THOS. T. HANDY
General, G.S.C.
Acting Chief of Staff
U.S. Air Force
B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Enola Gay, pictured above with its crew, dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima on August 6. Bockscar (below) dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki on August 9.
U.S. Air Force
“A very sobering event”
Colonel Paul W. Tibbets was in charge of the 509th Composite Group’s first mission to Japan, dropping the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. The following excerpt includes his eyewitness account of the mission.
From Operational History of the 509th Bombardment
At 0245 Tinian time on Monday, 6 August 1945, Col Tibbets and crew took off in the Enola Gay. The crew consisted of the following people: SSgt George R. Caron, tail gunner; Sgt Joe S. Stiborik, radar operator; SSgt Wyatt E. Duzenbury, flight engineer; PFC Richard H. Nelson, radio operator; Sgt Robert H. Shumad, assistant engineer; Maj Thomas W. Ferebee, group bombardier; Capt Theodore J. Van Kirk, navigator; Col Paul W. Tibbets, pilot and commander; Capt Robert A. Lewis, copilot; Lt Jacob Beser, radar countermeasures officer; and weaponeers, Captain William S. Parsons (US Navy) and Lt Morris R. Jeppson. The two other 509th planes that accompanied the Enola Gay included the instrument aircraft, the Great Artiste, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney and a third B-29, equipped with photographic equipment, commanded by Major George Marquardt.
As the crew approached the mainland of Japan, the weather was clear for the visual drop requirement. Col Tibbets described the final minutes before the drop:
We made the final turn to 272 degrees magnetic course for 14 minutes (72 NM). Ferebee checked the bomb sights and said “I have the aiming point in sight.” Van Kirk checked and agreed. The crew put on the dark goggles and turned on the tone for the instrument plane to know exactly when the bomb was released. Two small corrections were made and we finally released the bomb.
At precisely 0815:17 Japan time, the Enola Gay released the first atomic bomb over the target of Hiroshima. The Little Boy uranium bomb fell from 31,600 feet, detonating 43 seconds later, 600 yards in the air over the city. In a millisecond, a force of 20,000 tons of TNT was released, generating a fireball of heat equivalent to 300,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature of the ground beneath the burst reached an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Centigrade and the heat rays caused flash burns up to 13,000 feet away. Nearly 80,000 people were killed instantly, and almost every building within a 2-mile radius was obliterated.
Immediately after the release Col Tibbets said:
I made the required 155-degree turn away from the target and found my goggles made it so dark that I could not see the instruments, so I took them off. The tail gunner called, “Here it comes.” I had a peculiar taste (electrolysis) in my mouth and saw a bright hue. The first shock wave hit with a force of 2½ Gs, followed by a 2-G shock and a smaller third shock wave. It was a very sobering event, as we turned back over the target to take camera photos of the area. A boiling, tumbling, rolling cloud rose up from the ground. The cloud went up rapidly and was 10,000 feet above us and climbing by the time we had turned around. Down below all you could see was a black, boiling nest. I didn’t think about what was going on down on the ground—you need to be objective about this. I didn’t order the bomb to be dropped, but I had a mission to do.
“Massive pain, suffering, and horror”
Atomic bombs were introduced to the world when the Little Boy bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa describes the utter devastation of the bomb in Japan in contrast to the sense of “overwhelming success” in Washington, D.C., as President Truman warned the Japanese to “expect a rain of ruin.”
From Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
BY TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA
Little Boy exploded 1,900 feet above the courtyard of Shima Hospital, 550 feet off its target, Aioi Bridge over Ota River, with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT. The temperature at ground zero reached 5,400°F, immediately creating a fireball within half a mile, roasting people “to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away.” Thousands of such charred bundles were strewn in the streets, sidewalks, and bridges. A man sitting on the steps of a bank waiting for it to open vaporized, leaving only his shadow on the granite steps.
The blast that followed the explosion destroyed thousands of houses, burning most of them. Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima, 70,000 were destroyed. Fire broke out all over the city, devouring everything in its path. People walked aimlessly in eerie silence, many black with burns, the skin peeling from their bodies. Others frantically ran to look for their missing loved ones. Thousands of dead bodies floated in the river. Everywhere there was “massive pain, suffering, and horror,” unspeakable and unprecedented. Then the black rain fell, soaking everyone with radiation. Those who survived the initial shock began to die from radiation sickness. According to one study conducted by the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 110,000 civilians and 20,000 military personnel were killed instantly. By the end of 1945, 140,000 had perished.
On August 6, four days after leaving Plymouth, Truman was having lunch with the Augusta crew when Captain Frank Graham of the White House Map Room handed him a report with the message “Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 P.M. Washington time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.” The president beamed. He jumped to his feet and shook hands with Graham. “Captain,” he said, “this is the greatest thing in history.” He told Graham to take the message to [James] Byrnes, who was seated at another table. Byrnes read the message and exclaimed, “Fine! Fine!” A few minutes later the second message arrived, which reported “visible effects greater than in any test.” Truman signaled the crew in the mess hall and announced: “We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!” Truman and Byrnes then went to the officers’ wardroom to announce the news.
