The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  “Terminal” had offered a unique opportunity to the victors of the war to further order and justice in a world torn by conflict for a decade. Instead, however, it created new conflicts for the post-war world.

  3.

  In Moscow, Ambassador Sato once more tried to convince Tokyo that the U.S.S.R. had no intention of intervening on Japan’s behalf:

  … I BELIEVE THAT STALIN FEELS THAT THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO NECESSITY FOR MAKING A VOLUNTARY AGREEMENT WITH JAPAN. ON THIS POINT I SEE A SERIOUS DISCREPANCY BETWEEN YOUR VIEW AND THE ACTUAL STATE OF AFFAIRS.

  But the Japanese leaders could not face the truth. They seemed immobilized by a common wishful conviction that the Soviet Union would come to the assistance of Japan. Even the pragmatic Kido expected a favorable reply once Molotov and Stalin returned to Moscow. Togo continued to press Sato:

  … IT IS REQUESTED THAT FURTHER EFFORTS BE EXERTED TO SOMEHOW MAKE THE SOVIET UNION ENTHUSIASTIC OVER THE SPECIAL ENVOY.… SINCE THE LOSS OF ONE DAY RELATIVE TO THIS PRESENT MATTER MAY RESULT IN A THOUSAND YEARS OF REGRET, IT IS REQUESTED THAT YOU IMMEDIATELY HAVE A TALK WITH MOLOTOV.…

  While the Japanese waited hopefully for Russia to solve their problems, the first atomic bomb was ready for delivery, waiting only for good weather, and others were en route. Rather than explore peace with a Japan that desperately sought it, American leaders were resolved to bring a summary end to the war—and avenge the humiliation of Pearl Harbor as well as the countless atrocities committed throughout the Pacific—with a weapon already weighted with controversy.

  The bomb was assembled in an air-conditioned bomb hut on Tinian on the first day of August. It was ten feet long and twenty-eight inches in diameter, and except for its size, resembled an ordinary bomb.

  The men who would drop it, the 509th Group, had been training under such secrecy that only their commander, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., knew what their mission was to be. Their area was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and protected by machine guns. A general needed a pass to enter.

  For all the stringent security measures, the 509th seemed to be doing very little. Occasionally they flew off in threes to dump a single bomb on enemy territory. They were derided by the other outfits on the island. One anonymous satirist wrote:

  Into the air the secret rose,

  Where they’re going, nobody knows.

  Tomorrow they’ll return again,

  But we’ll never know where they’ve been.

  Don’t ask us about results or such,

  Unless you want to get in Dutch.

  But take it from one who is sure of the score,

  The 509th is winning the war.

  On the morning of August 5, the weather was forecast as favorable for takeoff after midnight. The previous night Captain William Parsons, a Navy ordnance expert who was responsible for arming the bomb, had witnessed four B-29’s crash in succession on takeoff. He told General Thomas Farrell, in command of the secret project, that if the plane carrying the bomb failed to get into the air safely, an atomic explosion might be set off that would ravage the entire island.

  “We will just have to pray that it doesn’t happen.”

  “Well, if I made the final assembly of that bomb after we left the island, that couldn’t happen.” Farrell asked if he had ever before assembled a bomb under these conditions. “No, but I’ve got all day to try it.”

  “Go ahead and try it.”

  Late in the afternoon the bomb, scrawled with rude crayoned messages for the Emperor, was rolled out of its air-conditioned building into the glaring sunlight and transferred to the bomb bay of a B-29 named Enola Gay after Colonel Tibbets’ mother. At dusk Parsons climbed into the stifling fuselage. Squatting beside the bomb, he practiced the final assembly hour after hour.

  “For God’s sake, man,” said Farrell when he saw Parsons’ bleeding hands, “let me loan you a pair of pigskin gloves. They’re thin ones.”

  “I wouldn’t dare. I’ve got to feel the touch.”

  At 7:17 P.M. Farrell radioed Groves: JUDGE [Parsons] TO LOAD BOMB AFTER TAKEOFF.… Shortly after 10 P.M. six crews were summoned to a Quonset assembly hut for briefing. Soberly they watched Tibbets stride up to a platform. “Tonight is the night we have all been waiting for,” he said. “Our long months of training are to be put to the test. We will soon know if we have been successful or failed. Upon our efforts tonight it is possible that history will be made.” They were to drop a bomb containing a destructive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. (The crew of Enola Gay had been told three days earlier what they would carry.) “Because this bomb is so powerful, we must use different tactics from those we have employed when using ordinary bombs.” He explained that three weather planes would take off first and cover the three selected cities so the target could be changed at the last minute. An hour later Enola Gay, followed by two escort planes with scientific and photographic equipment, would leave. All three would rendezvous over Iwo Jima a few minutes after dawn.

