Killing the Rising Sun

by Bill O'Reilly

  This is the new reality in Hiroshima as Emperor Hirohito walks his gardens. Despite the unprecedented carnage, the god-man continues to dither.

  24

  NORTH FIELD

  TINIAN, MARIANA ISLANDS

  AUGUST 9, 1945

  1030 HOURS

  Colonel Paul Tibbets still has not seen the awful destruction that he and his men delivered to Hiroshima. Right now that is not his primary concern. Radio contact with Bockscar, the aircraft flying the second A-bomb mission over Japan, has ceased; there has been a report that the aircraft and crew are lost at sea. Whether this means they’ve crash-landed in the Pacific or the new plutonium bomb exploded en route to the target, Tibbets does not know. Fearing the worst, he can only hope that the ominous radio message stating that “Bockscar is down” was garbled in transmission.

  Even though General Curtis LeMay wanted Tibbets to lead the second atomic bombing mission, Tibbets chose to hand over the job to Major Chuck Sweeney, his close friend. Tibbets wanted Sweeney to have a chance to go down in history. The twenty-five-year-old Bostonian flew The Great Artiste in the Hiroshima mission, witnessing the giant mushroom cloud that rose over the city as the plane’s scientific instruments measured radioactivity and blast force. Sweeney seemed an ideal choice to lead the second atomic bombing run over Japan, having served as a squadron commander for four months and flown five simulated A-bomb attack missions. Tibbets also knows him to be a rule follower, a man who will execute his orders precisely as they have been written.

  The nose of Bockscar, whose dramatic bombing run over Japan would be long overlooked by history

  The one flaw in Sweeney’s résumé is that he has never before flown in combat.

  * * *

  Major Chuck Sweeney and his plane, Bockscar, did not crash. Now, Sweeney sees nothing but storm clouds and antiaircraft fire as he flies over Japan, searching for his target.

  Three days after dropping the first atomic bomb, America is now just moments away from dropping a second. Ground zero is Kokura, a historic tree-lined city just 130 miles southwest of Hiroshima. It is one of Japan’s most heavily defended targets, a hub of steelworks and munitions factories. Many Hiroshima residents who survived the first A-bomb blast have come here seeking refuge.

  Sweeney’s bomb bay doors are already open. The plutonium weapon known as Fat Man is ready for release. Yet Sweeney’s orders forbid him from dropping Fat Man without a clear aerial view of the target, and the thick clouds are making it impossible to see Kokura from the air. The nearby industrial city of Yawata—an area so thick with industrial facilities that it has been called “the Pittsburgh of Japan”—was bombed last night with conventional weapons. Smoke from those still-smoldering fires now drifts over Kokura, mingling with low, gray summer-storm clouds.

  Frustrated bombardier Captain Kermit Beahan presses his left eye to the Norden bombsight’s viewfinder, straining to see the target. Today is his twenty-seventh birthday. Through the crosshairs, Beahan glimpses a few random buildings but cannot see the large arms factory that is the aiming point for Fat Man.

  An increasingly angry Charles Sweeney turns Bockscar in a steep bank. Determined to follow orders, he is taking a great risk by flying a second bombing run over the city because there is now determined opposition. Japanese antiaircraft fire explodes all around him as Sweeney flies straight over Kokura, proving to the surprised American crew that the enemy still possesses hidden defenses. Commander Frederick Ashworth, a naval officer who outranks Sweeney and serves as the mission’s chief weaponeer, climbs into the cockpit to speak with him. Ultimately, Ashworth has the power to order Sweeney to stop the bombing mission and fly home to Tinian.

  Bockscar has a fully armed A-bomb in her belly. She is behind schedule and running out of gas. Everything that can possibly go wrong on this mission has gone wrong.

  “Major,” tail gunner Sergeant Albert “Pappy” Dehart says over the radio as he watches the antiaircraft explosions coming their way, “flak is closer.”

  “Roger,” Sweeney answers, his voice flat and grim.

  Dehart’s voice comes over the radio once again, this time high and tight: “Flak right on our tail and coming closer.”

