The Indianapolis rolled onto her starboard side. As the cruiser filled rapidly with water, her stern rose higher and higher into the air until a hundred feet and more of hull reared straight up out of the Pacific, towering over hundreds of men, living and dying and already dead, floating in the sea.
For a few moments, the glistening hull remained poised. Screams of panic filled the air. Then, swiftly and cleanly, barely disturbing the Pacific swell, the Indianapolis plunged out of sight—the last major vessel to be lost in World War II, and victim of the greatest disaster at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.
It was 12:14 A.M., July 30, 1945.
After reloading his six torpedo tubes, Hashimoto brought I.58 to the surface. There was nothing to be seen in the darkness. It was over an hour since the action began. Finding nothing, he set course for the northeast.
A full ninety-six hours would pass before the first rescue ship would begin to drag from the water the few remaining survivors from the Indianapolis. When the news of the loss of four-fifths of its crew reached Tinian, it would cause shock and horror, and, in the case of Jake Beser, a sense of personal grief; before the Indianapolis had left Tinian, he had dined with an old classmate aboard the ship. Now his friend was dead, one of the nearly nine hundred victims of Hashimoto’s torpedoes.
In Washington, when Groves heard of the loss, he was relieved the ship had delivered her precious cargo of uranium before sinking. On the very day that the Indianapolis was attacked, Groves was writing a memo to the chief of staff in which he presented his projected production schedule for atomic bombs after August.
In September, we should have three or four bombs … four or three in October. … In November at least five and the rate will rise to seven in December and increase decidedly in early 1946.
Clearly, the Manhattan Project chief would have to think carefully in the future whether delivery by ship, as with the Indianapolis, was the most sensible course.
23
The thirteen surviving crewmen from the two B-24s were all being held prisoner within Hiroshima Castle’s grounds: some at Kempei Tai headquarters, others in the dungeon of the castle itself, and two at the Second Infantry’s divisional headquarters.
The newly arrived airmen had no knowledge of the ten other prisoners of war who had already spent weeks in solitary confinement within the castle.
For all twenty-three Americans now in Hiroshima, life was a mixture of despair and fear. Their cells were bereft of furnishings except for a washbasin and one blanket. They had no clothes other than those they had been wearing when captured. Long hours of solitude were interspersed with bouts of hard questioning. The bowls of cornmeal mush or rice they received three times a day in their cells were barely enough to sustain them.
Regularly, squads of curious Japanese soldiers came to stare into the cells. Peering through the grilles, they heaped insults on the prisoners as they attempted to squat over the stinking toilet holes set into the floor.
Occasionally, the prisoners were taken to the special interrogation room used by the Kempei Tai. Some of the Americans invented stories, hoping to stay alive by saying what they imagined their captors wanted to hear.
Those held at the Second Infantry’s headquarters were guarded by Private Second Class Masaru Matsuoka, who was not a member of the Kempei Tai. The soldier stood guard, rifle and fixed bayonet at the ready, for a shift of three hours on, three hours off.
Matsuoka never spoke to the airmen, but he and his fellow guards thought their dress looked so shabby that “America must be in bad shape—we can win the war yet.”
Matsuoka pitied his prisoners. He could not understand why they had not killed themselves to avoid capture, as “we would have done.” To him, the disgrace of being shot down would have been sufficient reason to die.
The belts and shoelaces of the prisoners had been taken away, and when they asked for a razor to shave, the request was refused. The Japanese feared the Americans might yet commit suicide.
24
In Washington, Groves studied a copy of an urgent cable from Spaatz on Guam.
REFERENCE CENTERBOARD OPERATION SCHEDULED AFTER AUGUST 3RD AGAINST NAGASAKI. REPORTS, PRISONER OF WAR SOURCES, NOT VERIFIED BY PHOTOS, GIVE LOCATION OF ALLIED PRISONER OF WAR CAMP ONE MILE NORTH OF CENTER OF CITY OF NAGASAKI. DOES THIS INFLUENCE THE CHOICE OF THIS TARGET FOR INITIAL CENTERBOARD OPERATION? REQUEST IMMEDIATE REPLY.
