D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  About half an hour after the explosion, whilst the sky all around Hiroshima was still cloudless, a fine rain began to fall on the town and went on for about five minutes. It was caused by the sudden rise of over-heated air to a great height, where it condensed and fell back as rain. Then a violent wind rose and the fires extended with terrible rapidity, because most Japanese houses are built only of timber and straw.

  By the evening the fire began to die down and then it went out. There was nothing left to burn. Hiroshima had ceased to exist.68

  Victims walked around in shock, with burnt skin hanging from their arms and faces. When one infirmary ran out of medication, volunteers sterilized the wounds with salt water. People were so damaged, one volunteer soldier recalls, “We took a broom, dipped it into … salt water, and painted over the bodies.”69

  Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, which was 1,500 yards from the hypocenter, the point directly under the blast. He began keeping a diary the evening the bomb hit.

  THE HOUR WAS EARLY; THE MORNING STILL, warm and beautiful…. Clad in drawers and undershirt, I was sprawled on the living room floor exhausted because I had just spent a sleepless night on duty as an air warden in my hospital.

  Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me—and then another…. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously.

  Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but the rubble and fallen timbers barred the way…. A profound weakness overcame me, so I stopped to regain my strength. To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked….

  All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding. A large splinter was protruding from a mangled wound in my thigh, and something warm trick led into my mouth…. Embedded in my neck was a sizable fragment of glass.

  Dr. Hachiya and his wife, Yaeko, who was also hurt, managed to escape the house. Just as they came to the street, a house across from theirs collapsed almost at their feet.

  OUR HOUSE BEGAN TO SWAY, AND in a minute it, too, collapsed in a cloud of dust. Other buildings caved in or toppled. Fires sprang up and whipped by a vicious wind began to spread.

  It finally dawned on us that we could not stay there in the street, so we turned our steps toward the hospital [only a few hundred yards away]. Our home was gone; we were wounded and needed treatment; and after all, it was my duty to be with the staff….

  I was still naked, although I did not feel the least bit of shame.

  Dr. Hachiya collapsed in the street arid sent his wife ahead of him to get help. After a while, he struggled to his feet and walked on, blood spurting from his leg wound.

  I PAUSED TO REST. GRADUALLY THINGS came into focus. There were shadowy forms of people, some of whom looked like walking ghosts. Others moved as though in pain, like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies with forearms and hands dangling. These people puzzled me until I realized that they had been burned and were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of raw surfaces rubbing together. A naked woman carrying a naked baby came into view. I averted my gaze…. An old woman lay near me with an expression of suffering on her face; but she made no sound. Indeed, one thing was common to everyone I saw—complete silence.

  Dr. Hachiya made it as far as the Communications Bureau, located in the building adjacent to the hospital. It was being used as an emergency hospital. His friends saw him outside the building and carried him in on a stretcher. As he was being treated, he looked up and saw that the hospital was on fire. He and the other patients were evacuated to a rear garden.

  THE SKY WAS FILLED WITH BLACK smoke and glowing sparks. Flames rose and the heat set currents of air in motion. Updrafts became so violent that sheets of zinc roofing were hurled aloft and released, humming and twirling, in erratic flight. Pieces of flaming wood soared and fell like fiery swallows….

  The Bureau started to burn … until the whole structure was converted into a crackling, hissing inferno.

  Scorching winds howled around us, whipping dust and ashes into our eyes and up our noses.

  The Communications Bureau was evacuated, and after being carried out and finding his wife by the main gate, Dr. Hachiya passed out.

  MY NEXT MEMORY IS OF AN open area. The fires must have receded. I was alive….

  A head popped out of an air-raid dugout, and I heard the unmistakable voice of old Mrs. Saeki: “Cheer up doctor! Everything will be all right. The north side is burnt out. We have nothing further to fear from the fire….”

  She was right. The entire northern part of the city was completely burned. The sky was still dark, but whether it was evening or midday I could not tell….

  The streets were deserted except for the dead. Some looked as if they had frozen to 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.

