Not that it mattered much. The Russians already knew about the bomb—through the treachery of a few scientists in the Manhattan Project who were feeding information to the Soviet Union. Even now, Russian scientists were engaged in an attempt to catch up with the Americans.
That night, Truman discussed the Alamogordo results with Stimson, Secretary of State Byrnes, and Admiral Leahy, who had stubbornly refused to believe the bomb would work. Over dinner, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—General Marshall, General Arnold, and Admiral King—joined in the conversation.
Truman forbore asking Leahy if he wished to revise his estimate. Instead, in his later words:
We reviewed our military strategy in the light of this revolutionary development … we did not know as yet what effect the new weapon might have, physically or psychologically, when used against the enemy. For that reason the military advised that we go ahead with the existing military plans for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
The die was cast. The bomb was ready. There would be no further tests to indicate what it might do in war. If the Japanese did not react positively to the final appeal for surrender Truman was planning, then he knew the responsibility was his to decide whether to use the new weapon.
11
Ferebee met Tibbets when his plane landed on July 18 after its three-day flight from Wendover. His first words were: “It’s bad news, Paul, really bad news.”
After listening to Ferebee, Tibbets knew he had been right to fly pell-mell to Tinian. The future of the 509th was endangered. In Ferebee’s words, “They’re trying to tear your outfit apart.”
A determined effort was under way to break up the tightly knit 509th and reassign the flying and ground crews to other groups based on the island.
A number of reasons were advanced for this astonishing move: the 509th’s fliers would benefit from working alongside combat veterans; they were needed to plug gaps in squadrons that had lost men over Japan; the ground crews were needed to help already harassed line chiefs keep the endless flow of bombers moving into the air.
Tibbets suspected these were mostly excuses. Like Ferebee, he now thought the trouble was caused mainly by others envious of the 509th’s special situation.
Matters were not helped by a brush Ferebee had just had with LeMay on Guam. The two men knew each other from Europe; their mutual respect was strong. It was based partly on the fact that while there was a considerable gap in rank between Major Ferebee and General LeMay, they had always spoken frankly to each other.
LeMay had succeeded in angering Ferebee by casting doubt on Tibbets’s ability to fly the atomic mission. Ferebee had exploded. “Look, General, if Colonel Tibbets is not qualified, then I’m not qualified, so neither one of us is qualified, so you don’t have anybody qualified, and the navy doesn’t have anybody qualified!”
LeMay had told Ferebee to cool down.
The advice had not been heeded. Today, the bombardier was as angry as ever, not only over LeMay’s remarks but over an “attempt by the navy to have their own man fly the mission.”
Tibbets knew the naval pilot—and disliked him. To Tibbets, the flier was “a prima donna, quite the wrong personality for the job.”
Tibbets promised Ferebee that he would go to LeMay “tomorrow, and settle the whole shooting match once and for all.”
The return of their commander acted as a tonic for the 509th. The sniping and sneering by other units had intensified: at night, some of the fliers lobbed stones onto the roofs of the group’s Quonsets as they passed by on their way to North Field for another mission over Japan.
Tibbets’s popular deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Classen, had tried to ease the situation; Tibbets felt that Classen was finding the strain of a second tour overseas barely endurable.
The group’s intelligence officer, the roly-poly Lieutenant Colonel Hazen Payette, had disappointed Tibbets. Payette was a trained lawyer and had always concerned himself with facts, not feelings; results, not excuses. On Tinian he had carried this to excess. “In trying to keep the men on their toes, he trod on too many feet,” was how radio operator Dick Nelson saw Payette’s behavior. Payette had also managed to ruffle Colonel E. E. Kirkpatrick, Groves’s energetic engineering officer on Tinian, the man who had worked wonders to ready the island’s facilities for the 509th before and since its arrival.
Unknown to Tibbets, Groves was receiving regular reports on the 509th from Kirkpatrick; it was a classic example of the way Groves worked: in his perfect world, everybody would watch everybody else.