Groves knew that the prisoners in Nagasaki could, at the very minimum, be blinded by an atomic blast. More likely, they would die.
Unwilling for once to assume total responsibility for everything involving the Manhattan Project, he consulted General Handy. Handy thought the query should be brought to the attention of Stimson, who had just returned from the Big Three Conference.
Before going to see Stimson, Groves prepared a reply to Spaatz telling him there was to be no change in the targets because of the POW situation; Spaatz could, however, adjust the aiming points “in such a way as to decrease the possibility of hitting any POW camps.”
Mindful of his confrontation with Stimson over the proposal to bomb Kyoto, Groves presented the secretary with the Spaatz cable and the proposed reply. Groves later recalled, “His only reaction was to thank me for showing him the cable before it was sent.”
In the meantime, Spaatz had sent another top-secret message to Handy. It read:
HIROSHIMA ACCORDING TO PRISONER OF WAR REPORTS IS THE ONLY ONE OF FOUR TARGET CITIES FOR CENTERBOARD THAT DOES NOT HAVE ALLIED PRISONERS OF WAR CAMPS. ADVISE.
Handy spoke with Groves by telephone before replying. He then cabled Spaatz:
IF YOU CONSIDER YOUR INFORMATION RELIABLE, HIROSHIMA SHOULD BE GIVEN FIRST PRIORITY.
Hiroshima was put at the top of the target list.
25
The biggest-ever task force from the Marianas was scheduled to bomb Japan on July 31. Almost a thousand bombers would take off at midday to attack a dozen selected Japanese cities.
Shortly after noon, the first Wright Cyclone engine banged into life. Then the next one started, and the next, until the sound of hundreds of engines echoed back from the jungle.
After moving from the apron to the taxiways, the bombers took off four at a time from the eighty-five-hundred-foot parallel runways of North Field. It took two hours for all the bombers to become airborne; by the time the last plane rose from North Field, the lead bomber was almost five hundred miles away.
Scores of ground crewmen had forsworn lunch to watch part of the armada take off. Beser was one of the few from the 509th who thought it worthwhile to miss Perry’s chow to “see the show.” Beser’s craving for action had not been satisfied in spite of his having by now made a number of trips over Japan. Today, as usual, he wished he were flying.
Yet Beser knew the planes carried a combined payload that in explosive power was less than that expected of the first atomic bomb.
And the radar officer was one of the few men on Tinian who knew that the weapon had now been finally assembled. It was resting on a cradle in a workshop in the Tech Area, ready for delivery. To Beser, the bomb looked like “an elongated trash can with fins.”
Tibbets, Ferebee, and van Kirk spent the morning on Iwo Jima checking on plans to use the island as an emergency “pit stop” for the atomic mission. Months before, it had been decided that if for any reason the atomic bomb–carrying plane developed a serious malfunction on the outward leg of its journey, it should land on Iwo; it was better to put at risk the few thousand U.S. servicemen stationed there than to endanger the more than twenty thousand on Tinian—not to mention Tinian’s second priceless piece of ordnance, the plutonium bomb.
In the center of one fenced-off area at Iwo Jima was a large, deep, open pit whose dimensions were precisely the same as another pit in a similarly fenced-off area on North Field, Tinian. The atomic bomb would first be lowered into the Tinian pit, then the B-29 wheeled into position over the hole so that the bomb could be winched up into the bomb bay. The pit on Iwo
Jima would permit the quick transfer of the bomb to a standby plane if the original aircraft had to force-land on the island. A specially prepared communications center would act as a relay station between the strike aircraft and Tinian.
Satisfied, Tibbets and his companions left Iwo Jima as mysteriously as they had arrived. Flying south again, they found the airspace on the six-hundred-mile journey back to Tinian “a logjam of bombers.” Tibbets thought to himself that “soon all this will be obsolete—if the atomic bomb works.”