  “Skipper,” barks Staff Sergeant Edward K. Buckley, “Jap Zeros coming up at us. Looks like about ten.”

  And still Captain Beahan cannot see a thing.

  “Let’s try it from another angle,” Sweeney barks over the intercom, ignoring the approaching fighter planes as he lines up for a third run.

  But when Beahan still cannot find the target, Commander Ashworth effectively takes control of the aircraft, steering it away from Kokura.

  “It’s Nagasaki,” he tells Sweeney, calling out the name of the secondary target. “Radar or visually, but drop we will.”

  Bockscar’s bomb bay doors are immediately closed. The tone warning of the impending bomb drop abruptly ceases. The Japanese Zeros have not yet arrived, and Sweeney pushes Bockscar to the limit in order to escape.

  The crew, which has grown fearful, cheers: “Nagasaki, here we come.”

  * * *

  The complications began the day before takeoff, when nuclear engineers assembling Fat Man’s firing unit almost detonated the device by inserting a cable into the assembly backward. The problem was fixed, but not before the two engineers spent several nervous hours in the middle of the night sweating fearfully as they switched and resoldered the connectors, terrified all the while that Fat Man would blow them up.

  The next problem was fuel. Monsoon conditions over Japan required Bockscar to fly at higher altitudes than on a normal bombing run, thus burning more fuel. This problem was compounded just prior to takeoff, during the preflight systems check: the electrical switch designed to shuttle 640 gallons of gasoline from the reserve tank into the main tank was found to be ineffective. If this had been the Enola Gay, the mission would have been scrubbed. But severe weather was now forecast for Japan, meaning that the window for dropping the second A-bomb was closing fast. It was either go now or wait a week. The mission had to proceed.

  * * *

  And so Bockscar took off shortly before two o’clock on the morning of August 9, 1945. Like Enola Gay, she used the entire length of Tinian’s runway before Sweeney could coax her up into the thick tropical air. This was also the moment when, two thousand miles west, the Soviet Army launched its invasion of Manchuria.

  Already exhausted and wanting to be sharp later in the flight, Major Sweeney immediately handed the controls off to his copilot, First Lieutenant Charles Donald Albury, so he could catch a few hours’ sleep. The weather was volatile, a mixture of lightning, rain, and winds from the distant monsoon. Bockscar fought through the chop as she climbed to nine thousand feet, burning more and more fuel. In the bomb bay, Commander Ashworth and his assistant weaponeer, Lieutenant Philip M. Barnes, removed the bomb’s green safety plugs.

  Fat Man was armed.

  Three hours later, shortly after sunrise, red lights on the weaponeer’s control panel began flashing in rapid sequence, indicating that detonation could take place at any second. Terrified, Lieutenant Barnes hurried to alert Ashworth, whom he found asleep in the bomb bay, using Fat Man as a pillow.

  “Hey,” Barnes said, shaking Ashworth awake, “we got something wrong here. We got a red light going off like the bomb is going to explode right now. Armed. It’s armed. Fully armed.”

  “Oh, my God,” exclaimed Ashworth.

  The two men told no one. For ten anxious minutes, they analyzed the bomb’s blueprints, searching for a clue to the problem. Finally, after removing the outer casing so they could peer into Fat Man’s inner workings, the two men realized they had made a mistake while arming the bomb. The solution was simple: they flipped two small switches.

  The red light stopped flashing.

  Ashworth rested his head on the bomb and went back to sleep.

  But that was not the end of Bockscar’s problems. The rendezvous with the instrument plane and the photographic
plane was supposed to take place at thirty thousand feet at 0900 hours. Sweeney had specific orders from Colonel Tibbets to remain at the rendezvous point for no more than fifteen minutes. The Great Artiste, still outfitted with scientific instruments, showed up on time, but the photographic plane was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Hoppy?” Sweeney demanded, referring to the pilot of the missing B-29. “Where the hell is Hoppy?”

  Defying Tibbets’s order, Sweeney circled for fifty long minutes, burning more and more fuel. He wanted this mission to be perfect, just like that of Enola Gay. He waited at the rendezvous until he could wait no more.