  Hiroshima was no longer a city, but a burnt-over prairie. To the east and to the west everything was flattened…. How small Hiroshima was with the houses gone.70

  Of Hiroshima’s 76,000 buildings, 70,000 were destroyed or damaged, for in this pancake-flat city there were no hills or ridges to blunt the sensational power of the blast. “Such a weapon,” said one victim, “had the power to make everything into nothing.”71

  Treating the burn victims, doctors did not realize at first that they were dealing with an absolutely new thing—radiation sickness or what they would call atomic bomb disease. “People who appeared to be recovering developed other symptoms that caused them to die. So many patients died without our understanding the cause of death that we were all in despair,” Hachiya observed in his diary.72 Those who suffered only minor burns lost their hair, their gums bled, they vomited blood, they developed raging fevers, and they died. For weeks they died at a rate of a hundred a day.

  No one will ever know how many people died at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Robert Oppenheimer had predicted a death toll of 20,000 from one bomb. At Hiroshima, an estimated 100,000 to 140,000 died almost immediately. Over the course of the next five years, another 100,000 died, according to Japanese records. Curtis LeMay would boast that “we scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”73 He is wrong. More people died in the atomic blasts.

  LeMay has argued that, it is no more “wicked” to kill people with atomic weapons than with conventional bombs. But that fails to account for radiation disease, one of the worst ways imaginable to die. Nuclear bombs continue killing long after they detonate; and they kill insidiously and across generations. Nuclear power is the fire that mankind has not yet learned to put out. “If a person picks up one rem it can linger in your cells all your life,” said Marine veteran Victor Tolley, who was stationed in Nagasaki shortly after the bomb was dropped. “It may lie dormant and nothing may happen to me. But when I die and I’m cremated and my ashes are scattered out over some forest, that radiation is still alive. Twenty-seven thousand years from now, somebody might pick up that rem of radiation from those ashes of mine and come down sick.”74

  But LeMay was correct when he said “the crew who freighted the ordnance up to Hiroshima and Nagaski and dumped it, didn’t know just what they really had. Nobody was sure about the destructive capacity, not even the scientists.”75

  After Hiroshima, Truman warned the Japanese leaders that “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.”76 There was no response; the cabinet was still deadlocked. To their everlasting discredit, the Japanese ruling elite, including the Emperor, was more concerned about the destruction of its own power than the destruction of its country. At any point, now or before this, the rulers could have stopped the insane violence. In delaying, they risked not only more nuclear devastation, but an invasion that would have had
catastrophic consequences for the Japanese people.

  Orders had already been cut to drop the second bomb, and Truman made no effort to intervene. This was the most frightening aspect of early atomic diplomacy—there was no diplomacy. Once in place, the technology dictated the decision-making. Even Truman sensed this. “I fear that machines are ahead of morals,” he wrote in his diary after learning of the first atomic test.77

  Although a third bomb was not yet ready, Groves wanted the Japanese to believe that the Americans had an unlimited supply of super bombs and were prepared to use them. If two were dropped in quick succession, the enemy would not know what to expect. Or as one of Tibbets’s fliers put it years later, “Hit ’em twice and make them think we’ve got a barrel full of these things at home. That was the psychology.”78

  Initial plans called for an August 11 drop day for the second bomb, but forecasters predicted bad weather for that day and the following five days. So Sweeney s mission was moved up to August 9. The target was still Kokura, with its enormous arsenal, a great source of strength for the army that was being mobilized to repel the American invasion. Since the intricate measuring instruments for the Hiroshima flight had been installed in Sweeney’s plane, The Great Artiste, Sweeney and his crew would fly Fred Bock’s B-29, Bockscar, and Bock’s crew would fly The Great Artiste. This would lead to considerable confusion in reportage of the event. William L. Laurence of the New York Times, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Manhattan Project, flew in The Great Artiste with Bock’s crew yet erroneously reported in the Times, and in his later book, that Sweeney dropped the bomb from The Great Artiste. For years afterward, other authors repeated his error.

