The planes reached Hamilton Field, San Francisco, without incident. A new team of agents then escorted the crate, cylinder, Furman, and Nolan to their next means of transport—a heavy cruiser whose recent battle scars, earned at Okinawa, were hidden under a fresh coat of paint. It was the Indianapolis.
A few hours after Dulles made his plans to travel to Potsdam, in Wendover Paul Tibbets watched a transport plane make its final approach. It descended over the salt flats, banked to avoid the town, and then touched down, rolling past the three B-29s still on the base.
How long the bombers would remain there depended on the news the transport brought. The plane carried a Manhattan Project courier who shuttled between Washington, Wendover, and Los Alamos carrying instructions too secret to be delivered by other means.
The courier brought news that part of the atomic bomb had been delivered to the Indianapolis. The other part—the uranium 235 “target,” the lump of uranium that would be placed at the muzzle end of the gun inside the bomb—was to be flown to Tinian by the crews still at Wendover.
The operation was code-named “Bronx Shipments.” Tibbets often wondered who invented the endless cover names that were given everybody and everything associated with the project. He was still surprised each time Groves came on the telephone with the words, “This is ‘Relief,’ ” or when Ashworth announced himself as “Scathe,” sometimes bringing news from the “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture,” the pseudonym given to one of the scientists working on the plutonium bomb.
Today’s memo confirmed a recent one from “Judge” (Captain Parsons) giving details of how the “target” for “Little Boy” (the uranium bomb) should travel to “Destination” (Tinian). “Little Boy” was just one of a variety of names for the bomb. It was also known as “the gadget,” “the device,” “the gimmick” (an expression Tibbets favored), “the beast” (often used by scientists now critical of the project), “S-1” (preferred by Stimson), and “it” (used by the 509th, still mystified about what, exactly, the weapon was).
Groves had originally called the uranium bomb “Thin Man,” after Roosevelt. When it was found necessary to shorten the bomb’s gun barrel, Groves renamed it “Little Boy.” The plutonium bomb, from its conception, was known as “Fat Man,” after Churchill.
Work in Britain on the bomb was hidden under the guise of “The Directorate of Tube Alloys.”
To keep track of who was who and what was what in the codified world of the Manhattan Project was hard even for the retentive memory Tibbets possessed.
But these instructions were clear enough. One of the B-29s at Wendover was to carry certain of the remaining bomb parts to Tinian; others would travel on board C-54 transport planes of the 509th.
Tibbets assigned crews for the flights and then prepared to travel to Alamogordo for the test-firing of the Fat Man.
Packed and just about to leave for New Mexico, he received an unexpected and urgent message from Tinian. It was signed by Ferebee, the one man above all others in the 509th whose judgment in all matters Tibbets trusted. The easygoing bombardier, who had just arrived on Tinian, was not a man to press the panic button. Yet there was no mistaking the gravity of Ferebee’s words urging Tibbets to fly at once to Tinian to deal with a major crisis. It looked as if the 509th were going to be dumped from the atomic bomb ticket.
Pausing only to send a coded message to Groves that he would not be at Alamogordo, Tibbets set off on the fifty-five-hundred-mile flight to Tinian. He had not spent the past ten months working himself to the bone, sacrificing his family life, his leisure, and his friendships only to have someone snatch the atomic mission from him at the last moment.
8
Using for illumination the jagged shafts of lightning that intermittently broke through the pitch-blackness before dawn on this chilly July 16 morning, many of the 425 scientists and technicians gathered at the test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico, carefully rubbed sun lotion on their faces and hands. Though some of them were twenty miles away from its source, they feared the flash, when it came, might cause instant sunburn. But that could be the least harmful of its side effects. They all knew the radioactive fallout accompanying the flash could kill. If it reached them, no lotion or potion could prevent them from being contaminated.
And since nobody knew for certain what the outer limits of an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction were, it was conceivable the destruction could spread beyond this semidesert area, which Groves and the scientists called Site S, and the natives called Jornada del Muerto, the “tract of death.” Even those scientists who, along with Groves, believed that the world’s first atomic explosion would not spread too far, shared a feeling of taking a huge leap into the unknown.
Nine miles from the base camp where Groves and Oppenheimer spent most of these early-morning hours, the plutonium bomb stood on a one-hundred-foot-high structural-steel scaffold. This point in the desert was code-named “Ground Zero.”
In mid-May, when the tower was still under construction, the air force had bombed the site, mistakenly believing the area to be part of a practice target range. Two buildings had been hit and fires started, but, miraculously, there had been no casualties. Then, a few days ago, during a rehearsal using a conventional bomb, a bolt of forked lightning had struck the tower and detonated the explosive. Again, no one had been hurt.
Now, with the test scheduled for 2:00 A.M., everyone hoped there would be no further mishaps. But the weather was getting worse. Lightning was accompanied by showers. Sporadic rain could be a serious danger, causing shorts in the electrical circuits leading to the bomb; heavy rain could prevent the test-firing altogether.
