D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Sitting in the cabin of The Great Artiste, reporter William Laurence took out his notebook and began to write. “Somewhere beyond these vast mountains of white clouds ahead of me there lies Japan, the land of the enemy. In about four hours from now one of its cities, making weapons of war for use against us, will be wiped off the map by the greatest weapon ever made by man. In one-tenth of a millionth of a second, a fraction of time immeasurable by any clock, a whirlwind from the skies will pulverize thousands of its buildings and tens of thousands of its inhabitants….

  “Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbor and of the Death March on Bataan.”10

  When The Great Artiste reached Yakushima, Bockscar was waiting for it. The two planes began circling, waiting for the third ship, piloted by Colonel Hopkins. Sweeney’s orders were to wait fifteen minutes and then head for the target. But he considered the observation plane vital to the mission, perhaps because the photographic equipment had malfunctioned on the Hiroshima flight. The minutes ticked away. They were flying under radio silence; there was no way to contact Hopkins. Sweeney circled for forty minutes, wasting precious fuel.

  “I couldn’t see what was going on,” says Ashworth. “I was down below, in the navigator’s compartment, just behind the flight deck. We started to circle and circle…. I remember Sweeney coming on the intercom and saying, ‘Look, gang, we gotta do this right for Paul.’ He wanted a perfect operation, like Tibbets had flown. That meant that three planes proceeded to the target. That’s probably why he overrode his instructions to spend no longer than fifteen minutes at the rendezvous.” In wasting gasoline, he “very nearly lost the mission right there.

  “Finally, after forty-five minutes; I went up to Sweeney and said, ‘Look, we’ve gotta get going. I don’t care about the observers [in Hopkins’s plane]. I want to be sure that the airplane carrying the instruments is the one that’s with us…. Is it?’ That’s when he told me it was the instrument plane….

  “The other plane never showed up. We found out later that he was up at 39,000 feet while we were at 30,000 feet, where we were all supposed to be.”

  One error led to another. In frustration, unable to find the two other planes, Hopkins broke radio silence and asked Tinian, “Has Sweeney aborted?” The message caused consternation at Tinian. “Here was this plane,” says Ashworth, “that was supposed to be with Bockscar and it had no idea where Bockscar was, with a 10,000-pound nuclear weapon on board. When General Thomas Farrell, Groves’s deputy on Tinian, got word of this he was having breakfast. He immediately became sick and raced outside the officers’ mess and vomited.”11

  Sweeney blames Hopkins for the delay at the rendezvous point, but Tibbets blames both Ashworth and Sweeney. Tibbets is convinced that Ashworth told Sweeney to wait for the observation plane. “Sweeney didn’t have sense enough to know that that Navy commander couldn’t tell him a damn thing. Sweeney was browbeaten by Ashworth. [Later] I told Sweeney to his face, ‘Sweeney, you forget who was in command of that airplane…. You wasted your envelope.’”12

  But Sweeney insists that he, not Ashworth, made the decision to “give Hopkins a little more time.”13 Tibbets was correct about one thing, however. This was the critical mistake of the mission. From here on, nothing went right.

  At 9:45 Bockscar and The Great Artiste arrived over the Kokura arsenal. It was hazy and there were broken clouds, but Sweeney thought he had a chance to spot the target. He began the bomb run, turning the plane over to bombardier Kermit Beahan, the most qualified member of the crew. By acclamation, his fellow crew members had named their plane—the plane Captain Fred Bock was flying that day—The Great Artiste after this brawny, handsome twenty-six-year-old Texan, an artist with the bombsight as well as with the ladies. A graduate of Rice University, Beahan had flown in North Africa and Europe and been shot down four times. Although he developed a slight stutter after surviving a crash that killed his pilot and co-pilot, he was rock-steady under pressure. He may have been unlucky in combat, but he was good.

  “[Beahan] hit those bomb bay doors and they opened up and the ship started to wobble a little because of the drag of the doors,” recalls assistant flight engineer Ray Gallagher. “So now you’re waiting. You’ve got your welder’s goggles on to protect your eyes from the blast. You’re waiting, bracing yourself for the ship to go up, because you’re dropping 10,000 pounds of weight.” Only seconds into the bomb run, Beahan said he couldn’t see the aiming point. Smoke and clouds obscured it.