  LeMay had assumed that Tibbets would fly this mission. But Tibbets told him, “I’m getting enough publicity. The other guys have worked long and hard and can do the job as well as I can.”79 He would regret that decision.

  *The Manhattan Project produced two types of atomic weapons, one using uranium (U-235), the other plutonium, which was created from uranium. The explosive power of the bombs resulted from the instantaneous release of energy upon the splitting, or fission, of the atomic nuclei in uranium 235 or plutonium.

  These weapons had different detonation systems. The uranium bomb was set off by using a gunlike device that fired a subcritical slug of uranium (one not compact, or dense, enough to explode) into a subcritical core of uranium. The slug or bullet, was placed at one end of a long hollow tube similar to a gun barrel, with an explosive packed behind the bullet, and the core was placed at the other end of the sealed tube. When the bullet was fired and hit the core it produced a critical mass, setting in motion a self-sustaining chain reaction and a nuclear explosion.

  The plutonium bomb was detonated by an implosion process. Plutonium was arranged inside tile bomb in the form of a hollow sphere and surrounded by a sphere of conventional chemical explosives. When the fuse was ignited, the explosion of the outer sphere compressed the inner sphere of plutonium into a ball-like critical mass, the size of a baseball. A chain reaction and an explosion followed instantaneously.

  Victory

  THE FORGOTTEN BOMB

  This was “the forgotten bomb,” says Navy Commander Frederick Ash worth, the weaponeer in charge of Fat Man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. “The Nagasaki strike was a kind of sideshow to the first one. There was no fanfare when we left and no fanfare when we got back. Yet few people realize that our mission was almost a national disaster.”1

  Chuck Sweeney wanted to fly a flawless mission, as Tibbets had done.2 But from start to finish, the second most important bombing strike of the war was a succession of near-disastrous accidents, bad command decisions, and broken orders. The bomb was dropped a mile and a half from the designated target. Bockscar came perilously close to running out of fuel and ditching at sea. And the bomber nearly crashed on an airfield it was not scheduled to land on. One man saved the mission and the careers of the pilot and the weaponeer, who, together, broke strict orders about how the bomb was to be dropped, orders that had come down from the highest authority.

  It all began with a typhoon off Iwo Jima.

  BOCKSCAR AFTER THE NAGASAKI MISSION (USAAF).

  “The night we were getting ready to go to Hiroshima, there were thunderstorms in the area, lightning all over the place, and you get a little skittish about lightning,” recalls Ashworth, a coolly composed aviator who had commanded a torpedo squadron in the South Pacific earlier in the war. “That’s bad news in the airplane business. Then we got word about a storm at Iwo Jima.”

  The three planes flying to the target, Bockscar, The Great Artiste, and an observation plane piloted by Colonel James Hopkins, were to take off from Tinian and rendezvous over Iwo Jima. But the weather forced them to take a different route and reassemble at Yakushima, a small island off the coast of Kyushu. “Because of the bad weather at low altitudes and our proximity to the Japanese mainland, the rendezvous would be at 30,000 feet instead of at 8,000, as on the Hiroshima mission,” Sweeney wrote in his memoir, War’s End. “This meant we would be flying through some turbulent weather for about five hours in complete radio silence. Then all three of us had to arrive at a tiny spot in the ocean within one minute of each other.”3

  At the preflight briefing, Sweeney’s crew was told that they were to drop the bomb visually. These were the “only stringent orders that we had,” Ashworth recalls. “General Groves wanted to be sure that we knew exactly where we were putting it, and radar bombing equipment at that time was notoriously inaccurate. There was a provision that if it couldn’t be dropped by visual bombing with a Norden bombsight then we should bring it home.”