To the 509th, Kirkpatrick was just one more outsider attached to their unit. Scientists from Los Alamos—men most of the 509th had never seen before—were now flying in and bedding down in the compound.
They created unexpected paperwork for Charles Perry. The mess officer had received written orders from the Air Force Quartermaster’s Office that he must collect thirty-five cents for every meal the civilians ate, get receipts for the money, and send them in a special pouch by air to Washington.
Perry thought the idea “plain stupid.” He did not suspect that behind it all was a continuing Manhattan Project concern about using civilian scientists alongside military personnel to make and maintain and eventually to help deliver a military weapon. At Los Alamos, some of the scientists refused to wear a uniform; here, on Tinian, they wore khakis without insignia or markings.
The charges for their meals kept a “distance” between them and the military.
Beser had no patience with such niceties. To him, it was “simply a matter of trying to play it both ways. The fact was, they were part of the American war effort like everybody else.”
In the seven weeks he had been on Tinian, Beser had made only a few short flights to check out his equipment; the nearest he had come to seeing action was when a solitary flak battery on Rota opened up as the B-29 he was in cruised high overhead.
A few days ago, a friend in the 504th had invited Beser to fly with him as a passenger for a fire raid on Japan.
Classen and Sweeney, now the commanding officer of the 393rd Heavy Bombardment Squadron, refused Beser permission to go.
Beser saw Tibbets’s arrival as fortunate: the raid was scheduled for this very night. He found Tibbets in his Quonset and repeated the request.
“I’m sorry, Jake, you can’t go.”
Beser looked miffed. “Colonel, it’s just one raid—”
“No.”
Tibbets settled back on his bunk, indicating that the interview was over.
Beser misunderstood the gesture. He thought Tibbets was merely tired after his trip from Wendover, and with a little more persuasion would let him go. “Paul, all I want to do is just this one mission to see what it’s like.”
Tibbets leaped from his bed. “Godammit, Lieutenant Beser, I’ve said no, and I mean no! Now get the hell out of here and go about your business. And the next time you come with a request, it’s Colonel Tibbets. Understand?”
A chastened Beser backed out of the hut. He spread the word that “the Old Man’s on a rampage.”
Tibbets’s long absences had convinced Lewis that when it came to the mission that really mattered, his commanding officer would not be on board; it would be Lewis himself who would fly the strike. Lewis’s reasons for coming to this conclusion were based on a number of premises.
He believed that his own record and his crew’s fitted them for the mission. Further, he assumed that Tibbets saw his own role as a “chairborne commander, planning the operation, leaving its execution to men who regularly flew B-29s.”
Lewis also believed that Tibbets “didn’t have an airplane.” Technically, that was true. The 509th’s commander had not assigned himself the aircraft; instead, he had chosen almost always to fly with Lewis. In Tibbets’s view, this made it clear to everyone with “a couple of dimes’ worth of sense that Lewis and his boys were actually my crew. When I went aboard, Lewis was copilot and I drove the plane.”
Lewis interpreted the position “somewhat di
fferently. First of all, Tibbets had never been inside my airplane since I collected it from the factory; secondly, he had not flown on Tinian with us; thirdly, I could do the job as well as he could—as well as anybody could.”
Nobody doubted Lewis’s flying ability. But the first atomic strike called for more than professional flying expertise. It called for decision making of the highest order. And indeed, it was Tibbets’s duty to command the mission. But Lewis believed he should do the job.
Only Eatherly matched Lewis in eagerness to fly the mission. He had even named his B-29 Straight Flush, partly because of his obsession with gambling and partly because he believed his crew was the best in the group.
Whatever flying standards the officers of the Straight Flush had achieved, nobody could match them for the comfortable life they lived on the ground. Through Eatherly’s good offices, they had inherited a group of five nurses on Tinian. On an island filled with men starved for female companionship, this was the most desirable gift Eatherly could bestow. The officers, equipped with perfume and silk stockings that they had brought from America, in the words of flight engineer Eugene Grennan, “came, saw, and conquered.”
