Tibbets was even more alarmed than van Kirk about the strange outbreak. In Tibbets’s view, there “just wasn’t anybody in the same class as Dutch when it came to accurate navigation.” He sent Ferebee to the hospital to find out how ill van Kirk was.
It was an inspired choice. Ferebee made light of van Kirk’s complaint, “accusing me of lying in bed just to get attention from some of the prettiest nurses you ever did see.”
After Ferebee left, Dr. Young visited the navigator. Seeking “a possible emotional basis” for the illness, Dr. Young asked van Kirk, “Are you worried about the mission?”
“No.”
“Do you really want to go? You’ve got a wife and son now.”
“I want to go.”
“Then go.”
Within a few hours, van Kirk’s rash completely cleared, and on August 3 he left the hospital.
The same day, LeMay flew into Tinian with the order for Special Bombing Mission No. 13. It was essentially the same document Tibbets had drafted the morning of August 1, with a number of details added. The strike was set for August 6. The targets were:
Primary—Hiroshima urban industrial area.
Secondary—Kokura arsenal and city.
Tertiary—Nagasaki urban area.
The order confirmed that no friendly aircraft, “other than those listed herein, will be within a fifty-mile area of any of the targets for this strike during a period of four hours prior to and six subsequent to strike time.”
Thirty-two copies of the order were distributed to commands on Guam, Iwo Jima, and Tinian. Tibbets locked his copy in the office safe and then departed with LeMay to inspect Little Boy, nestling on its cradle in the heavily guarded Tech Area.
Shortly after 2:00 P.M. on August 4, the 509th’s briefing hut was sealed off by carbine-carrying MPs who barred its entrance and entirely ringed the long, narrow building. Inside, intelligence officers Hazen Payette and Joseph Buscher attached enlarged reconnaissance photographs of Hiroshima and the alternative targets to two blackboards, then draped both boards with large cloths. The walls were covered with maps of Japan and reminders that “careless talk costs lives.”
At 2:30 P.M., Parsons arrived with a group of scientists. Among them was Second Lieutenant Morris Jeppson, who a few days before had won a coin toss with another electronics officer to decide which would assist Parsons on the mission. Parsons produced a can of film from his briefcase, and a technician laced it on a projector.
At 2:45, the British contingent arrived. Both Cheshire and Penney were grim-faced, having just been told by LeMay that they were to be excluded from flying on the first atomic mission. Hoping for a last-minute reversal of the order, they seated themselves behind the scientists.
Caron, Duzenbury, Shumard, Stiborik, and Nelson arrived wearing flight coveralls. They had just returned from a local test run in which van Kirk, fully recovered, had navigated to Rota. Tibbets had made a four-minute bomb run, then banked sharply after Ferebee released the practice pumpkin. All the bomber’s equipment had functioned perfectly.
During the practice flight, Lewis, in the copilot’s seat, had said little. Prior to flying, he had performed the painful task of telling his regular bombardier and navigator that “they were being superseded by rank” and would not be flying the atomic strike. Tibbets had at last made it clear to Lewis that his role would be that of copilot, with Tibbets in command, but Lewis still felt it was “basically my crew” that would make the run.
Caron arrived at the briefing wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers cap and determined that nothing but a direct order would make him remove it. The night before, in a drunken moment, Caron had succumbed to Shumard’s prompting for a haircut. A tipsy GI barber and Duzenbury had trimmed Caron’s head until he “resembled a cross between a Blackfoot Indian and a patch of sprouting prairie.”
Lewis came in with Eatherly’s crew, who were in boisterous spirits after a night’s carousing. They seated themselves next to Sweeney’s crew, who, taking a cue from their commander, were in a more thoughtful mood. Before coming to the briefing, Sweeney had gone down the flight line with three scientists who were installing a range of radio receivers and automatic film-recording devices aboard the Great Artiste. The scientists had explained to Sweeney that three parachutes, carrying cylinders similar in shape and weight to fire extinguishers, would be dropped from the plane near the target. Radio transmitters in the cylinders would send data back to the plane. Sweeney realized he would have to fly in perfect sync with Tibbets to make sure the instruments fell into the designated area.