On August 1, after one of Perry’s magnificent breakfasts, Tibbets adjourned to his office in the 509th’s headquarters, closed the door, sat at his desk, and wrote rapidly. It took him only minutes to draft the top-secret order for the first atomic attack in history.
He sealed the order in an envelope and sent it by special courier to LeMay’s headquarters on Guam.
The order specified that a total of seven B-29s would be used for the historic mission. One would be needed at Iwo Jima to serve as the standby aircraft. Three would fly well ahead of the bomb-carrying plane, one to each of the potential target cities, to appraise the local weather and to relay the information back to the bomb carrier. This aircraft would be accompanied by two observer planes.
Tibbets now had to decide which of his crews would fly with him on the mission, and what role each would have.
He started by assigning Eatherly to fly the weather plane to Hiroshima.
At noon, Tibbets sent for his group intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonal Hazen Payette, and the intelligence officer of the 393rd Squadron, Captain Joseph Buscher. It was Buscher who on that first day at Wendover, almost a year ago now, had urged the complaining fliers to “give the place a chance.”
Tibbets told the two men about the impending mission and ordered them to be ready to brief the selected crews on what the target cities looked like from thirty thousand feet.
On Guam, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, Groves’s deputy, who had just arrived in the Marianas to act as the project’s “eyes and ears,” received his first cable from Morose, Groves’s Washington headquarters. It read:
IS THERE ANYTHING LEFT UNDONE EITHER HERE OR THERE WHICH IS DELAYING INITIATION OF LITTLE BOY OPERATION?
Farrell, a man of commendably few words, cabled: NO.
After lunch, Tibbets sent, in rapid succession, for Perry, the mess officer; Sweeney, the commander of the 393rd; and Classen, the deputy commander of the 509th.
Among other instructions, he ordered Perry to make sure he had “a goodly supply of pineapple fritters ready from August 3 onward.” The fritters were Tibbets’s favorite meal; he liked several helpings before he flew.
Tibbets briefed Sweeney on the forthcoming mission. He told the Boston Irishman that his plane, the Great Artiste, would be turned into a flying laboratory, carrying sensitive instruments that would measure the blast and other effects of the bomb. Sweeney and a B-29 carrying photographic equipment would accompany Tibbets’s plane to the target.
Classen received a general briefing. Tibbets sensed his somewhat neglected deputy was glad to be filled in at last.
Tibbets did not send for Lewis to tell him that he would be flying as his copilot on the flight. He felt that was “so self-evident it didn’t warrant stating.”
In Washington, D.C., Groves received a further laconic cable from Farrell. “As of 1000 hours Eastern War Time,” the atomic bomb was ready to drop over Japan. Truman had insisted on giving Japan’s leaders several more days to reconsider their original reaction to the Potsdam Proclamation, but since then everything they had reportedly said seemed to confirm their initial rejection of its terms. For Groves, the operation was now put “fully into motion.”
26
In the early afternoon of August 2, Tibbets and Ferebee arrived at LeMay’s headquarters on Guam to complete the details Tibbets had been unable to incorporate in the draft mission order he had sent yesterday.
LeMay had just been promoted to chief of staff of the Strategic Air Forces. He was in a receptive mood.
The first thing the two fliers needed to know was which target city LeMay personally preferred. When Groves had originally recommended Kyoto, LeMay had disapproved. In LeMay’s view, Kyoto “wasn’t much of a military target; only a lot of shrines and things of that sort, and anyway, bombing people gets you nowhere—it’s just not profitable.” But LeMay was happy with Hiroshima. He knew it contained a large number of troops and war factories. He turned to Tibbets and said, almost casually, “Paul, the primary’s Hiroshima.”
Tibbets’s response was immediate. “I’ve always preferred it as the target.”
LeMay led his visitors over to a large map table, its surface covered with the latest reconnaissance photographs of Hiroshima. As Tibbets and Ferebee studied them, LeMay called in operations officer Blanchard. LeMay broke the silence. “Bombing from the height you intend, crosswinds can be a big problem.”
Ferebee agreed, saying his bombsight “could handle twenty-five to thirty degrees of crosswind, but it sometimes gets to forty to fifty degrees up there.”
