And Ration Free Beer
FOOD GALORE BY PERRY & CO. CATERERS
SPECIAL MOVIE WILL FOLLOW AT 1930, “IT’S A PLEASURE” IN
TECHNICOLOR WITH SONJA HENIE AND
MICHAEL O’SHEA
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CHECK WITH YOUR ORDERLY ROOM FOR MORE DETAILS
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Wear Old Clothes Wear Old Clothes Wear Old Clothes
6 AUGUST 1945
WELCOME PARTY FOR RETURN OF ENOLA GAY
FROM
HIROSHIMA MISSION
7
Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the attack on Pearl Harbor and now flying toward Hiroshima in his navy bomber, wondered what force had created the strange cloud hovering over the city.
He called the airport’s control tower. There was no reply.
As he got closer, Fuchida saw that Hiroshima, the city he had left only the afternoon before, “was simply not there anymore. Huge fires rose up in all quarters. But most of these fires seemed not to be consuming buildings; they were consuming debris.”
Fuchida would have no conscious recollection of landing his plane on the runway, the same one from which Yasuzawa had made his epic takeoff. His next memory would be walking toward the airport exit, immaculately dressed in his white uniform, shoes, and gloves, and coming face-to-face with “a procession of people who seemed to have come out of Hell.”
Horrified, Fuchida walked into Hiroshima. The dead and the dying clogged the gutters, floated in the rivers, blocked the streets. Near the city’s center, whole areas had simply disappeared; for at least a square mile, “nothing remained.” Utterly depressed and exhausted by what he could see, Fuchida wandered aimlessly through the wasteland.
8
The Enola Gay was 363 miles from Hiroshima when Caron reported that the mushroom cloud was no longer visible. Only then did Tibbets catnap, leaving Lewis to fly the plane.
At 2:20 P.M., Tinian time, Tibbets was awakened by Farrell calling from North Field tower to offer his congratulations. Refreshed after a can of fruit juice, Tibbets took over flying the bomber. At 2:58 P.M., the Enola Gay touched down at North Field. She had been in the air for twelve hours and thirteen minutes.
Two hundred officers and men were crowded on the macadam to greet her. Several thousand more lined the taxiways.
They cheered when Tibbets led the crew down through the hatch behind the nose wheel. All were swamped by cameramen and well-wishers. A brigadier general ordered the crowds back. Into the space he had cleared stepped General Spaatz. He walked up to Tibbets and pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on the breast of his coveralls. The two men separated, still not having spoken, and saluted each other. Then Spaatz turned and led away a coterie of high-ranking officers. The others again swarmed around the fliers and plied them with questions.
An officer took Caron’s camera. The photographs were processed and rushed to Washington for worldwide distribution.
Another officer took Beser’s wire recorder. The recordings vanished.
The debriefing was a relaxed, informal affair, helped along by generous shots of bourbon and free cigarettes. By the time it was over, Perry’s party was in full swing.
Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter. All Paul Tibbets and the other men on the Enola Gay wanted to do was sleep.
Aftermath
AUGUST 7
TO MIDDAY, AUGUST 15, 1945
1
By the morning of August 7, news had trickled through to the Japanese leaders that Hiroshima had been hit by a new kind of bomb. They were told the destruction caused was very great but, in devastated Tokyo, the reports sounded distressingly familiar.
President Truman’s statement describing the weapon in some detail, which had been released to an astounded world and a delirious American public the day before, was then broadcast to Japan. It was dismissed by many politicians as propaganda. The Japanese public was told nothing by its leaders.
Worldwide reaction was mixed.
The Vatican condemned the new bomb as a “catastrophic conclusion to the war’s apocalyptic surprises.” A spokesman compared the bomb’s invention with that of the submarine by Leonardo da Vinci and expressed regret that the nuclear scientists did not, like da Vinci, “destroy their creation in the interest of humanity.”
In Britain, the government welcomed the bomb as a means of speedily ending the war. H. G. Wells, who had forecast atomic bombs twelve years earlier in his book The Shape of Things to Come, remarked, “This can wipe out everything bad, or good, in this world. It is up to the people to decide which.”
