Kempei Tai officer Hiroshi Yanagita snored insensibly in his bed.
Tatsuo Yokoyama, stripped to the waist in the midsummer heat, was raising a bowl of rice to his mouth, chopsticks poised.
Tibbets continued to hold the Enola Gay in a steep power dive and right turn of 155 degrees. Sweeney’s Great Artiste was performing an identical maneuver to the left.
Inside the bomb, a timer tripped the first switch in the firing circuit, letting the electricity travel a measured distance toward the detonator.
Tibbets asked Caron if he could see anything. Spread-eagled in his turret, the gravitational force draining the blood from his head, the gunner could merely gasp, “Nothing.”
Beser, also trapped by the violence of the maneuver, stared at his instruments. He could not lift his hand to activate the wire recorder.
There were now twenty seconds left.
On the ground, Prince RiGu was cantering his horse onto the Aioi Bridge.
The announcer at Radio Hiroshima reached the studio to broadcast the air-raid warning.
In the half-underground communications center at Hiroshima Airport, Yasuzawa asked where Hata’s meeting was to be held.
On the fire lanes, supervisors blew their whistles, signaling thousands of workers, many of them schoolboys and -girls, to run to their designated “safe” areas.
Aboard the Enola Gay, Tibbets pulled down his glasses. He could see nothing. He yanked them off. In the nose, Ferebee had not bothered to put his on.
The Enola Gay was coming to the end of its breathtaking turn and was now some five miles from Ferebee’s AP, heading away from the city. Tibbets called Caron. Again, the tail gunner reported there was nothing to see.
Beser at last managed to switch on the wire recorder. Stiborik turned up the brightness on his radar screen so he could see it through his glasses. Duzenbury, his hand on the throttles, worried about what the blast would do to the Enola Gay’s engines.
Jeppson counted. Five seconds to go.
In the bomb, the barometric switch tripped at five thousand feet above the ground. The shriek of the casing through the air had now increased to a shattering sonic roar, not yet detectable below.
On the ground, Kazumasa Maruyama was on his way to pick up Mayor Awaya, as he did every morning before work.
At Radio Hiroshima, the announcer pushed the button that sounded the air-raid siren and, out of breath, spoke into a microphone. “Eight-thirteen, Chugoku Regional Army reports three large enemy planes spotted, heading—”
The bomb’s detonator activated 1,890 feet above the ground.
At exactly 8:16 A.M., forty-three seconds after falling from the Enola Gay, having traveled nearly six miles, the atomic bomb missed the Aioi Bridge by eight hundred feet and exploded directly over Dr. Shima’s clinic.
Shock Wave
8:16 A.M.
TO MIDNIGHT, AUGUST 6, 1945
1
In the first millisecond after 8:16 A.M., a pinprick of purplish-red light expanded to a glowing fireball hundreds of feet wide. The temperature at its core was 50 million degrees centigrade. At “ground zero,” the Shima clinic, directly beneath the detonation, the temperature reached several thousand degrees centigrade.
The flash heat started fires a mile away, and burned skin two miles distant.
Of the estimated 320,000 civilians and soldiers in the city, some 80,000 were killed instantly or mortally wounded. About one-third of the casualties were soldiers. Most deaths occurred in the four square miles around the Aioi Bridge, containing the city’s principal residential, commercial, and military quarters.
The stone columns flanking the entrance to the Shima clinic were rammed straight down into the ground. The entire building collapsed. The occupants were vaporized.
Sixty-two thousand other buildings—out of a total of 90,000—were destroyed. All utilities and transportation services were wrecked. Over 70,000 breaks occurred in the water mains. Only sixteen pieces of firefighting equipment survived to plug into the ruptured system.
One hundred eighty of the city’s 200 doctors and 1,654 of its 1,780 nurses were dead or injured. Only 3 of the city’s 55 hospitals and first-aid centers remained usable.