  Finally, just before 10:00 a.m., Sweeney broke off and flew toward Kokura.

  Major James I. “Hoppy” Hopkins and the B-29 that will be nicknamed “Big Stink” shortly after the mission were in fact in the area the entire time. But Hopkins was at an incorrect altitude, nine thousand feet above Bockscar and The Great Artiste.

  Growing more concerned by the minute, Hopkins finally disobeyed orders and broke radio silence. “Is Bockscar down?” he asked the personnel back on Tinian.

  The control tower heard only the words “Bockscar down”—leading to Colonel Tibbets’s current angst and causing one general to step outside the mess hall and vomit up his breakfast. All ships and planes standing by for rescue operations are now told to stand down, as Bockscar is considered lost.

  But nobody has told that to Bockscar’s crew. They are now on their own.

  * * *

  Grasping the steering wheel tightly, Sweeney banks southwest toward Nagasaki, 95 miles away. He turns so severely that Bockscar almost collides midair with The Great Artiste, which has been following them to record the power of the blast. Sweeney’s jitters are compounded by the knowledge that his aircraft only has enough fuel for one bombing run if he hopes to land 450 miles away at Okinawa on his return. Even that is a stretch—he may have to crash-land Bockscar in the Pacific after dropping the bomb. The thought is weighing heavily on his mind.

  * * *

  Nagasaki is a town of some romance, first visited by Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century and so beloved by European tourists that it became the setting for Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. It is also a major port city for the Japanese war effort and home to both the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the torpedo-producing Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works.

  Sweeney levels off at twenty-eight thousand feet for the bombing run, but Nagasaki is just as covered by clouds as Kokura. Captain Kermit Beahan, Bockscar’s bombardier, is prepared to violate orders and use radar to locate the target as Sweeney begins the five-minute bombing run over the city.

  “I got it,” an excited Beahan suddenly yells, seeing the unmistakable shape of a Nagasaki racetrack through a hole in the clouds. He immediately switches from radar to visual bombardment. Bockscar’s airspeed is just two hundred miles per hour.

  Within forty-five seconds, Beahan spots the target and drops Fat Man.

  “Bombs away,” he announces. The black five-ton bomb tumbles out of the bay, destined to explode in forty-three seconds.

  Immediately, Sweeney dives Bockscar down and banks to the right, racing away from the coming mushroom cloud. The Great Artiste follows. The blast force far exceeds that of Little Boy. Five shock waves pound the two planes as they make their escape, a sensation that feels like “being beaten by a telegraph pole” to Sweeney. Within moments, both planes are out over the sea.

  “Mayday, Mayday,” Sweeney says, breaking radio silence. He is desperately trying to signal any American military craft in the area that the Bockscar is in trouble—almost out of fuel. His radio call is heard back in Tinian, reassuring them that the mission has not been aborted and that the men of Bockscar are still alive. Yet there is little anyone but Sweeney can do to get Bockscar safely to Okinawa; all rescue operations were suspended when it was feared that Bockscar had crashed. The flight engineer, Master Sergeant John D. Kuharek, estimates that their three hundred remaining gallons of fuel will leave them fifty miles short.

  For more than an hour, Sweeney and the men of Bockscar pray. They fly over open ocean, estimating their remaining fuel and knowing all too well that there is no margin for error. Each man dons his “Mae West,” the flotation device that will keep the men from drowning in case of a water landing.1 Sweeney slows the propellers to increase fuel range and lowers his elevation incrementally, allowing gravity to provide airspeed. Many of the men believe they will not make it. Bockscar’s navigator, Second Lieutenant Fred Olivi, wonders if the water will be cold.

  Okinawa finally comes into view. In the short few weeks since America conquered the island, its runways have become congested and busy; rows of bombers preparing for takeoff line the runway apron. Unable to raise the control tower on the radio, Sweeney orders that emergency flares be fired out of the plane’s upper porthole, hoping the runways will be cleared.

  They are.