  At a final midnight briefing each man was issued a pair of adjustable arc welder’s goggles to protect his eyes from the intense flash of the explosion. The crews bowed their heads in awed silence absorbing the words of Chaplain William Downey, a husky twenty-seven-year-old Lutheran: “… We pray Thee that the end of the war may come soon, and that once more we may know peace on earth. May the men who fly this night be kept safe in Thy care, and may they be returned safely to us.…”

  The men solemnly filed into the mess hall for preflight supper, and were handed menus embellished with GI humor:

  Look! Real eggs (“How da ya want them?”)

  Rolled oats (“Why?”)

  Milk (“No fishing”)

  Sausage (“We think it’s pork”)

  Apple butter (“Looks like axle grease”)

  Butter (“Yep, it’s out of again”)

  Coffee (“Saniflush”)

  Bread (“Someone get a toaster”)

  After the three weather planes lifted off into the night at 1:37 A.M., a crowd of well-wishers and photographers gathered around Enola Gay, and scores of flashbulbs popped, causing some apprehension that Japanese guerrillas in the hills might radio Tokyo that something extraordinary was taking place.

  Enola Gay and her two escorts taxied to their runways. From the North Field control tower William Laurence, science editor of the New York Times and the sole newspaperman covering the story, watched intently, at General Farrell’s side, as Enola Gay slowly rumbled down the runway. She accelerated to 180 miles an hour, but burdened by her extra weight, seemed earthbound. The onlookers, remembering the four Superfortresses that had crashed the night before, strained to help lift the plane into the air.

  Tibbets was holding the nose down to build up speed but his co-pilot, Captain Robert A. Lewis, thought it was “gobbling a little too much runway,” and began to put back pressure on the wheel. At last, with only a few yards of the oiled coral left, the huge aircraft soared up into the darkness.

  In the tower, General Farrell turned to a Navy officer. “I never saw a plane use that much runway,” he said. “I thought Tibbets was never going to pull it off.”

  It was exactly 2:45 A.M., August 6. It would be a day to remember.

  * In an address at Notre Dame University on February 6, 1967, Dr. Edward Teller voiced regret over this decision: “We could have exploded the bomb over Tokyo at a safe altitude and done nothing more than shake the windows. We could have demonstrated in a wonderful way that man’s technical ingenuity can stop a most horrible war.”

  † To a question posed in an interview by the author in 1958 that the decision must have come only after considerable soul-searching, President Truman replied, “Hell, no, I made it like”—he snapped his fingers—“that!”

  A year later, on April 28, 1959, he told a seminar at Columbia University, “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision.’ It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atom bombs accounted for
. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the two bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives. It is just the same as artillery on our side. Napoleon said that victory is always on the side of the artillery. It was a purely military decision to end the war.”

  At the end of the seminar, a student again pressed him. “That was not any decision that you had to worry about,” the President retorted. “It was just the same as getting a bigger gun than the other fellow had to win the war and that’s what it was used for. Nothing else but an artillery weapon.”

  ‡ Szilard had gone much further in an early draft of this petition, calling for an outright ban on the use of atomic bombs: “Once they were introduced as an instrument of war it would be difficult to resist the temptation of putting them to such use.… Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”

  Few of his colleagues would endorse this draft on the grounds that if the bomb was not used they would be guilty of allowing the war to drag on and the slaughter to continue. Others completely disagreed with Szilard and countered with their own petitions. One such concluded: “In short, are we to go on shedding American blood when we have available a means to speedy victory? No! If we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon—now!”

  § This hardened position was belied on July 18 in a startling letter to the editor which appeared in the Washington Post signed “An Observer.” The writer proclaimed that American military law, based upon historical precedents, clearly specified that conquest or occupation did not affect the sovereignty of a defeated nation. Its suggestion that the United States was open to negotiations through regular diplomatic channels created a minor furor in the capital. Knowledgeable reporters interpreted it as an official trial balloon. They had been privately informed, indeed, that it was the work of Ellis Zacharias, a maverick Navy captain and head of Op-16-W, a secret naval operational intelligence agency concerned mainly with psychological warfare. As an “official spokesman,” Zacharias had for some time been assuring the Japanese by radio that unconditional surrender was largely a military term and did not mean the end of Japan’s way of life. But the writer of the letter was actually one of his assistants, Ladislas Farago, who had spontaneously, on his own, decided to mitigate the unconditional surrender formula. Zacharias, when he learned of his subordinate’s enterprise, approved of it and, moreover, repeated the advice to the Japanese in a subsequent broadcast.

  ǁ Within two hours the Combined Chiefs of Staff would hear General Alexei E. Antonov, Chief of Staff of the Red Army, announce that “Soviet troops were now being concentrated in the Far East and would be ready to commence operations against Japan in the last half of August. The actual date, however, would depend upon the result of conferences with Chinese representatives which had not yet been completed.”

  a In 1946 Alexander Werth, war correspondent in the Soviet Union for the Sunday Times of London, asked Molotov if the Soviets had been told about the bomb at Potsdam. Molotov looked startled, thought for a moment and then said: “It’s a tricky subject, and the real answer to your question is both Yes and No. We were told of a ‘super-bomb,’ of a bomb ‘the like of which had never been seen’; but the word atom was not used.’ ”

  b Less than four days later Indianapolis was hit by three torpedoes from the submarine I-58, skippered by Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. She sank in twelve minutes. There were no lifeboats and few life rafts. Incredibly, Indianapolis was not missed for almost four days and, consequently, only 316 of her crew of 1,196 were rescued. It was the most controversial sea disaster in American naval history.

  c The State Department makes a distinction between the Potsdam Proclamation (the July 26 document demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally) and the Potsdam Declaration (the Allied policy statement concerning Europe), although both are usually referred to as “the declaration.”