The largest single group of casualties occurred around Hiroshima Castle, about nine hundred yards from the epicenter, where, out in the open, several thousand soldiers and one American POW were directly exposed to the blast. They were incinerated, their charred bodies burned into the parade ground. A similar fate befell thousands of others laboring on the fire lanes.
Hiroshima Castle was totally destroyed. The mortality rate for its occupants was about 90 percent. Among the casualties were the schoolgirls on duty in the communications center, and most, although apparently not all, of the American POWs.
The extreme temperatures set alight Radio Hiroshima and burned out trolley cars, trucks, and railroad rolling stock. Stone walls, steel doors, and asphalt pavements glowed red-hot. The heat burned the black lettering from books and newspapers, and fused clothing to skin. More than a mile from the epicenter, men had their caps etched onto their scalps, women their kimono patterns imprinted on their bodies, children their socks burned onto their legs.
The blast clogged six of the city’s sewer pumping stations and affected the water table beneath the ground. It sent a whirlwind of glass through the area of destruction.
Almost all this happened in the time it took Bob Caron’s eyelids to blink shut behind his goggles—his first, uncontrollable response to the flash.
Every man in the Enola Gay saw the light and was overwhelmed by its intensity.
Nobody spoke.
Tibbets could taste the brilliance. “It tasted like lead.”
An ethereal glow illuminated the instruments in the cockpit, on Duzenbury’s panel, on Nelson’s radio, on the racks of instruments before Beser.
By the time Caron opened his eyes, the flash had gone.
Taking its place was something equally stunning. It was, in Caron’s words, “a peep into Hell.”
In Hiroshima, a firestorm raged. From within an area now over a mile wide, a monstrous, seething mass of red and purple began to rise into the sky; the column was sucking into its base superheated air which set fire to everything combustible.
Lieutenant Colonel Oya recovered consciousness to find himself lying face down on the floor in the devastated Second General Army Headquarters. Sand was raining down on him from ruptured sandbags above the broken ceiling. The blast had hurled Oya ten feet from the window, and the heat rays had severely burned the back of his head and neck. Blood oozed from his skin where it was punctured by slivers of glass. Other officers in the room were in a similar state.
On Mount Futaba, slightly farther away, Second Lieutenant Yokoyama had no recollection of the initial flash, the searing blast of heat. His first memory was of standing almost naked outside his quarters, brandishing his ceremonial sword and screaming for his gun crews to open fire. But there was nothing for them to shoot at. Yokoyama turned to look down on Hiroshima and became aware of “a strange dense fog enveloping the city.”
In the center of that fog, his commanding officer, Colonel Abe, was dead, along with his daughter. There would be no need for Yokoyama to invent further excuses about not marrying her.
Kazumasa Maruyama, about one mile from ground zero, was felled by a stone pillar. When he regained consciousness, darkness was descending on Hiroshima as the great mushroom cloud blotted out daylight. Staggering to his feet, Maruyama stumbled back to his home. He would remember nothing of the journey.
Not far from where Maruyama lay was the man he had served so faithfully, Mayor Awaya. The mayor’s house was wrecked and on fire. Mayor Awaya, his fourteen-year-old son, and his three-year-old granddaughter had been killed instantly. His wife and daughter would die later. The following day, Maruyama would go to the still-smoldering ruins of the house and dig out what remained of the mayor’s body.
2
From his vantage point in the
tail of the Enola Gay, Bob Caron was the first to see a frightening phenomenon developing. A great, circular mass of air was rising upward, traveling at the speed of sound, toward the Enola Gay. Stupefied, the tail gunner tried to shout a warning, but his words were unintelligible.
Caron was the first man ever to witness an atomic bomb’s shock wave, created by air being so compressed that it seemed to take on a physical form. It looked to Caron as if “the ring around some distant planet had detached itself and was coming up toward us.”