It was one more worry for Groves, already concerned that Tibbets was not at Alamogordo. And because of the weather, the B-29 Tibbets had ordered to be in the air at the time of the explosion was grounded. Now there was no way of knowing what effect the bomb would have on the airplane that would drop it over Japan.
Groves was further distressed by the way some of the scientists were trying to pressure Oppenheimer to postpone the test. The brilliant physicist was now wound up “like the spring in a very expensive watch.”
Groves decided to cast himself in the unusual role of the man who would dispel the tension. Clutching his scientific director firmly by the arm, the project chief marched him up and down around the base camp area, assuring him that the weather would improve. In Groves’s opinion:
All the personnel had been brought up to such a peak of tension and excitement that a postponement would be bound to result in a letdown which would affect their efficiency. … We simply could not adequately protect either our own people or the surrounding community or our security if a delayed firing did occur. … [Another] point of concern was the effect of a test delay on our schedule of bombing Japan. Our first combat bomb was to be a U-235 one, and while a successful test of the plutonium bomb without the complications of an air drop would not be a guarantee, it would be most reassuring. Moreover, it would give credence to our assurance to the President as to the probable effectiveness. A misfire might well have weighed heavily on the argument by some, particularly Admiral Leahy, that we were too optimistic and that we should wait for a successful test. After all, this was the first time in history since the Trojan Horse that a new weapon was to be used without prior testing.
The test was delayed while the harassed weathermen tried to predict conditions in the coming hours.
Finally, the firing was scheduled for approximately 5:30 A.M., Mountain War Time.
At 5:25 A.M., the observers who were out in the open took up their final positions, lying flat on the earth, faces down, feet toward the blast.
At 5:29 sharp, the last in a series of automatic timing devices took over. There were forty-five seconds to go.
Oppenheimer and his senior staff waited tensely in a concrete bunker. Groves was in a slit trench a short distance away from the scientific director, because “I wanted us to be separated in case of trouble.”
5:29:35.
From another dugout, a man spoke into a microphone linked to the four lookout posts around the base camp. “Zero minus ten seconds.”
A green flare flashed from the ground and burned against the low cloud base, briefly and eerily lighting up the darkness.
5:29:40.
“Zero minus five seconds.”
A second flare cascaded.
5:29:43.
Silence and darkness reigned once more over the desert.
5:29:44.
At 5:29:45, everything happened at once. But it was too fast for the watchers to distinguish: no human eye can separate millionths of a second; no human brain can record such a fraction of time. No one, therefore, saw the actual first flash of cosmic fire. What they saw was its dazzling reflection on surrounding hills. It was, in the words of the observer from The New York Times:
a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one only sees in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the birth of the World—to be present at the moment of Creation when the Lord said: Let There Be Light.
Many of the observers were transfixed, rooted to the ground by a mixture of fear and awe at the immensity of the spectacle. Oppenheimer remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred epic of the Hindus. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The sinister cloud continued to billow upward, its internal pressures finding relief in one mushroom after another, finally disappearing into the dawning sky at well over forty thousand feet. At Ground Zero, the temperature at that moment of explosion had been 100 million degrees Fahrenheit, three times hotter than the interior of the sun and ten thousand times the heat on its surface.
Within a mile radius of Ground Zero, all life, plant and animal, had vanished; around what had been the base of the tower, the sand had been hammered into the desert to form a white-hot saucer five hundred yards in diameter. There had never before been sand like it on earth. When it cooled, it turned into a jade-green, glazed substance unknown to scientists.
The steel scaffold, impervious to any heat known in the preatomic age, had been transformed into gas and dispersed.
Groves was among the first to regain his composure. He turned to his deputy, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, and uttered a prediction. “The war’s over. One or two of these things and Japan will be finished.”
9
Furman and Nolan, the two young Manhattan Project specialists who were escorting some of the vital bomb components to Tinian, watched the final sailing preparations of the Indianapolis.
Knowing as little about ships as they did about guns, Furman and Nolan were impressed by the Indianapolis’s towering superstructure and her eight-inch gun batteries. She was the flagship of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet. He was now on Guam helping to plan the invasion of Japan. They were blissfully unaware that the admiral believed the ship’s center of gravity was entirely too high, and, as a result, he had once remarked that if she ever took a clean torpedo hit, she could capsize and sink in short order.
The Indianapolis’s problem was age. Her keel had been laid in 1932, well before the advent of radar. To remain on active service, she had been fitted with lookout aids following Pearl Harbor; her superstructure, from the bridge aft, bristled with radar devices which were efficient but heavy. To those who knew her well, the venerable old warship seemed always to be in danger of toppling over. She was a curious choice to carry the crucial components of the world’s most sophisticated weapon.