  Bockscar lands at 1:51 p.m., traveling so fast that upon initial impact she bounces twenty-five feet into the air. One by one, her engines shut down for lack of fuel. Struggling to control his floundering aircraft, Sweeney just misses a row of B-24 bombers laden with incendiary bombs, which would have killed him and his crew in a massive fiery explosion.

  Finally, Bockscar comes to a halt. Emergency fire trucks and ambulances race to her assistance. The bomber does not even have enough fuel to taxi off the runway. Incredibly, no one has informed the airfield that Bockscar is en route.

  “Who the hell are you?” demands base commander Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, the man whose daring raid on Tokyo in 1942 marked the first American attack on Japanese soil. It is a fitting moment: the first man to bomb Japan in the Second World War is standing toe-to-toe with the man who hopes to be the last.

  “We are the 509, Bockscar,” Sweeney replies. “We dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.”

  Not having lingered to assess the aftereffects of Fat Man, Sweeney tells Doolittle, “I think we were a little off target.”

  * * *

  Fat Man is indeed off target, missing the Mitsubishi torpedo plant by almost two miles.

  It doesn’t matter.

  “The pillar of fire became a living thing,” New York Times journalist William Laurence will write, watching the explosion on board The Great Artiste. “A species of being born right before incredulous eyes. It seethed and boiled in white fury like a thousand geysers.”2

  On the ground in Nagasaki, an estimated forty-five thousand men, women, and children die instantly; another sixty thousand are badly injured. There is no firestorm, as in Hiroshima, because Fat Man detonates in the foothills of the steep, wooded folds of the Urakami Valley, thus preventing the blast from expanding outward. However, the traumatic flash burns and the carbonization of the dead and dying are no less intense.

  Nagasaki as the mushroom cloud from Fat Man rises up and out over the city

  Once again, thousands are crushed in the rubble of their own homes and businesses. The unique construction of Nagasaki’s bomb shelters, which are mostly caves dug into the hillsides, turns the stone passageways into ovens that burn hundreds alive in an instant. Throughout the city, many of the burned walk for miles before collapsing and dying. Still others suffer not just from burns but also from vomiting and bloody diarrhea, which kill them within a week of Fat Man’s detonation. Thousands of victims watch their skin grow yellow; they are doomed to die weeks and months later from radiation poisoning. The city of Nagasaki, having no place to bury all the bodies, establishes open-air crematoriums to burn the dead.

  In one haunting incident, a young boy no more than ten years old approaches the operators of a crematorium. He carries his infant brother in a small pack on his back. Head lolling peacefully to one side, the infant appears to be sleeping.

  He carefully removes his backpack and hands his brother to the men working the flames, who see that the baby is dead. As the infant is placed on coals to be cremated, his older
brother stands at rigid attention like a soldier and watches, fighting off tears by biting his lip so hard that a trickle of blood soon runs off the corner of his mouth.

  Only when he is certain that his baby brother has received a proper cremation does the young boy turn and leave.

  “The general impression, which transcends those derived from our physical senses, is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without hope for resurrection,” one eyewitness to the destruction will write.

  “It’s everywhere, and nothing has escaped its touch.”3

  25

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  AUGUST 9, 1945

  10:46 A.M.

  A vicious wave of heat and humidity envelops the nation’s capital as President Harry Truman meets for ninety minutes in the Oval Office with his select team of atomic weapons advisers.1 News of the successful Nagasaki mission reached the White House overnight, and as foul summer storms lash Japan, delaying further bombing for the near future, Truman must decide whether, once the weather clears, the United States should drop a third atomic bomb. Target: Tokyo.

  Truman does not wish to obliterate the Japanese; he wants them to surrender. Early reports show heavy civilian casualties in Nagasaki, just as in Hiroshima. Yet the Japanese military seems willing to endure such horrific losses.

  “For myself, I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the ‘pigheadedness’ of the leaders of a nation,” Truman will write to his friend, Georgia’s Democratic senator Richard Russell. “My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.”

  Truman is expressing his sympathy, not reversing his position. He is as adamant as ever that he will do what it takes to defeat the Japanese.