  Out on the flight deck, Philip Morrison and his team of scientists had just finished loading the “man-made meteor” into Bockscar.4 The bomb bay doors were open, so Sweeney bent down to look. “There it was…. Ten feet eight inches long, five feet across, painted with high-gloss yellow enamel and black tail fins. It weighed 10,300 pounds, at least 1,000 pounds heavier than Little Boy. It resembled a grossly oversized decorative squash. I could see that many people had signed the bomb or left poems and messages with varying degrees of vitriol.”5

  The takeoff would be “dangerous because there was no way of rendering [the bomb] safe,” Morrison notes.6 Unlike the uranium bomb used at Hiroshima, the complicated implosion system was sealed inside the bomb. Ashworth would not be able to wait until after takeoff to arm Fat Man, as Parsons had “late armed” Little Boy, with its gunlike firing mechanism. If the plane were to crash and burn on takeoff, as so many B-29s did on Tinian, the bomb might detonate. “You probably would not have had a full-scale detonation,” says Ashworth, “but you’d have had a smaller one. With all that fuel aboard, you would have had a raging fire and the heat would have set off the explosives in the bomb, causing a cook off, a low-level detonation, that would have torn the bomb apart, spreading chunks of radioactive plutonium all over that part of the island. This was a very serious consideration. The only thing that could be done was to reinforce all the fire-fighting and ambulance equipment on the field and hope that if it happened, we could put the fire out before anything went radically wrong.”

  Chief scientist Norman Ramsey was so concerned about a nuclear accident that he stood at the end of the runway with the emergency equipment so that in the event of an explosion he would be blown up and would not have to do any explaining.

  The only people to see the plane off were a few Army photographers and “the boss,” Paul Tibbets. Just as Sweeney was ready to take off, his flight engineer, Sergeant John Kuharek, leaned into the front of the cockpit and said, “Major, we have a problem. The fuel in our reserve tank in the rear bomb bay bladder isn’t pumping. We’ve got six hundred gallons of fuel trapped back there.”7 Kuharek thought the problem was a solenoid and that it would take several hours to fix. Sweeney pulled off his harness and climbed out of the plane to consult with Tibbets. “Sweeney and Kuharek walk up to the jeep I’m sitting in,” Tibbets reca
lls, “and Sweeney says, ‘We can’t transfer fuel from our bomb bay.’

  THE CREW OF BOCKSCAR ON ARRIVAL AT TINIAN AFTER THE NAGASAKI MISSION. MISSING ARE FREDERICK ASHWORTH AND HIS ASSISTANT, LT. PHILIP M. BARNES. CHUCK SWEENEY IS ON THE FAR LEFT (USAAF).

  “I said, ‘What do you give a damn about it. The fuel is only carried as ballast’ [to balance the bomb in the forward bomb bay]…. With my airplane I had 1,000 gallons of fuel more than I needed.”

  Sweeney still looked concerned.

  “‘Chuck,’ I told him, ‘you’ve lost a lot of time now. If you’re waiting for me to tell you … to cancel the mission, I’m not going to. You’re the airplane commander. You can say cancel or don’t cancel.’

  “He said, ‘Well, we’re gonna go.’

  “When Sweeney got ready to walk away, I said, ‘Chuck, you’ve already lost about forty-five minutes. Get back in that airplane, go to your rendezvous point and tell the other planes the same thing I told you at Iwo Jima [where Tibbets and Sweeney rendezvoused on the Hiroshima mission]: Make one 360 degree turn, be on my wing, or I’m going to the target anyway.’”8

  Tibbets also advised Sweeney that if he ran into any problems on the bomb run he should consult with Kermit Beahan, the bombardier, who had plenty of combat experience in Europe. As they prepared for takeoff, with lightning streaking across the black sky, everyone was on edge. “Young man, do you know how much that bomb cost?” Admiral W. R. E. Purnell, a high official in the Manhattan Project, asked Sweeney. “About 25 million,” said Sweeney. “See that we get our money’s worth,” Purnell cautioned.

  As the plane raced down the runway at 150 miles per hour a horrible thought went through Sweeney’s mind: Had the Japanese figured out the point of origin of the first flight? Were they out there, over the ocean, waiting for him? But the takeoff went smoothly and they cruised to the assembly point off the coast of Japan at 17,000 feet to try to get above the rough weather. At 5:30 A.M. sunlight started to fill the flight deck and the storm was behind them. “All seemed right,” Sweeney recalls, “in our pressurized, air-conditioned, encapsulated universe.”9