For Furman and Nolan, the journey to Tinian would have all the trappings of a luxury cruise. There would be nothing for them to do except take turns sitting in their spacious cabin watching over the lead bucket containing the uranium projectile. It had been welded to the cabin floor. The fifteen-foot-long crate carrying the cannon was lashed to the deck and guarded around the clock by marines. With an armed man at each corner, it resembled a bier.
Gossip spread to every corner of the ship. In wardrooms and mess halls, bets were laid that the mystery cargo was anything from a secret rocket to gold “to bribe the Japs to quit.”
Even rosy-cheeked Captain Charles Butler McVay III, the ship’s forty-six-year-old commander, knew little more than any enlisted man as to what his ship was carrying or why she was making this headlong dash to the Marianas.
Yesterday, Parsons had come from Los Alamos to brief McVay. The two men had met in Admiral William Purnell’s office at the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Parsons had spelled out the mission in words McVay would always remember. “You will sail at high speed to Tinian where your cargo will be taken off by others. You will not be told what the cargo is, but it is to be guarded even after the life of your vessel. If she goes down, save the cargo at all costs, in a lifeboat if necessary. And every day you save on your voyage will cut the length of the war by just that much.”
Mystified but having the good sense not to ask questions, McVay had returned to his ship still wondering what his cargo was and why his ship had been chosen.
Pure chance had decided on the Indianapolis. She was available, and, from the standpoint of speed and space, she was right. But nobody could be sure how well the cruiser had recovered from the mauling she had received at Okinawa, when a kamikaze plane had killed nine of her crew and blown two huge holes in her hull. Skilled artisans at Mare Island, the largest repair yard on the West Coast, had given her a new port quarter, radio and radar equipment, and fire-control mechanisms. She had also received a new “team.” Captain McVay and some of his senior officers were still there, but over 30 officers, almost half the cruiser’s complement, and 250 enlisted men had come aboard as replacements for the veterans of Okinawa. Most of the new officers were distinctly junior; 20 of them had come straight from midshipman’s school or the Naval Academy, and many of the enlisted men from basic training.
McVay had planned to work them up in a series of training exercises off the California coast. Now, these plans were scrapped. With untried officers and crew, with a ship that had undergone the skimpiest of sea trials after major repairs, he was about to set off.
He sent for Nolan, who, as Parsons had suggested, told the captain he was not a gunnery officer but “a medical orderly,” and that, as such, he could state “the cargo contained nothing dangerous to the ship or crew.”
McVay looked at Nolan and said, “I didn’t think we were going to use bacteriological weapons in this war.”
Nolan did not reply. He rejoined Furman in their cabin keeping watch over the bucket, leaving McVay as baffled as ever.
At exactly 8:00 A.M., the Indianapolis weighed anchor. Thirty-six minutes later, she passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, outward bound.
10
Soon after his arrival in Potsdam on the morning of Monday, July 16, Churchill had paid a brief call on Truman. It was the first time the two men had met. Truman had taken an “instant liking” to Churchill, who had entered into “an amiable relationship” with Truman, showing “a marked disposition to agree with him as far as possible.”
The two leaders had parted after discussing the news that Stalin was unwell and would be one day late for the conference. They had guessed, correctly, that the Soviet leader was recovering from a minor heart attack.
Truman had taken advantage of the delay to go sightseeing in the ruins of Berlin. He had been much affected by what he saw, remarking th
at the destruction “is a demonstration of what can happen when a man [Hitler] overreaches himself.”
Upon his return to Babelsberg, Truman had been given a message by Stimson which had just arrived from Washington. It made Truman the most powerful of the three leaders soon to meet over the negotiating table.
The message read:
OPERATED ON THIS MORNING. DIAGNOSIS NOT YET COMPLETE BUT RESULTS SEEM SATISFACTORY AND ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS. LOCAL PRESS RELEASE NECESSARY AS INTEREST EXTENDS GREAT DISTANCE. DR. GROVES PLEASED. HE RETURNS TOMORROW. I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED.
END
The message had let Truman know that the Alamogordo test had been a success, so much so that a fake, pre-prepared press release had been fed to the wire services claiming that an ammunition magazine had exploded, “producing a brilliant flash and blast” which had been observed over two hundred miles away.
As Truman had read the message, he realized “that the United States had in its possession an explosive force of unparalleled power.” He had ordered Stimson to respond. From Potsdam had gone the message:
I SEND MY WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS TO THE DOCTOR AND HIS CONSULTANT.
Now, at noon on this Tuesday, as Stimson met with Churchill and told him the good news from Alamogordo, Stalin called on Truman.
Truman was impressed enough by the Soviet leader to feel that at this first meeting he could “talk to him straight from the shoulder. He looked me in the eye when he spoke and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement that would be satisfactory to the world and to ourselves.”
But the president was not impressed enough by Stalin to confide in him what he had just learned about the atomic bomb. Nor did he do so later in the day when they met again at the opening session of the Potsdam Conference.
Enola Gay Page 20