In a Luxembourg prison camp, top-ranking Nazi war criminals—among them Göring, von Ribbentrop, and Field Marshal Keitel—agreed that warfare had reached a turning point. Von Ribbentrop, the former foreign minister, said, “No one would be so stupid as to start a war now. It is the opportunity for mankind to end war forever.”
In the Soviet Union, the media did not rate the atomic bomb worthy of headline news. While expressing “interest in the new weapon,” radio and newspaper reports stressed that Russian scientists were also “well advanced in atomic research.”
In Washington, D.C., senators called on the newly created United Nations to ensure that the “peace-loving nations share the benefits of the discovery that led to the bomb.”
What most everyone agreed on was that the world would never be quite the same again.
When the Japanese Cabinet learned about the bomb, Major General Arisue was chosen to head a group of high-ranking officers and scientists to go to Hiroshima to investigate. Among the scientists was Professor Asada, the physicist who had worked on Japan’s atomic bomb and who was still perfecting his death ray.
In Hiroshima, with the mayor dead, Field Marshal Hata took over administrative control of the city. He himself had been only superficially injured, although his wife was severely burned. Hata moved his headquarters to the underground bunker cut into the side of Mount Futaba.
Many of his senior officers were dead. Prince RiGu and his white stallion were gone; so, too, Colonel Katayama, whose horse had been found compressed to half its breadth in a crack in the ground. Hata’s orders were relayed through Colonel Imoto, who, although badly injured, was the field marshal’s highest-ranking surviving officer.
Relief workers were slow to arrive in Hiroshima. The first help came from the soldiers based at Ujina. The harbor was over two miles from the epicenter, and little damage was done to it. Marines collected the explosive-filled suicide boats, prepared for the American invasion, from the coves around Hiroshima Harbor. The small craft were emptied of their charges, lashed together, and covered with planks. Raftlike, they moved slowly up the rivers to Hiroshima’s center, collecting wounded and taking them to the military hospital at Ujina. The boats’ passage was hampered by the dead bodies in the rivers; the corpses floated in and out with the tide for days.
The fate of the American prisoners of war is not certain. Two were reported to have been escorted, wounded but able to walk, to Ujina. One was seen under a bridge, apparently dying, wearing only a pair of red-and-white underpants. Two were said to have been battered to death in the castle grounds by their captors.
Warrant Officer Hiroshi Yanagita, the Kempei Tai leader, was still suffering from a hangover when the bomb exploded. Less than half a mile from the epicenter, he was thrown naked from the bed in his second-floor room. The house was on fire. He went to the window and jumped—only to find the house had collapsed and his room was at street level. Dressed in a sheet, skirting the edge of the city, Yanagita made his way to Ujina. There he collected some clothes and ten soldiers, and went to the leveled site where Hiroshima Castle once stood. He saw no American POWs. But when he reached his divisional Kempei Tai headquarters in the west of the city, one of his men told him he had tried to bring two prisoners to the headquarters but, finding it impossible, had left them by the Aioi Bridge. There, one person reported seeing them, hands tied behind their backs, being stoned to death.
Ame
rican records so far available show that at least pilot Thomas Cartwright and tail gunner William Abel survived the war. Both were awarded the Purple Heart. Cartwright’s commission terminated in 1953. Abel retired from the American forces in 1968. It is possible that they, and indeed other POWs, had been moved from Hiroshima before the bomb fell.
On Tinian, the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, some 509th crews, including the Enola Gay’s, with Lewis in command, took off for a follow-up attack on Japan using conventional bombs. In the meantime, Tibbets flew to Guam, where, on August 8, he held a short press conference in which he confined his comments to a straightforward recital of the facts of the mission.
President Truman had warned the Japanese leaders that if they “did not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
The Japanese had not accepted the terms.
