up. It's nearly level with us and climbing. It's very black, but there's a purplish tint to the cloud. The base of the mushroom looks like a heavy undercast that is shot through with flames. The city must be below that. The flames and smoke are billowing out, whirling out into the foothills. The hills are disappearing under the smoke." Beser himself recorded, "What a relief it worked." Lewis wrote on his notepad, "My God, wrhat have we done?"
Before the Fallout Page 37