  Two nights earlier, Curtis LeMay’s B-29s had firebombed a steel mill in Yawata, just to the north, and shifting winds had begun to carry the heavy black smoke of the still burning factory over Kokura. Sweeney yelled, “No drop,” and “at that,” says Gallagher, “we were told ‘no talking on the ship!’ We didn’t want the Japanese to be able to pick up anything. Complete silence.” Flak was exploding all around the plane, making it buck and shiver. The enemy gunners had the right altitude and were zeroing in. Kokura, the Pittsburgh of Japan, was one of the most heavily defended cities in the empire.

  Then Sweeney did something almost no combat pilot ever did: he made a second bomb run, giving the flak gunners another chance. “Oh boy!” said Ray Gallagher to himself. Ashworth admits he pressured Sweeney to make the second run. “I suggested to Sweeney, ‘Why don’t we go around 120 degrees and come in from a different direction, and maybe the wind will be such that Beahan can see what he’s looking for.’ But we still couldn’t see the target. I did this, even though we had a potential fuel problem, because I knew General Groves wanted the second bomb dropped as soon as possible after the first one, to try to convince the Japanese we had more of these things and would use them. There was great pressure to get that second bomb dropped quickly.”

  “We’re not playing here too long,” Sergeant John Kuharek’s voice came over the intercom, breaking the silence, “because we’ve got a problem with gas.” But Sweeney made a third run! The flak got closer and Gallagher looked out and saw fighters climbing to intercept them. Beahan said, “I can’t drop,” and Sweeney closed the bomb doors. As he did, Gallagher muttered into his mike, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”14

  “In hindsight, I recognize that this was a stupid way of doing it,” Ashworth admits. “Sweeney was told at this briefing to make only one pass at the target. If he couldn’t drop it he was supposed to take it to the secondary target, or bring it home. So here again, Sweeney was violating his instructions.

  “We spent fifty minutes over the target and I finally said to Sweeney, ‘We gotta get to Nagasaki, our secondary target.’ That was a suggestion. It was Sweeney’s decision. He was the commander of the aircraft, and he agreed.” Sweeney was determined not to fly back to Tinian—humiliated—with the bomb.

  Tibbets is convinced that neither Ashworth nor Sweeney wanted to return to Tinian because “they wanted to beat [me]. Well the elements wouldn’t let ’em do it. They didn’t have enough sense to see that…. I said to Sweeney later. ‘You should have turned around and come back home. Nobody had the gun to your head.’

  “I don’t know why even Ashworth didn’t make that decision to turn around and bring it back.” In going to Nagasaki dangerously low on fuel, Sweeney jeopardized his own life and the lives of his crew. “We haven’t talked about it in great length, but I told Chuck, ‘You’re the only bad mistake the 509th ever made.’”

  Ashworth agrees. “We had the wrong guy flying the plane.” Yet he blames Tibbets for picking Sweeney. “He had a bunch of experienced, combat-tested guys like Fred Bock. Yet for some reason, God only knows why, he chose Sweeney, who was green. It was a disastrous mistake and a shoddy operation. We were lucky we didn’t get into more trouble than we did.”

  Yet it was Ashworth, under pressure from Groves to drop a second bomb soon after Hiroshima, who had suggested they go on to Nagasaki, knowing the plane had a fuel problem. In this way, atomic diplomacy figured strongly in what was nearly a catastr
ophic atomic mission.

  On the way to Nagasaki, Kuharek informed Sweeney that he had only enough fuel for one bomb run if they were to make it to Okinawa, their emergency landing field. As they approached the target, the heart of the port city’s downtown, there was dense cloud cover. A visual drop seemed impossible. What would they do with the bomb? Drop it in the ocean? “We couldn’t take the bomb [back] with us,” says Gallagher. “We were running out of gas and there was too much weight.”

  Back at Tinian, the generals and scientists worried that Sweeney, hours behind schedule, had crashed or been shot down.

