THE 509 COMPOSITE GROUP, 20TH AIR Force, will deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 5 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. To carry military and civilian scientific personnel from the War Department to observe and record the effects of the explosion of the bomb, additional aircraft will accompany the airplane carrying the bomb….
Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff.44
Stricken from the atomic target list, as it had been from LeMay’s list of cities to burn, was Kyoto. Nagasaki replaced it. It was a major military port in western Kyushu that was the home of the enormous Mitsubishi Steel and Armament Works and of a plant that made the torpedoes that were used against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Hiroshima, the primary target, was the southern headquarters and supply depot for the homeland army that would mount the defense of Kyushu. Located on the main island just across the Inland Sea from Kyushu, it had a population of about 350,000 and also contained a number of war industries.
The United States was about to commit the most destructive single act in the history of civilization. How had it come to this decision?
The world’s first nuclear explosion occurred in the New Mexico desert, at a remote area of Alamogordo Air Force Base, in the early morning hours of July 16. 1945. Truman was notified immediately and received a detailed description of the plutonium explosion five days later at Potsdam, an undamaged suburb of Berlin where he was meeting with Stalin and Churchill. Groves’s report was euphoric. The “awesome roar” of the bomb had been heard at a distance of 100 miles and the “searing light” from the explosion had been seen 180 miles away. “All seemed to feel,” wrote Groves’s deputy, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, “that they had been present at the birth of a new age.” But Groves concluded soberly, “We are all fully conscious that our real goal is still before us. The battle test is what counts.”45
At Potsdam, Truman also secured a pledge from Stalin that Russia would soon enter the war against Japan. “I’ve gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it,” Truman wrote jubilantly to his wife on July 18. “I’ll say we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t get killed. That is the important thing.”46 With Russia on the move in East Asia, it would be impossible for Japan to bring in reinforcements from Manchuria, northern China, and Korea to help stop an American invasion.
On July 26 the Allied leaders at Potsdam issued an ultimatum calling for “the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces…. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”47
None of the President’s advisors opposed using the atomic bomb. But Secretary of War Stimson, Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Grew, and a number of others had tried to persuade Truman to eliminate the unconditional surrender clause of the Potsdam Declaration or at least modify it to allow the Japanese to keep their Emperor. They did so not to avoid dropping the A-bomb (Grew didn’t know about the bomb), but to make an invasion unnecessary.
These proposals appealed to Truman’s interest in saving lives, but to Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes this was rank appeasement. Byrnes, the longtime Democratic leader of the Senate, had enormous influence on the President, a former senator from Missouri. The Germans had to accept unconditional surrender, he argued. Why not the Japanese? Byrnes was also concerned about Truman’s standing with the American people. A Gallup poll taken on May 29 showed the American public overwhelmingly opposed to retaining the Emperor, whom they saw as a Hitler—like figure who had encouraged Japanese aggression. A third of those polled wanted him executed as a war criminal. Only 7 percent favored retaining him as a figurehead.
That spring, Americans learned of the Palawan Massacre. To prevent 150 American POWs from falling into enemy hands, Japanese soldiers on the Philippine island of Palawan put them into an air raid shelter, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire with long torches. Some of the men—their bodies in flames—managed to escape the shelter, but most were cut down by gunfire and finished off with bayonets. Miraculously, a few escaped to tell their grisly story, which further inflamed anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Giving in to Stimson, Byrnes warned, “would mean the crucifixion of the President.”48
Some scholars criticize the “uncompromising” nature of the Potsdam Declaration. But Truman was determined to overthrow the Imperial system, or kokutai, that was behind Japan’s racist war of conquest in Asia, in the same way that Roosevelt and Churchill had vowed to eradicate Nazism root and branch. Japan must not be treated more leniently than Germany.
Truman intuited correctly that the Emperor was not a mere ceremonial figure, but an active advocate, until the dying days of the war, of a fight to the finish with the Americans. And historian Herbert Bix points out what Truman could not have known: that even the peace faction in the Japanese cabinet wanted to retain this authoritarian system. The entire cabinet and the Imperial court were fighting not for a constitutional monarchy, Bix argues, but “for a monarchy based on the principle of oracular sovereignty,” a system that could allow them to continue to control the Japanese people.49 It is unlikely, moreover, that an American guarantee of the maintenance of the Imperial system would have caused Japan to surrender before the Normandy invasion on terms acceptable to the Americans.50
On July 24, after agreeing to the wording of the Potsdam Declaration, Truman had learned from Stimson that one bomb would probably be ready by August 1. The President “was highly delighted,” Stimson wrote in his diary.51 Did he make his final decision to drop the bomb that day? We will never know. Probably, there was no one moment when he made up his mind. The only real decision he had to make was whether or not to stop the almost unstoppable momentum of events. Leslie Groves would later observe that Truman’s “decision was one of noninterference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.”52
Truman knew the bomb would kill tens of thousands of innocent people, and that did not sit well with him. But he weighed this against the horrendous cost in American lives if the invasion were to go forward. He has been accused of crossing a moral threshold, but America had already crossed that ethical boundary with the fire bombing of Tokyo and the saturation bombing of German cities in late 1944 and early 1945—raids aimed at transportation targets in tightly settled urban cores. “Every step in the bomber’s progress since 1937,” the editors of Life observed just after the atomic bombs were dropped, “has been more cruel than the last. From the concept of strategic bombing, all the developments—night, pattern, saturation, area, indiscriminate—have led straight to Hiroshima.”53 By this point in the war the mass killing of innocents had come to be seen as a narrowly military decision, independent of ethical considerations. There was no debate in Truman’s circle over the ethics of the bomb.