He yelled again. At the same time, the great circle of air smashed against the Enola Gay, bouncing the plane higher. Tibbets grabbed the controls. But it was the noise accompanying the shock wave that caused him the greatest concern. Remembering his bombing missions over Europe, he thought “an eighty-eight-millimeter shell had exploded right beside us.” He immediately shouted, “Flak!”
Ferebee had the same reaction. “The sonsofbitches are shooting at us!”
The two battle-hardened veterans frantically searched the sky for smoke puffs. Pandemonium broke out in the bomber.
In less than four seconds, above the cacophony of voices on the intercom, Caron screamed, “There’s another one coming!”
With a spine-jarring crash, the second wall of air hit the Enola Gay. Once more, the bomber was tossed upward, tipping Nelson half out of his seat and sending Beser tumbling.
As quickly as it had arrived, the shock wave passed. The Enola Gay was back in calm air.
Tibbets addressed the crew. “Okay. That was the reflected shock wave, bounced back from the ground. There won’t be any more. It wasn’t flak. Stay calm. Now, let’s get these recordings going. Beser, you set?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“I want you to go around to each of the crew and record their impressions. Keep it short, and keep it clean. Bob, start talking.”
“Gee, Colonel. It’s just spectacular.”
“Just describe what you can see. Imagine you’re doing a radio broadcast.”
With the Enola Gay beginning to orbit at 29,200 feet, eleven miles from Hiroshima, the tail gunner produced a vivid eyewitness account. “A column of smoke rising fast. It has a fiery red core. A bubbling mass, purple-gray 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 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 nearly level with us and climbing. It’s very black, but there is 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. All I can see now of the city is the main dock and what looks like an airfield. There are planes down there.”
In a wide orbit, Tibbets circled the cloud as it climbed toward sixty thousand feet.
Waiting to speak on Beser’s recorder, Lewis was groping for words to write in his log. There were those on board the plane who would insist his initial reaction to the mushroom cloud was: “My God, look at that sonofabitch go!” But Lewis later decided to pen: “My God, what have we done?”
Tibbets was “surprised, even shocked. I had been expecting to see something big, but what is big? What I saw was of a magnitude and carried with it a connotation of destruction bigger than I had really imagined.”
Beser confined himself to a few words for posterity. “It’s pretty terrific. What a relief it worked.”
Nelson, Shumard, and Duzenbury used such words as “just awesome,” “unbelievable,” “stunning,” and “shattering” to try to convey what they saw. Stiborik thought, “This is the end of the war.” Ferebee and Parsons were too busy preparing the strike report to record their impressions.
In the tail, Caron took photographs that would be used around the world.
The Enola Gay completed its first circle around the stricken city.
3
Second Lieutenant Matsuo Yasuzawa emerged from the communications center and saw the bombers as three specks in the smoke-filled sky. “Humiliated and furious” they had not yet been attacked by fighters or antiaircraft fire, he determined to go after them.
Weaving his way past burning fuel trucks and aircraft, he ran toward the “99 Superior Trainer” he had landed in Hiroshima less than one hour before. Every plane he passed was severely damaged.
The airfield was over two miles from the epicenter, and the force of the explosion was largely spent by the time it struck the base. Even so, hardly a window was left intact, and many of the buildings had suffered structural damage.
Yasuzawa reached his plane panting, out of breath, and shook his head in wonderment.
The plane was bent like a banana.
It had been broadside to the shock wave, which had blown out all the glass along one side of the cockpit and reshaped the fuselage into a shallow “C.” The tail was swung ten degrees off true, and the nose was similarly bent.
Yasuzawa climbed into the cockpit and pressed the starter button. The engine kicked and, incredibly, spluttered into life.
Then, Yasuzawa saw a sight that made him shudder. Coming onto the airfield was the vanguard of a procession of “living corpses.” Bleeding and blackened, their skin hanging in shreds, their hair scorched to the roots, the first survivors were seeking sanctuary. Many were totally naked, their clothes burned from their bodies. Some of the women carried babies.
Horrified, Yasuzawa looked away. There was now a new thought in his mind: he had to get out and report what had happened to Hiroshima.