  “I was responsible to see that the bomb got off and got on the target,” says Ashworth. “So I said to Sweeney: ‘We’ll make this approach by radar and hopefully the visual bombardier may be able to see the target when we get closer to it.’” Sweeney claims that he made that decision. That is unlikely, for Ashworth was in complete charge of the bomb. According to Gallagher, Ashworth made the decision and told Sweeney, “I’ll back you.” Sweeney didn’t balk; this is what he wanted to do. Having come this far—having gotten this deeply into trouble—neither man felt he had any other choice. They didn’t want to jettison the bomb in the ocean or disconnect the firing circuit and crash-land at sea with the bomb in the bomb bay, losing it in the ocean. “We were violating orders,” says Ashworth, “but in tight situations like this the man in charge has to make a decision on the spot. You simply have to step up and do it. I thought making a radar drop was the right thing to do. You can’t just wring your hands. Our mission was drop the bomb on one of two targets and the second target was right below us. I wouldn’t have jettisoned the bomb under any circumstances. We needed to get two off, back to back, to force a capitulation.”

  Now it was up to Kermit Beahan. “On his shoulders,” Ashworth said later, “rested one half of the Manhattan Project’s finances, namely a billion dollars that had been put into making this plutonium bomb that had to be dropped someplace.”

  The crew was told to prepare for a radar run. It was still overcast; no one could see the city. Thirty seconds before the bomb’s release, the bomb bay doors snapped open. Twenty seconds later Beahan spotted a thin break in the clouds and hollered, “I can see it, I can see it, I’ve got it!” Sweeney answered, “You own it.”15 Immediately, the radar run was stopped and Beahan “took over, set up the bombsight and dropped the bomb,” says assistant co-pilot Fred Olivi. “So actually, we did in the end follow orders.” But they had come within seconds of violating them.

  Beahan said later that he had studied the target thoroughly before the mission and knew he was somewhere over the industrial area of Nagasaki. “It was not,” says Ashworth, “a blind drop, as Olivi claimed later.”

  “There she goes!” someone said on The Great Artiste, which was about a mile and a half in back of Bockscar.

  “Captain Bock [piloting The Great Artiste] swung around to get out of range; but even though we were turning in the opposite direction, and despite the fact that it was broad daylight in our cabin, all of us became aware of a giant flash that broke through the dark barrier of our are-welder’s lenses and flooded our cabin with intense light,” William Laurence wrote.

  “We removed our glasses after the first flash, but the light still lingered on, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky all around. A tremendous blast wave struck our ship and made it tremble from nose to tail. This was followed by four more blasts in rapid succession, each resounding like the boom of cannon fire hitting our plane from all directions.

  NAGASAKI MUSHROOM CLOUD (USAAF).

  “Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white smoke rings. Next they saw a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shooting skyward with enormous speed.”

  Less than a minute later the purple fire reached the altitude of the planes. “It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”16

  Back in Bockscar, Ray Gallagher shouted to Sweeney over the intercom, “the mushroom is coming toward us! It’s right under us!” That got everyone’s attention because the scientists had emphatically told the crews to steer clear of the radioactive cloud. “When Sweeney became aware of it,” says Fred Olivi, “he dove the aircraft down and to the right with full throttles, to pull away from the oncoming mushroom cloud. For a while I couldn’t tell whether we were gaining on it, or it was gaining on us…. But then we began to see that we were pulling away and we escaped the radiation.”

  The cloud kept rising “in an elemental fury” to a height of almost 60,000 feet.17

  The mood in Bockscar was relief, not elation. Beahan had gotten rid of the bomb. “If Beahan doesn’t accomplish the release,” Ash worth said later, “we’re in a disaster situation. There would have been a board of investigation if we had bombed by radar, and we might even have missed Nagasaki, because radar bombing was notoriously inaccurate. That would have caused a national embarrassment and might even have prolonged the war. If Beahan hadn’t done his job, Sweeney would never have become a general and Ashworth would never have become an admiral.”