American leaders, fearing that the Hiroshima bomb might have hardened Japan’s will to resist and might also be regarded as an unrepeatable phenomenon, decided to use the second bomb, which was the only other one then ready. They hoped to convince Japan’s leaders that America’s nuclear capability was far greater than it was.
LeMay asked Tibbets, “Don’t you think you should lead the second attack?”
Tibbets replied, “No. I’m getting enough publicity. The other guys have worked long and hard and can do the job as well as I can.”
Sweeney was chosen to command the second strike. He told his crew he wanted “to do it just like Paul did.” Among those on board would be Jacob Beser, the only man to accompany both atomic bombs to Japan. Cheshire and Penney, the British representatives, would ride in one of the two observer planes.
There were only two potential targets: Kokura was the primary, Nagasaki the alternate. Both cities were on the island of Kyushu, southwest of Hiroshima.
From the beginning, the mission was bedeviled. The predicted weather over the targets was not promising. Sweeney’s plane, the Great Artiste, had been fitted with scientific equipment for the first atomic run and would again be so used on the second. To carry the bomb, Sweeney borrowed another B-29, Bock’s Car. Just before takeoff, a fault was found in the plane: six hundred gallons of gas were trapped in one tank and would not be available for use during the flight. Sweeney decided to risk it.
When he reached the rendezvous point, where the other two planes were to join him, Sweeney could find only one. He waited forty minutes for the third bomber to appear, but then could wait no longer. He headed for Kokura.
Bock’s Car made three runs over the target, but the aiming point, a munitions complex, remained obscured. Puffs of antiaircraft fire were exploding below. Beser noticed signs of activity on the Japanese fighter-control circuits he was monitoring. Interceptor planes were on the way.
Sweeney, his fuel running low, decided to “go for Nagasaki.” There, again, he found heavy overcast. Then, suddenly, bombardier Kermit Beahan, like Ferebee a veteran of the war in Europe, shouted that he had spotted a break in the clouds. He told Sweeney, “I’ll take it.”
Beahan called minor course corrections and then dropped the plutonium bomb. It fell wide of the intended aiming point, exploding above the northwest section of the city. Although the plutonium bomb was more powerful than the uranium bomb used at Hiroshima, it did less damage and caused fewer casualties, mainly because of the difference in Nagasaki’s terrain. Even so, its effect was devastating.
Following a harrowing landing at Okinawa, its fuel supply almost gone, Bock’s Car returned belatedly to Tinian, after twenty hours.
Tibbets praised Sweeney and Beahan for their achievement. Privately, he decided that if another atomic attack proved necessary, he himself would lead it.
Meanwhile, in Moscow on August 8, Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador who had tried repeatedly to get his government to surrender before it was too late, was bluntly told by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that as of midnight the Soviet Union would be at war with Japan.
Next morning, while the six members of Japan’s Inner Cabinet met for the first time since the nuclear bomb had fallen on Hiroshima, they learned that Russian troops had marched into Manchuria, and that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki.
But the members of the Inner Cabinet could not bring themselves to surrender. They talked all morning, afternoon, and into the evening. Those in favor of continuing the war pointed out that millions of Japanese soldiers had hardly been tested. They were spoiling for a fight and would probably not surrender even if ordered to do so.
Premier Suzuki, desperate to break the deadlock, suggested that Emperor Hirohito might graciously agree to help them come to a conclusion.
At 2.00 A.M., August 10, Japan’s divine ruler stated that he was in complete accord with his foreign minister. He then left the meeting.
The view of Foreign Minister Togo was that Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation, on the understanding that the Allied demands did not “prejudice the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”
When Truman and his advisers learned of this qualification, they, too, found themselves divided. Eventually, Secretary of State Byrnes came up with an agreeable formula. While making clear the emperor’s authority to rule would at first be subject to that of the Allied supreme commander in Japan, it reiterated that eventually the Japanese people would be free to choose whatever form of government they wished.
When the Japanese leaders received America’s reply, they still could not agree to capitulate. They talked through August 12, 13, and into August 14. Then Emperor Hirohito acted again. He told the military and civilian leaders that they should “bear the unbearable and accept the Allied reply.” He agreed personally to inform his people by radio of the decision the next day.