Philip Morrison, a scientist who helped build the plutonium bomb and was at Tinian to assemble it, argues that the bomb “was not a discontinuity. We were carrying on more of the same, only it was much cheaper.” One bomb, one city. “For that war, it was just one more city destroyed.” The scientists who made the bomb, he argues, bear as much responsibility for its use as President Truman. The Army did not approach the physicists. “We went to the Army. I mean the scientific profession. Einstein, the pacifist, at its head. We beat on the doors and said, We must be allowed to make this weaponry or we’re going to lose the war. Once we did that, we didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. I didn’t work a forty-hour week. I worked a seventy-hour week … [making] weapons….
“I was wildly enthusiastic, ’cause I was a long-time anti-Nazi and this was the war I expected and feared. I was caught up spontaneously and naively in this terrible war. It was a great crusade.” The scientists he worked with realized, Morrison adds, “that the idea of dropping it was implicit in making it.”54
On July 26, the day Truman released the Potsdam Declaration, the cruiser Indianapoli
s arrived at Tinian with the firing mechanism and uranium bullet (U-235) for the first bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” The uranium core arrived by air shortly thereafter, along with the plutonium core for the second bomb, “Fat Man,” named, for its shape, after Winston Churchill. This bomb was bigger and more powerful than Little Boy. A third bomb was scheduled to be sent from Los Alamos in late August, according to Groves’s original timetable.
After delivering her top secret cargo, the Indianapolis headed for the Philippines. On July 50, she was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. Only 317 of the sailors survived; most of the others died a horrible death in shark-infested waters because of a botched Navy rescue mission. “The Indianapolis,” Leslie Groves wrote later, “was a very poor choice to carry the bomb. She had no underwater sound equipment, and was so designed that a single torpedo was able to sink her quickly.”55 (She was hit by two torpedoes.)
Although the Japanese had already attempted feeble peace overtures through Russia. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, a seventy-seven-year-old admiral, publicly announced that they would “ignore” the Potsdam Declaration “kill it with silence”—and continue to fight. The cabinet was almost evenly split between diehards who wanted to continue the war and those who wanted peace, albeit on terms favorable to Japan. No one in the cabinet was willing to accept the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. Truman gave the order to the air command at Tinian: “Release when ready but not sooner than August 2.”56
Bad weather canceled the first flight, scheduled for August 3, but on August 5, meteorologists called for several consecutive days of clear visibility. “Now we were ready.” Tibbets recalls. Two planes would fly to the target with the Enola Gay, the lead plane that Tibbets named after his mother. The Great Artiste, piloted by Chuck Sweeney, would drop instruments to record heat, blast, and radiation, and an unnamed plane with George Marquardt at the controls would photograph the blast. At a tense preflight briefing, Captain Parsons told the crews they would be delivering the most powerful weapon in the history of the world, but the words “atomic” and “nuclear” were apparently not used. Nor, of course, were the crews told that the uranium bomb had not, and could not be, tested because of the slow production of U-235. (The uranium bomb was used because Los Alamos had exhausted its entire “immediate supply” of plutonium in the test bomb.)57 Afterward, the men went to the mess hall for a preflight meal. It was 12:50 A.M., August 6, 1945. When Tibbets got up to leave, flight surgeon Don Young handed him a pillbox containing twelve cyanide capsules, one for each member of his crew. They were to be passed out if an emergency occurred. The crewmen could use them or not. There were no suicide orders.
THE FLIGHT AND GROUND CREW OF THE ENOLA GAY THE HEROSHIMA MISSION. PAUL TIBBETS IS STANDING WITH HIS HAT ON IN THE CENTER UNDER THE PROP (NA).
As Chuck Sweeney’s crew stowed their gear and prepared their airplane. Sweeney jumped into a jeep and drove over to Tibbets’s plane. “The scene I encountered was surrealistic. There had to be two hundred people … standing in an island of intense light. Mobile generators were powering all forms of illumination: stands of high-intensity shop lights, floods, popping flashlights, and klieg lights like those you’d see at a grand opening of a movie…. Army photographers and film crews, MPs, technicians, senior officers, and civilians—who, I presumed, were the scientists—milled about.”58
When Tibbets climbed into the cabin of Enola Gay he felt he was about to be a part of “the greatest single event in the history of warfare.”59
With his plane overweight because of the four-and-a-half-ton bomb, Tibbets burned practically every inch of the runway before he eased back on the yoke and the Enola Gay rose majestically into the air. It was 2:45 A.M. Tinian time. Eight minutes into the flight, Captain William Parsons, the weaponeer, and his assistant, Morris Jeppson, crawled into the cramped bomb bay and inserted the explosive propellant powder into the bomb’s gunlike firing mechanism and hooked up the detonator. The arming was done in the air because Parsons feared the plane stood a good chance of crashing on takeoff.