He taxied his plane slowly to the runway, revved the engine, and released the brakes. When he pulled back the stick, the bent trainer sidled uncertainly into the air. Yasuzawa held it about three feet off the ground for a moment, then touched down again.
Now confident the plane would fly, he taxied back to the other end of the runway and prepared for takeoff.
4
Aboard the Enola Gay, Nelson had already sent word that the mission was a success. Now Parsons handed him a second message that, when decoded, would tell General Farrell, waiting anxiously in the 509th’s operations room on Tinian, the news he had been waiting hours to hear.
CLEAR CUT. SUCCESSFUL IN ALL RESPECTS. VISIBLE EFFECTS GREATER THAN ALAMOGORDO. CONDITIONS NORMAL IN AIRPLANE FOLLOWING DELIVERY. PROCEEDING TO BASE.
After a third and final circle around Hiroshima, Tibbets put the Enola Gay on course for Tinian. The Great Artiste and No. 91 formed up behind, and the three bombers headed down the “Hirohito Highway” for home.
5
Second Lieutenant Yasuzawa was about to take off when out of the murk stumbled the officer he had earlier flown to Hiroshima. When he saw that Yasuzawa intended to take off, he insisted on going as well. The pilot pointed to the precarious state of the plane, but the major would not be put off. He climbed into the seat behind Yasuzawa.
With both men leaning hard to the left, sheltering behind what little glass remained on that side of the cockpit, the misshapen trainer moved, crablike, down the runway. Almost at the end, Yasuzawa pulled back the stick, and the plane skewed into the air.
Over Hiroshima Harbor, he turned back toward the city and the smoke. He knew that if he made one false move on the controls, “the plane would flip over, and that would be the end.”
As he climbed, the wind howled through the open cockpit. Yasuzawa, concentrating on keeping his distorted plane in the air, was conscious only of “a thick haze, dust and smoke and flames.”
At two thousand feet, he leveled out to do what Tibbets had done fifteen times higher—circle the city to estimate the damage. But where the Enola Gay had remained well clear of the cloud, Yasuzawa was now flying in and out of the pall, unaware of the risk to which he was subjecti
ng himself and his passenger.
After about five minutes’ reconnaissance, the intrepid pilot put the crippled plane on course for his Kyushu air base, one hundred miles away.
There, after completing one of the most unusual flights in the history of aviation, he would exchange his extraordinary-looking aircraft for a transport plane, and spend the rest of the day ferrying survivors out of Hiroshima.
6
At 10:30 A.M., when mess officer Charles Perry heard that the strike was a success, he turned to his cooks and shouted, “The party’s on!”
The 509th’s kitchens became the center of activity as Perry masterminded a celebration to mark the victors’ return.
His staff prepared hundreds of pies for a pie-eating contest, cooled scores of crates of beer and lemonade, made thousands of hot dogs, sliced beef and salami for open sandwiches, mixed potato and fruit salads.
Satisfied that the “biggest blowout” Tinian had ever known was safely under way, Perry sat down at a typewriter and prepared a program to mark the occasion. It read:
509TH
FREE BEER PARTY TODAY 2 P.M.
TODAY—TODAY—TODAY—TODAY—TODAY
PLACE—509TH BALL DIAMOND
FOR ALL MEN OF THE 509TH COMPOSITE GROUP
FOUR (4) BOTTLES OF BEER PER MAN—NO RATION CARD NEEDED
LEMONADE FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT CARE FOR BEER
ALL-STAR SOFT BALL GAME 2 P.M.
JITTER BUG CONTEST
HOT MUSIC
NOVELTY ACTS
SURPRISE CONTEST—YOU’LL FIND OUT
Extra-ADDED ATTRACTION, BLONDE, VIVACIOUS,
CURVACIOUS, STARLET DIRECT FROM ???????
PRIZES—GOOD ONES TOO
Enola Gay Page 30