From then on, they had lived “in the laps of goddesses who waited on us hand and foot.”
For other officers, the Tinian evenings were long; some, like navigator Russell Gackenbach, relieved their boredom by playing endless practical jokes. His specialty was to creep through the Stygian darkness tossing rescue flares into the campfires which at night flickered all over the compound. The flares created considerable panic—and provided much amusement for Gackenbach.
Caron devised a different way to spend his nights. When he wasn’t at the movies, he was stealthily removing, plank by plank, parts of the officers’ club, and using the wood to build himself a porch at the back of his Quonset hut. The job was coming along nicely; he hoped he could finish it before the mission took place. If he was selected for that, he planned to wear the new Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap that the team had just sent him.
Flight engineer Duzenbury had found potentially the most dangerous way of all to spend his free time. Despite having heard that the Japanese on Tinian had recently killed two GIs, at night he and a handful of friends, armed with carbines, went out into the jungle “in search of souvenirs—Japanese guns and bayonets.” So far, during his scrambling down into caves, Duzenbury had discovered three bottles of sake; he didn’t much like the taste.
Late in the evening of July 18, Tibbets received a coded message. It was from Groves. It told him the Alamogordo test had been a total success. Tibbets went to sleep knowing the “next atomic bang would be the real thing.”
12
The July 19 confrontation between Tibbets and LeMay was brief and direct. Tibbets explained that it was necessary for the 509th to be left alone and intact, that he hoped there would be no more “meddling,” and that he intended to fly the first atomic mission.
LeMay had crossed swords with Groves a month earlier over the question of who would be in charge once the weapon was ready for combat use. LeMay believed that “it was my baby once it came to my area.” Groves thought otherwise.
LeMay still could not understand why Groves and the others in Washington wanted to entrust the bomb to a unit that had not been fully tested in combat over Japan. But he could see that “to turn it over now to someone else was a little more than they could swallow.”
He decided to agree to Tibbets’s request, with one proviso. LeMay would send his operations officer, Colonel William “Butch” Blanchard, up on a training ride with Tibbets and his crew later that day, “just to satisfy the requirement that you guys know what you’re doing.”
Tibbets took his time over the preflight checks. Just behind him, seated on a pile of cushions, Blanchard was listening to each instruction, watching every response of the crew.
Lewis was strapped in the copilot’s seat. Van Kirk was at the navigator’s table, Ferebee in the bombardier’s position. Duzenbury was at the engineer’s panel, Nelson at the radio, Shumard and Stiborik in the blister turrets, and Caron in the rear turret.
In the bomb bay was a single blockbuster filled with high explosive; the fuel tanks carried enough for the round trip from Tinian to Rota.
Tibbets taxied to the end of the airstrip and, having received clearance for takeoff, sent the B-29 thundering down the central runway on North Field. Just as the wheels were about to leave the ground, he feathered an engine. Many of the Tinian crashes on takeoff happened because an engine failed at this critical moment. Tibbets fought the bomber’s yawing movement, brought it back on course, and deftly coaxed it into the air.
Then he ordered a second engine to be cut. On the same side.
“Yes, sir!” replied Duzenbury.
Pulled by only two engines, both on one wing, the huge plane, carrying its five-ton bomb, very slowly began to climb.
Banking the B-29, dipping the wing with the silent engines toward Tinian, Tibbets offered Blanchard an excellent view of what was now the world’s largest operational airfield.
Blanchard was not interested in sightseeing; his eyes were on the two propellers gently windmilling in the air.
Tibbets winked at Lewis—and increased the aircraft’s bank until the bomber seemed to be standing on one wing.
Blanchard called Tibbets on the intercom. “Okay, I’m satisfied with engine performance. Let’s head for Rota.”
Tibbets leveled off, and at full power, the B-29 roared toward the island. It arrived over the initial point at exactly the time van Kirk had predicted. Tibbets called Blanchard. “Guess we can agree navigational error was nil.”
“Agreed.”
“Now it’s Ferebee’s turn.”