It was a perfect tropical night, with clear skies and a light breeze. As the Enola Gay approached the target six and a half hours later, after rendezvousing with the two other planes over Iwo Jima, the sun was shining brilliantly and visibility was perfect. Bombardier Thomas Ferebee released the bomb just seventeen seconds behind schedule. The plane jumped violently, 9,000 pounds lighter, and Tibbets made the dangerous diving turn he had been practicing for almost a year. “When we completed the turn, we had lost 1,700 feet and were heading away from our target with engines at full power…. Then everyone was quiet as a church mouse because we had nothing else to do,” Tibbets recalls. They were about eleven miles from the drop point when a bright light filled the plane and a tremendous shock wave smashed into them. “The plane shook, and I yelled ‘Flak!’ thinking a heavy gun battery had found us.” At a press conference the next day, co-pilot Robert Lewis told reporters he “felt as if some giant had struck the plane with a telephone pole.” No one, not even Oppenheimer, was sure the plane would be able to withstand the shock of the blast. But after the second, and lighter, shock wave hit them Tibbets knew they’d survive. “And for the record, I announced over the intercom, ‘Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.’”60
George “Bob” Caron, the tail gunner, had the best view; and he was on the intercom describing the mushroom-shaped cloud that rose high above the city and seemed to be coming right at them. “We were not prepared for the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city,” Tibbets wrote later. “The giant purple mushroom … had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, three miles above our altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive. It was a frightening sight, and even though we were several miles away, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us.
HIROSHIMA (NA).
“Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. At the base of the cloud, fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar…. The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire.
“A feeling of shock and horror swept over all of us.”
“My God!” Lewis wrote in his log.
The bomb detonated at 1,900 feet above the ground at 8:16 Hiroshima time, forty-three seconds after it was dropped. Almost in that instant, there was no city.
“I think this is the end of the war,” Tibbets said to Lewis as they headed back to Tinian.61
President Truman thought the same. When he got the news, four hours later aboard the cruiser Augusta on his return from Potsdam, he grabbed the messenger by the hand and said, “This is the greatest thing in history.”62
Caron could see the mushroom cloud for an hour and half as the Enola Gay sped southward from the horror of Hiroshima. The cloud did not disappear until they were almost 400 miles away. On their smooth return to Tinian, Tibbets smoked his pipe and then dozed off, the first time he had ever been able to sleep in an airplane. “When we landed, someone yelled, ‘Attention!’ and General Tooey Spaatz came forward. He pinned the D.S.C. [Distinguished Service Cross] on me while I stood at attention, palming the bowl of my pipe and trying to work the stem up my sleeve.”63 A crowd of exuberant airmen milled around the plane, cheering and shouting, and all the military brass in the Marianas was on hand.
At a press conference, none of the correspondents questioned the use of the atomic bomb. “These reporters had seen the war at first hand,” Tibbets said later, “and, like every soldier I met, welcomed anything that would shorten the conflict.”64
When news of the bomb was announced on Armed Forces Radio, American soldiers in the Pacific at last saw the end in sight. “We whooped and yelled like mad, we downed all the beer we’d been stashing away,” recalled a Marine veter
an of Okinawa. “We shot bullets into the air and danced between the tent rows, because this meant maybe we were going to live.”65
That afternoon there was a raucous beer party at the Tinian officers club. “All work on the island had stopped, and … the order of the day was to get drunk,” Chuck Sweeney recalls. But Sweeney was exhausted and ready to leave after an hour. As he started for the door of the big Quonset hut, Tibbets spotted him and waved him over. “Chuck, if it becomes necessary, the second one will be dropped on the ninth. Primary target will be Kokura. The secondary target will be Nagasaki.” Then he paused and said, “You’re going to command the mission.”66
It would be Chuck Sweeney’s first combat mission command.
“EVERYTHING INTO NOTHING”
None of the physicists on Tinian went to the party that night. “We obviously killed a hundred thousand people and that was nothing to have a party about,” recalls Philip Morrison. “We knew a terrible thing had been unleashed.”67
The bomb was horrifyingly successful. Pedestrians who were alive one second were vaporized the next, leaving behind nothing but shadows etched eerily into the concrete sidewalks. A Japanese journalist described the bomb’s effects:
EVERYTHING STANDING UPRIGHT IN THE WAY of the blast—walls, houses, factories, and other buildings were annihilated and the debris spun round in a whirlwind and was carried up in the air…. Horses, dogs and cattle suffered the same fate as human beings….
Beyond the zone of utter death in which nothing remained alive houses collapsed in a whirl of beams, bricks and girders. Up to about three miles from the center of the explosion lightly built houses were flattened as though they had been built of cardboard. Those who were inside were either killed or wounded. Those who managed to extricate themselves by some miracle found themselves surrounded by a ring of fire….
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 39