Beser arrived with Tom Classen; they sat down at the rear of the room, near the projector. For Beser, the briefing was a welcome respite “from the murderous pace up at the Tech Area.” Having worked on the uranium bomb, he was now assisting with the final assembly of the plutonium bomb; shortly before coming to the briefing, scientist Ed Doll told him to “stand by to go on a second mission as well.” Beser had asked how many missions were planned, and Doll had replied, “Just as many as it takes to make them quit.”
Ferebee and van Kirk entered soon afterward and took seats up front, near General Farrell.
At 3:00 precisely, Tibbets arrived in freshly pressed khakis. Flanked by Payette and Buscher, he walked to the platform. The two intelligence officers positioned themselves by the blackboards. Parsons joined Tibbets on the dais.
Sergeant Spitzer was concentrating hard to remember his impressions for his diary. He saw that Parsons was “perspiring and kept clearing his throat and shuffling his papers.”
Two months earlier, at a Los Alamos conference, one of Parsons’s staff had proposed “arming” the bomb in flight. Groves and Oppenheimer had opposed the idea, believing it would be too easy for something to go wrong. Nevertheless, Parsons, increasingly troubled by the spate of crashes on Tinian, had decided to insert the conventional explosive and its detonator into the rear of the bomb after the plane was airborne. While this plan would somewhat reduce the risk, in the event the plane crashed the uranium “bullet” might still slip down the barrel, hit its “target,” and cause a nuclear explosion.
Parsons had told nobody yet of his plan. He feared that if Groves heard about it, he would reach out nearly seven thousand miles and stop him.
The hushed murmuring in the room ceased as Tibbets spoke. “The moment has arrived. Very recently, the weapon we are about to deliver was successfully tested in the States. We have received orders to drop it on the enemy.”
He nodded to Payette and Buscher, who removed the cloths from the blackboards.
Tibbets announced the targets in order of priority: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki. He next assigned three B-29s to serve as weather scouts. Eatherly’s Straight Flush would go to Hiroshima; Jabbit III, commanded by Major John Wilson, would fly to Kokura; the Full House, piloted by Major Ralph Taylor, was given Nagasaki.
Sweeney’s Great Artiste, and No. 91, commanded by Major George Marquardt and carrying photographic equipment, would accompany Tibbets to the actual target—whose final selection would still depend on the weather reports radioed back by the scouting B-29s. If all three cities were ruled out by weather conditions, the plane would return to Iwo Jima, after Parsons had “disarmed” the bomb in the air.
The seventh B-29, Top Secret, commanded by Captain Charles McKnight, was assigned to fly to Iwo Jima and park on the guarded apron by the specially constructed pit.
Tibbets then introduced Parsons, who came directly to the point. “The bomb you are going to drop is something new in the history of warfare. It is the most destructive weapon ever produced. We think it will knock out almost everything within a three-mile area.”
A stunned gasp swept the room.
Parsons sketched in the background of the Manhattan Project. Spitzer later recorded his reaction to what he had heard. “It is like some weird dream conceived by one with too vivid an imagination.”
Parsons signaled the technician to switch on the projector. Nothing happened. The operator fiddled
with the mechanism. Suddenly, the celluloid became entangled in the sprockets, and the machine started to rip up the film.
Parsons told the operator to stop the projector, walked back to the platform, and addressed the room. “The film you are not about to see”—he paused, and laughter lifted the tension—“was made of the only test we have performed. This is what happened. The flash of the explosion was seen for more than ten miles. A soldier ten thousand feet away was knocked off his feet. Another soldier more than five miles away was temporarily blinded. A girl in a town many miles away who had been blind all her life saw a flash of light. The explosion was heard fifty miles away.”
Every man in the room was transfixed. Even Tibbets, who knew what was coming, was “overwhelmed by the presentation.”