The Japanese surrender was made known to the American public late in the afternoon of August 14. Most had no doubt that the atomic bomb had ended the war.
The Russian public was told the Red Army had forced Japan to submit.
In truth, it was probably the fact of the bomb plus fear of the Russians that caused—or made it possible for—Japan to give up.
On August 15, just before noon, people all over Japan waited to hear their emperor speak. They had been told in the past—and most still believed—they were winning the war. They had no understanding yet of what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In Hiroshima, a crowd gathered by a loudspeaker in the demolished railway station to hear the sacred words of their divine monarch.
Emperor Hirohito used such formal and oblique phrases—the word surrender was never uttered—that it was almost impossible for the average person to grasp what he meant.
But when he ended his address, a great number no longer thought they were winning the war. They believed they had won. For, as one of those in the crowd at the Hiroshima railway station remarked, “How else could the war end?”
Epilogue
1
Early in September 1945, Tibbets, Ferebee, and van Kirk flew to Japan to inspect Nagasaki. After touring the city—a journey which had little emotional impact on Tibbets—he wound up shopping. “I bought rice bowls and wooden carved hand trays,” he recalled. “So did Ferebee, and we became typical American tourists.”
In America, Tibbets found himself a controversial figure. Unlike some members of the crew, he hated the publicity. He was glad to be sent to the Air War College in Alabama, where he could study war tactics. He wrote a thesis on “the employment of atomic bombs,” used by the Strategic Air Command, America’s answer to the Soviet Union’s takeover of Eastern Europe.
In the late 1950s, Tibbets served as a senior officer with NATO in France. He returned to the United States and the Strategic Air Command, once again in a flying job he liked.
He remarried. This time the marriage was successful.
In May 1965, at the age of fifty, a brigadier general, Tibbets was appointed deputy director of t
he U.S. Military Supply Mission to India. Almost twenty years had passed since he flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, but within a week of his arrival in New Delhi, Tibbets was greeted by virulent headlines in the pro-Communist press, labeling him “the world’s greatest killer.”
He was given a Gurkha bodyguard, but nobody could protect him from the continued newspaper harassment. An embarrassed State Department recalled Tibbets and closed down the mission.
Back in Washington, Tibbets was given a desk job. He believed his career in the air force was over. After thirty years in the service, he retired, convinced he was an “expendable victim” of a changing public attitude toward what he had been ordered to do over Hiroshima.
Withdrawn, even within his family circle, he has stayed close to his first love—airplanes. He is president of an executive jet company in the Midwest and still regularly flies Lear jets and, when the rare occasion arises, a B-29. He has arranged that when he dies, his ashes will be scattered in the sky.
Claude Eatherly, the flamboyant Texan whose off-duty conduct would have cost him his place in the 509th had he not been such an accomplished pilot, never adjusted to civilian life. His path was strewn with worthless checks, a conviction for forgery, post-office burglaries—interspersed with stays in Veterans Administration mental hospitals. His wife left him, and, after years of patient loyalty, even his brother Joe refused to put up with his drunkenness and penchant for petty crime. How, then, did this ne’er-do-well become a martyr, the American Dreyfus, the Hiroshima pilot who went mad because of his guilt over the bombing?
A reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, on the hunt for a human interest story, came across Eatherly in a routine check of the jail. The headline on his front-page story on March 20, 1957, read: WORLD WAR II HERO IN TROUBLE. The first sentence read: “The Air Force pilot who led the world’s first atomic bombing mission into Hiroshima was in Tarrant County Jail Wednesday—charged with a crime against his country.” The story, further on, clarified Eatherly’s role as the pilot of one of four (sic) reconnaissance planes, but the harm was done. Eatherly was a “hero,” and he had “led” the bombing mission. The next day’s page 1 headline read: HERO TO PLEAD INSANITY IN POST OFFICE BREAK-INS.
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