The bombardier was in the nose, head glued to the bombsight.
From thirty thousand feet, the blockbuster plummeted down. Blanchard watched it fall and hit. “It came so close to the target that there was no use even talking about it,” Tibbets later said.
Then, without warning his passenger, Tibbets put the B-29 into the usual 155-degree turn.
A strangled cry came from Blanchard. “What—what’s happening?”
“The damn tail is stalling on me!”
“What’ya mean?”
Blanchard, pinned to the cushions by centrifugal force, felt the plane shudder as if it were going to pieces.
Tibbets shouted to him. “This is the only way I can make a tight turn. I’ve got to keep the tail stalling, and then I know I’m doing it right. Now, you wouldn’t want me to do it any other way, would you?”
“Okay, that’s enough. I’m satisfied!”
“Oh, no, we’re not through yet!”
Coming out of the turn, Tibbets yanked back the control column, sending the huge bomber up into a sickening stall. It hovered momentarily on its tail, then slid back, turned, and spun toward the ground.
Blanchard turned white. “For Chrissake, you’re going to kill us!”
Judging the moment perfectly, Tibbets brought the B-29 under control and headed back for Tinian. He touched down within fifteen seconds of van Kirk’s estimate.
Blanchard did not speak until his feet were firmly on the ground. “Okay. You’ve proved your point.”
Tibbets laughed, now certain Blanchard would pose no further challenge to his authority.
Tibbets chose ten crews to fly the first 509th missions over Japan on July 20. Each flew separately, against a preselected target. The purpose was to accustom the fliers to combat, and the Japanese to seeing single high-flying aircraft that dropped only one bomb.
The crews had orders that if their given targets were weather-bound, they must “under no circumstances” drop their blockbusters on Hiroshima, Kyoto, Kokura, or Niigata. Otherwise, their choice of alternative targets was unrestricted.
The first of the B-29s took off from Tinian at 2:00 A.M. On the way to Japan, one of them had engine trouble and had to jettison its bomb in the sea; five managed to drop their blockbusters in or aro
und their target areas; four, including the plane piloted by Claude Eatherly, found the weather so bad that they were forced to seek alternative targets.
Eatherly chose Tokyo—and the emperor’s palace. He was completely oblivious of the fact that his plan was not only against the official policy of the United States but could also affect the Potsdam Conference and, perhaps more important, strengthen the will to resist of every person in Japan.
Only one thought concerned Eatherly. If he succeeded, he would be guaranteed a place in history. He believed he might even end the war.
Eatherly circled at thirty thousand feet just south of Tokyo while his navigator plotted a course that would allow the Straight Flush to drop its ten-thousand-pound high-explosive bomb directly on the emperor’s palace.
The navigator, Francis Thornhill, was having trouble. Tokyo, like the original target they had been assigned, was socked in with cloud.
Bombardier Ken Wey said he could see no gaps in the overcast.
“Then drop it by radar!” Eatherly commanded.
“Right,” replied the bombardier.
Wey lined up the Straight Flush for a radar drop and released the bomb. Eatherly, whooping with excitement, immediately threw the B-29 into a 155-degree turn.
They left the Tokyo area without being able to see where the bomb had fallen.
13
Kizo Imai, the Japanese naval warrant officer in hiding on Tinian, waited until images flickered on the outdoor movie screen. Then, moving swiftly and surely, he left the jungle and wriggled toward the high wire fence.
He ran his fingers along the barbed strands. The gap was still there. Imai eased himself through, moving slowly now, careful not to snag his clothes. He would leave no clue for the guards who patrolled the 509th’s compound.
Imai squirmed on his belly to the nearest Quonset hut, then carefully checked himself and his surroundings. The mud he had smeared on his face and neck, buttons and belt buckle, was still there; so was the sacking he had wrapped around his boots to deaden his footsteps. Imai doubted whether in the darkness anybody could spot him from more than a few feet away. And then, if he was lucky, he could kill before the alarm was raised; he carried a small knife in his belt for just such a purpose.
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