Meanwhile, Eben Ayers in the White House released a previously approved message from the President: “A short time ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.” The statement went on to say that the Japanese had begun the war by attacking Pearl Harbor, and that the bombing of Hiroshima was retribution for that act. The statement declared that “the bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.” Truman’s message ended with a dire warning:
It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do 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. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.
A LONG FORTY-THREE SECONDS
It took forty-three seconds from the time the bomb left the airplane to the time it exploded. Everyone was counting to forty-three. “One-thousand one, one-thousand two…” I was fortunate, I had a watch. But I think we had all concluded that it was a dud. We were nervous, counting fast or something because all of a sudden we saw the bright flash inside the airplane and knew that the bomb had exploded.
—THEODORE “DUTCH” VAN KIRK, NAVIGATOR ON THE ENOLA GAY
“Miss Yamaoka, you look like a monster”
Immediately after the detonation of the Little Boy atomic bomb, the people of Hiroshima remembered two sensations: a bright light, pika, and a loud noise, don. As historian Richard B. Frank relates in several firsthand accounts, this pika-don was indelibly etched into the memories of the Japanese survivors, or hibakusha. The effects of the heat and fires were so devastating
that many survivors were, like Miss Yamaoka, burned beyond recognition.
From Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire
BY RICHARD B. FRANK
Upon hearing the changed pitch of the engines as the Enola Gay banked violently into its evasive turn, many looked up to see the “dazzling gleam from its mighty flank, and… a fleecy white cloud trail across the blue sky.” Little Boy detonated at 8:16, after a forty-three-second fall to an altitude of 1,900 feet over the courtyard of the Shima Hospital, 550 feet southeast of the Aioi bridge aiming point. The power of the bomb later was calculated as equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT. It created a blinding pulse of light for perhaps only a tenth of a second, but the center of that pulse reached 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
On a hillside two kilometers northwest of the city, P. Siomes, a German Jesuit missionary, was gazing out the window toward Hiroshima when “a garish light which resemble[d] the magnesium light used in photography” filled the whole vista. Behind it surged an intense heat wave. He jumped to the window but saw only “brilliant yellow light” and heard only a “moderately large explosion.” An Imperial Army medical-investigation team reported that the flash appeared yellow to those nearby and blue to those farther away. Distant witnesses described it as a red radiant sunset. Two words became fixed to the event: pika and don—pika meaning a glitter, sparkle, or bright flash of light; don meaning a boom or loud sound. Many who had been close in later recalled hearing no sound of an explosion and spoke only of the pika; those like Father Siomes who saw the flash and heard a rumble called it the pika-don, flash-boom.
Close in, the pika signified more than brightness. At a stone bridge about four hundred yards from ground zero, an American officer later found the etched shadow of a man with one foot in the air pulling a laden two-wheeled cart. The man’s shadow had shielded the blacktop from the heat, but elsewhere the surface melted to tar and absorbed dust. The only vestige of another man idling at a bank building was his shadow on the granite. Both had been vaporized at or near the speed of light, passing from being to nothingness faster than any human physiology can register. Among those who died from the bomb, they were the lucky ones and presumably knew nothing.
The light waves traveled in straight lines so that persons farther away showed patterns of burns perfectly reflecting their exposed surfaces. For a radius of two miles, the flash inflicted “primary burns,” noted a detailed study, “[which] are injuries of a special nature and not ordinarily experienced in everyday life.” Among those not vaporized, the skin characteristically took on a dark brown or black hue, and most victims died in agony within a few minutes or hours. Nearly all objects, not only flesh, took on this tone, so that Hiroshima’s ruins appeared “brown, the color of unfired pottery.”
The pika-don caught Michiko Yamaoka, a fifteen-year-old mobilized high-school student, ambling toward her job as a telephone operator, about eight hundred meters from what became the hypocenter, the theoretical point directly below where the bomb burst. She understood that “Japan was winning, so we still believed. We only had to endure.” In the bright sunlight, she put her hand above her eyes to glance up to the faint sound of an aircraft, then Little Boy exploded. “There was no sound. I felt something strong. It was terribly intense. I felt colors. It wasn’t heat. You can’t call it yellow, and it wasn’t blue.” She sensed the heat wave envelop her as the blast lifted her up and tossed her aside. She lay under rocks, unable to see but able to hear “moans of agony and despair.” Then she heard, “Fire! Run away! Help! Hurry up!” The heat wave had ignited a firestorm that overran the injured and the trapped, hugely increasing the death toll. Yamaoka’s mother found her, and soldiers dug her out as crackling flames encroached near, charring her skin and clothes and leaving her hair “like a lion’s mane.” Nearby were people trying to push intestines back into their bodies; headless bodies; legless bodies; seared, swollen faces. She encountered a friend and called out. The friend at first did not respond, then she exclaimed: “Miss Yamaoka, you look like a monster.” Only then did she know how badly she had been burned.