Parsons continued. “No one knows exactly what will happen when the bomb is dropped from the air. That has never been done before. But we do expect a cloud this shape”—he drew a mushroom on the blackboard—“will rise to at least thirty thousand feet and maybe sixty thousand feet, preceded by a flash of light much brighter than the sun’s.”
Buscher brought forward a cardboard box and pulled out a pair of tinted goggles similar to those worn by welders. Parsons explained that these would be worn by every crew member of the planes that would be near the target at the time of the explosion. He slipped them over his eyes, indicated a knob on the nose bridge, and told his audience that turning it would change the amount of light admitted by the glass. Over the AP, he said, the knob must be turned to its lowest setting.
Payette and Buscher distributed the goggles while Tibbets issued a warning. “You’re now the hottest crews in the air force. No talking—even among yourselves. No writing home. No mention of the slightest possibility of a mission.”
He then gave details of the route to be taken to Japan, the altitude along various stages of the flight, the bombing height, and the likely takeoff time: the early hours of Monday, August 6.
The air-sea rescue officer took over, saying no mission at any time was ever so thoroughly supported. Flying off the Japanese coast would be Superdumbos—B-29s specially equipped to coordinate rescue operations and fight off any enemy opposition. Dumbos—navy flying boats—would be patrolling the flight path to and from Japan, ready to swoop down and rescue any crew that ditched. Supporting the aircraft would be cruisers, destroyers, and “lifeguards”—submarines prepared to “come almost onto the enemy beaches to pick you up.”
Before the briefing, Ed Doll had told Jeppson that if he fell into enemy hands, Jeppson “should tell the Japs everything you know. Then we’ll know what you’ve told them. They’d find out anyway in the end.”
Doll was a civilian. Buscher was a military man and delivered the formal air force attitude: captured crews were to give only their name, rank, and serial number. He reminded them to search through their flying kit to make sure they had removed all personal belongings—items which could be useful to the enemy.
Tibbets concluded the formal briefing with a short homily. Later, he would not be able to recall his exact words; it would be left to Spitzer to produce the only record.
The colonel began by saying that whatever any of us, including himself, had done before was small potatoes compared to what we were going to do now. Then he said the usual things, but he said them well, as if he meant them, about how proud he was to have been associated with us, about how high our morale had been, and how difficult it was not knowing what we were doing, thinking maybe we were wasting our time and that the “gimmick” was just somebody’s wild dream. He was personally honored and he was sure all of us were, to have been chosen to take part in this raid, which, he said—and all the other big-wigs nodded when he said it—would shorten the war by at least six months. And you got the feeling that he really thought this bomb would end the war, period.
On August 5, a duplicating machine turned out the single-page operations order, No. 35, which described the final preparations for the strike.
The order was primarily a timetable of the day’s activities, from mealtimes for the various crews to the last moment they could rest in their Quonsets before takeoff. Down on the flight line, the order gave the mechanics all the details they needed about which planes were going, and when, and how much fuel and ammunition each would carry. The one bomb to be taken was described only as “special.”
Crucial data on the weather expected over western Japan in the next twenty-four hours were radioed from northern China on the orders of Mao Tse-tung.
After attending morning Mass, Sweeney was to make the last preatomic flight of the 509th. He was ordered by Tibbets to take the Great Artiste to thirty thousand feet and release an inert, concrete-filled bomb over the ocean while the scientists on Tinian tracked its fall. The fuzing test was similar to the one Sweeney’s crew had performed at Wendover, when the firing system had triggered prematurely.
At altitude, Sweeney radioed that he was ready.
Among the knot of scientists waiting to track the falling bomb was Luis Alvarez, the son of a well-known surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alvarez had invented the ground-control approach system that would one day be used on almost every airfield in the world. He had later headed the Los Alamos team that built the complex release mechanism for the bomb. On Tinian he had developed a device that would be carried by Sweeney’s plane and dropped over the target city to help measure the atomic bomb’s shock wave.