Blanchard proposed a solution. “You should fly directly downwind. That would have the double advantage of increasing your speed, so you wouldn’t be vulnerable over the target so long and you wouldn’t have to worry so much about crosswinds.”
Tibbets disagreed. He thought it better to head directly into the wind, which could eliminate crosswind effect and give Ferebee the best chance to bomb accurately.
LeMay pointed out that going against the wind would also reduce the aircraft speed, making the journey over the target more hazardous.
Ferebee looked at Tibbets and then spoke for them both. “Our primary purpose is to hit the target. We’re going up there to bomb, not to play safe.”
“Okay, the heading will be into the wind.”
LeMay then asked Ferebee to select his aiming point.
The bombardier unhesitatingly placed his index finger on the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima.
LeMay nodded.
Tibbets agreed. “It’s the most perfect AP I’ve seen in this whole damn war.”
Fission
AUGUST 3, 1945,
TO 8:16 A.M., AUGUST 6, 1945
1
Less than half a mile from the Aioi Bridge, a solitary blindfolded American stood motionless inside the keep of Hiroshima Castle. His guard, Private Matsuoka, grasped the airman’s arms, lifted them up and down. Once the prisoner began doing the movement himself, Matsuoka took hold of his knees, forcing them to bend.
Each morning, in turn, the twenty-three American POWs in Hiroshima received such exercise.
Although it was now barely eight o’clock, the August sun beat down on the prisoner, and soon his soiled coveralls were soaked with perspiration. Afterward, still blindfolded, he was marched for fifteen minutes around Hiroshima Castle’s courtyard.
Some fifty yards away, in his Town Hall office, Mayor Awaya listened to Maruyama counting off the latest statistics. As of this morning, August 3, about 30,000 adults and 11,000 students, between the ages of eleven and seventeen, had been drafted into labor battalions to work on the firebreaks. Over 70,000 dwellings had been demolished; some 60,000 of the city’s peak wartime civilian population of 340,000 had already been evacuated; a sixth exodus was due within a few days as more people lost their homes to the firebreaks. This morning, Maruyama estimated, there were 280,000 civilians left in the city.
Both men knew that Hiroshima’s dwindling number of stores could not supply the needs of so many people. Before the war, there had been nearly 2,000 food shops in the city; today, there were fewer than 150. Many of the larger ones were allowed to supply only the military. And Awaya also knew it was the demands of the military that made it necessary for so many of the citizens to remain in the city. The Toyo factory, for instance, needed 10,000 employees to turn out its 6,000 rifles a week. The Mitsubishi company also required a huge labor force and, like Japan Steel’s complex on the edge of Hiroshi
ma, it was working seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.
Awaya told his assistant he would seek an immediate interview with Field Marshal Hata and ask for the commander’s help in “changing the situation and ending this madness.”
Maruyama cautioned him that in formal situations Hata was reputed to be stiffly uncompromising. Far better to catch the field marshal in more relaxed surroundings, he suggested. And in two days’ time there would be just such an opportunity: the mayor had been invited to a cocktail party in the officers’ club on August 5.
Awaya said he would think over the idea.
In the Shima Surgical Hospital, Dr. Kaoru Shima smiled at his earnest visitor. The man, a farmer, had walked several miles to ask Dr. Shima to call on his wife. From his description, Dr. Shima guessed that the woman was pregnant. He promised to call at the farm the next time he was in the area.
2
On August 2, Tibbets had told van Kirk that he was going on the mission.
Briefing the 509th’s group navigator on the strike, Tibbets had stressed the importance of accuracy. That did not worry the experienced van Kirk. But he was concerned by the fact that Tibbets, Ferebee, and he had never flown together from Tinian, and now there would be no chance for them to do so. Further, some of the men he would be flying with were virtual strangers to him.
Van Kirk did not share his worries with Tibbets. Yet, shortly after he had left Tibbets’s office, a painful rash erupted on various parts of his body. He reported to flight surgeon Young, who hospitalized him and reported the incident to Tibbets.
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