Shin Bok Su was a Korean and a Hiroshima resident since 1937. Her family had emerged from its shelter with the all clear, then “‘PIKA!’ a brilliant light and then ‘DON!’ a gigantic noise,” then blackness. She heard her mother-in-law call out and found her lying protectively across a thirteen-month-old son but trapped by fallen debris. She finally freed them, but the terrified older woman bolted away. Her husband appeared, and they began frantically digging to find their other two children as the fires marched toward their house; finally, soldiers tugged them away. They spent the night on city sports fields with people dying all around them. The next day, they returned to the site of their once large house, where fires still burned, as did “the corpses of my children. When I approached, I saw a line of buttons from my son’s white shirt. Akiko, my girl, was curled up next to Takeo. Flames were still licking up from them.”
For Dr. Hachiya, in an instant a vision of shimmering leaves vanished; the garden shadows disappeared; a stone lantern brilliantly ignited; a blast removed his clothes and inflicted multiple wounds. With his injured wife, he fled into the street, tripping over the head of a dead officer crushed beneath a massive gate. “Excuse me, excuse me, please!” he cried hysterically to the dead man. Motionless in the street, their stunned gazes beheld their neighbors’ house sway and then crash with a rending sound into the street, followed shortly by a swirl of dust as their own house collapsed. Hachiya staggered to his workplace, the Ministry of Communications Hospital, a modern building. He passed others—all completely silent—walking with arms held out, forearms dangling. A young girl who also witnessed this behavior described more graphically how she saw
three high school girls who looked as though they were from our school; their faces and everything were completely burned and they held their arms out in front of their chest like kangaroos with only their hands pointed downward; from their whole bodies something like thin paper is dangling—it is their peeled off skin which hangs there, and trailing behind them the unburned remnants of their puttees, they stagger exactly like sleep walkers.
Hachiya and his wife found the streets deserted except for the dead. Some looked as if they had been frozen by death while in the full action of flight, others lay sprawled as though some giant had flung them to their death from a great height.
The hospital quickly became packed with the dying and injured. They came seeking “so much as a glimpse of a white robed doctor or nurse,” wrote Hachiya. Broken bodies literally filled every space; the floors and grounds soon became coated with feces, urine, and vomitus. A coworker, Dr. Hanaoka, arrived to report that he saw reservoirs filled to the brim with people who looked as though they had been boiled alive. Another colleague, Mr. Katsutani, bore more eyewitness descriptions of horrors, the worst of which were the injuries to soldiers he passed, their skin burned from the hips up, “their flesh wet and mushy” where the skin peeled, “and they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off.” Little Boy caught thousands of soldiers doing morning calisthenics. It totally flattened the headquarters of the Second General Army at Hiroshima Castle, and an intercepted message later disclosed that the entire army staff, from Field Marshal Hata on down, had been injured. The bomb killed the commander of the Fifty-ninth Army, Lieutenant General Yoji Fuji, whose “burnt sword was found alongside his charred remains.”
“For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein!”
The announcement that an atomic bomb had been used against Japan was very startling. Historian Paul Boyer describes the unfolding of the news with the first radio announcements at noon followed quickly by commentary on the new state of the world.
From By the Bomb’s Early Light
BY PAUL BOYER
The first to hear the news that distant Monday were those who happened to be near a radio at midday—housewives, children, the elderly, war workers enjoy
ing a vacation day at home:
This is Don Goddard with your news at noon. A little less than an hour ago, newsmen were called to the White House down in Washington, and there they were read a special announcement written by President Truman.… This was the story of a new bomb, so powerful that only the imagination of a trained scientist could dream of its existence. Without qualification, the President said that Allied scientists have now harnessed the basic power of the universe. They have harnessed the atom.
As the sultry August afternoon wore on, the news spread by word of mouth. The evening papers reported it in screaming headlines:
ATOMIC BOMB LOOSED ON JAPAN
ONE EQUALS 20,000 TONS OF TNT
FIRST TARGET IS ARMY BASE OF HIROSHIMA
DUST AND SMOKE OBSCURE RESULT.
On his six o’clock newscast, Lowell Thomas of CBS radio, already assuming that everyone had heard the story, began in his folksy, avuncular voice:
That news about the atomic bomb overshadows everything else today; and the story of the dropping of the first one on Japan. The way the Japanese describe last night’s raid on Hiroshima indicates that this one bomb was so destructive that the Japs thought they had been blasted by squadrons of B-29s.
Meanwhile, over at NBC, the dean of radio news commentators, H. V. Kaltenborn, was preparing the script of his 7:45 P.M. broadcast. The first draft began by describing the atomic bomb as “one of the greatest scientific developments in the history of man.” Hastily, Kaltenborn penciled in a punchier opening: “Anglo-Saxon science has developed a new explosive 2,000 times as destructive as any known before.”
Continuing in his stern, professional voice, Kaltenborn struck a somber note: “For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.”
The Manhattan Project Page 33