Now, wearing earphones, Alvarez was waiting for the steady tone he was hearing to be broken, signifying that Sweeney’s test bomb had left the plane. He knew exactly the sequence of events which, if everything worked properly, would follow. It was precisely the same as for the real atomic bomb to be dropped the following day.
When the bomb fell from the plane, wires attached to it would be pulled out, not only cutting a tone signal but also closing a switch within the bomb—the first of a number of switches that had to be closed in sequence before the electricity traveling from batteries within the bomb reached the end of the circuit, the electrical detonator. Once the electricity reached the detonator, it would ignite the explosive powder. If there were no hitches the next day, this would send the uranium “bullet” down the gun barrel, causing the atomic explosion.
Alvarez heard the signal stop. He knew the test bomb was on its way. The first switch should have closed. Sweeney started his 155-degree turn. A timing device in the bomb now waited a preset number of seconds before closing the second switch in the electrical circuit. Once that switch was closed, the electricity continued a little farther along the line, stopped by another, still-open switch which was controlled by a height-detecting device that measured barometric pressure. That device was set to close its switch when the bomb was five thousand feet above the ground. Then the final and most sensitive instrument in the chain took over. This was a miniature radar set, also enclosed within the bomb. Its transmitter sent out radio waves which hit the ground, bounced back, and were received by the bomb’s radar antennae, sticking out like strange feelers near the front of the weapon. If all went well, the radar was set to close the final switch in the chain when the bomb was still 1,850 feet up in the air.
For this test run, to signify that the fuzing system had worked properly, the bomb was to emit a slight puff of smoke at 1,850 feet. Through binoculars, Alvarez and the other scientists watched carefully for the smoke.
In vain.
The test bomb plunged, smokeless, past the planned height of detonation and into the ocean.
Alvarez turned to his colleagues. “Great, just great,” he said. “Tomorrow we’re going to drop one of these on Japan, and we still haven’t got the thing right.”
Sweeney wasn’t surprised. He knew that, whereas Japanese bombs had a tendency to explode prematurely, among the conventional bombs produced by the United States there were a fair number of duds. With such a new, complex bomb, the chances of success must be less.
He predicted the bomb T
ibbets would drop tomorrow would be a dud.
In the hot, glaring sun down on the flight line, a group of men led by scientist Bernard Waldman, a physics professor on loan from Notre Dame University, completed fitting out No. 91 for its photographic role; a fast-acting camera was to replace the plane’s Norden bombsight. Waldman himself would be acting as cameraman.
At 2:15 P.M., the telecon machine in the 509th’s operations room clattered out confirmation from LeMay on Guam that the takeoff time for the atomic bomb–carrying plane was to be in just over twelve hours, making the time over target between 8:00 and 9:00 the following morning.
At 2:30 P.M., Ed Doll sent an encoded telegram to Los Alamos. It was based on an interview he had conducted with Beser, who reported that a rigorous search “had so far detected no Japanese using the frequency on which the bomb’s radar set will be operating.”
By 3:00 P.M., Morris Jeppson and three officers from the First Ordnance Squadron had completed installing a control panel just forward of the bomb bay and just aft of the engineer and pilot compartments of the bomber Tibbets would be flying. The console was thirty inches high and about twenty inches wide. It contained switches, meters, and small, colored indicator lights. Attached to its back were four thick cables, each containing twenty-four individual wires. These cables stretched like umbilical cords back to the bomb bay, where, once the bomb was in place, they would be plugged into the weapon. They would automatically disconnect from the bomb when it was dropped.
The console was designed to monitor the bomb’s batteries; to check for any electrical shorts along its firing circuit; to look out for a premature closing of any switch; to spot a malfunction in the barometric-pressure device, the timing mechanism, or the radar set.
While Jeppson and his team toiled inside the bomber, a sign painter placed a ladder against its nose and grumpily climbed to the top, carrying a can of paint and a brush.
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