  But now the pilot and the weaponeer had another problem: they had no idea of where, exactly, the bomb had landed. Beahan had gotten one quick look at Nagasaki before releasing his cargo. But Fat Man turned the city into a boiling inferno of fire and smoke, reducing ground visibility to zero. “To be able to tell headquarters back in Tinian precisely where it had gone was impossible,” Ashworth admits. “I sent Tinian a coded strike report saying just that we had hit Nagasaki, but added, ‘Conference recommended before any news release.’ This shook them up at Tinian, I learned later. But this was the first time they had heard from us. We were running over two hours late and, before this, they had no idea where we were or what we were doing.”

  When they left Nagasaki, Sweeney asked Kuharek, “What are your readings for gas?”

  “You’ve got two hours.”

  “What’s your time from here to Okinawa?” Sweeney asked navigator Jim Van Pelt.

  “You’ve got two hours.”

  Sweeney instructed radio operator Abe Spitzer to start putting out calls to the air-sea rescue teams. Spitzer got no response. With the mission running hours behind schedule, Navy rescue teams had probably left their prearranged positions, assuming that Bockscar was on its way safely back to Tinian. No one would be waiting for them if they had to ditch at sea.

  By the time they sighted Okinawa they were flying on fortune and fumes. Sweeney repeatedly called the tower at Yontan airfield, but couldn’t get a response. Losing patience, the volatile Irishman ordered the crew to fire the emergency warning flares. “Red and green flares were fired out in an are, bursting away from the airplane.” There was no answer from the field. “Mayday, Mayday,” Sweeney shouted into the mike. “I yelled bark toward Olivi and Van Pelt, ‘Fire every goddamn flare we have on board.’” The color-coded flares went out, nearly every color in the rainbow, each color signifying a different type of problem: “aircraft out of fuel”; “prepare for crash”; “heavy damage”; “dead and wounded on board.” That got their attention on the ground, and the crew could see planes peeling away from runways and emergency equipment racing toward the edge of the airstrip.

  Sweeney told the crew to brace themselves for “a rough one.” He was going in without clearance—into the busiest airfield in the world. And it was hard to see because the plane was filled with gray smoke from the flare guns. A B-24 was taking off just where Bockscar was heading and the two planes almost collided in midair. “We were hot,” says Olivi. “We were going in about 160 miles an hour and when we hit the ground it must have been at least 150.”

  When Bockscar touched down halfway down the runway it bounced into the air almost twenty-five feet, and “veered violently to the left toward a line of B-24s parked wingtip to wingtip along the edge of the runway.” But Sweeney muscled
the plane under control with the help of its specially installed reversible propellers. Just barely missing the row of B-24s, the big bomber came to a screaming stop at the end of the island. As it rolled onto a taxi strip, one of the engines quit. Sweeney killed the other engines and slumped back in his seat. “Total silence fell over the compartment. No one made a sound.” Emergency vehicles came racing toward them, sirens blaring. Sweeney opened the nosewheel door. A rescue worker stuck his head in. “Where’s the dead and wounded?”

  “Back there,” said Sweeney, pointing to the north, toward Nagasaki.18

  Kuharek later measured the fuel. They had seven gallons left, about one minute of flight time.

  As soon as they landed at Okinawa. Ashworth had to quickly figure out where the bomb had hit so he could make a report to Tinian. “The instrument-carrying airplane landed on Okinawa shortly after we did,” he recalls, “and strangely who should arrive shortly thereafter but the third plane that had never joined us. It had gone on to Nagasaki and done some observing after the bomb was dropped. So I got the three pilots together, and Beahan, and I spread out a target map on the hood of a jeep, right on the runway. After we talked it over, it became obvious that the point of detonation was the industrial Urakami River Valley, which was a mile and a half from the center of the city, our aiming point, and directly over the huge Mitsubishi Steel and Armament Works. That was good enough for me.” This long industrial valley was separated from the downtown by a ridge of hills, which contained the blast and saved tens of thousands of lives. By missing the intended target by almost two miles, Beahan had turned to cinder and ash one of Japan’s stupendous industrial complexes, employing some 40,000 workers.