  33

  Hiroshima

  1.

  Once Enola Gay had climbed to 4,000 feet, Captain Parsons lowered himself into the bomb bay and while his assistant, First Lieutenant Morris Jeppson, a Mormon, illuminated the bomb with a flashlight, he cautiously inserted the explosive detonating charge through the bomb’s tail. It was almost half an hour before Parsons said, “Okay, that’ll do it.”

  Jeppson removed a green plug from the bomb, replacing it with a red one. The electrical circuit was completed; the bomb was ready to be dropped. In the rear compartment Tibbets tried to sleep—he had been awake for twenty-four hours—but it was impossible, and after fifteen minutes he started to crawl back through the narrow thirty-foot tube that led to the front compartment. The tail gunner, Staff Sergeant George R. Caron, in a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, held him back. “Say, Colonel,” he asked, “are we splitting atoms today?”

  “You’re pretty close, Bob.”

  Tibbets relieved his co-pilot. Lewis left the cockpit for a snack and noticed little green lights on a black box. He asked Parsons “what the hell” they meant. They indicated that the bomb was okay; red lights meant trouble.

  Tibbets watched Mount Suribachi, scarred from battle, slowly rise out of the sea in the dawn light. He moved the throttles forward and Enola Gay began to climb. It was 4:52 A.M. In minutes the plane had reached 9,000 feet, where she was joined by her two escorts. Below on Iwo Jima—the emergency stand-by base—awaited Tibbets’ security chief, Major William Uanna. Tibbets called him by voice radio: “Bud, we are proceeding to target.”

  Tibbets picked up the intercom and told everyone to remain at his station until the bombing was over. Once Japan was sighted, he said, their conversation would be recorded. “This is for history, so watch your language. We’re carrying the first atomic bomb.”

  Most of the crew had never heard the word “atomic” before. Its very sound was chilling.

  Their primary target was Hiroshima on the southeast coast of Honshu, Japan’s principal island. From this, the empire’s eighth largest city, 120,000 civilians had been evacuated to the countryside, but 245,000 still remained. The city was almost unscarred by the war. Like the people of Dresden before them, the citizens of Hiroshima felt that their city was to be spared, though it was headquarters of 2nd General Army and was an important military port of embarkation. Their reasons for hope of immunity ranged from the naïve to the preposterous: they were exempt because they had numerous relatives in the United States; their city, like Kyoto, was so beautiful that the Americans wanted it as a residential area after the war; President Truman’s mother lived nearby. They had taken little notice of 720,000 leaflets fluttering from the sky two days before, warning them that their city among others would be obliterated unless Japan surrendered at once. At 7:09 A.M. (an hour earlier than Tinian time), sirens blasted for a long minute. It was the third air-raid warning since midnight and few took to the shelters. The latest alert had been set off by Straight Flush, a weather plane bearing a cartoon of a Japanese soldier being flushed down a toilet. It was on the same course that Tibbets would take if the weather conditions at Hiroshima were favorable enough. If not, Tibbets would be sent to Kokura or Nagasaki.

  From the distance Hiroshima appeared to be blanketed by an undercast, but by the time Straight Flush reached the bombing point the observerbombardier, First Lieutenant Kenneth Wey, could see Hiroshima clearly through his bombsight. It was flat and consisted of six long slender islands lying in the delta of the Ota River. From 32,000 feet the city resembled the fingers of a deformed hand. On the southern tips docks jutted into the beautiful Inland Sea. The delta itself was rimmed by small mountains.

  At 7:25 Straight Flush turned back toward its base, Tinian, harassed by scattered flak that burst far short of the target. The pilot, Major Claude Eatherly,* ordered the radio operator to send out the following message: “Low clouds, 1 to 3/10ths. Middle cloud am
ount, 1 to 3/10ths. Advice: Bomb primary.”

  Enola Gay had just reached its bombing height of almost 32,000 feet, and Co-pilot Lewis noted in the log he was writing at the request of New York Times correspondent William Laurence: “Well, folks, it won’t be long.”

  Tibbets was informed of Eatherly’s message and turned to his navigator, Captain Theodore (“Dutch”) Van Kirk: “It’s Hiroshima.” At 7:50 (their watches read 8:50) the big aircraft reached Shikoku Island. Just beyond was Honshu—and Hiroshima. The crew hurriedly strapped on their flak suits. The radar and IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) were switched off. The ship remained on autopilot. Parsons sent word up front that the lights were still green, then crawled forward to the cockpit where he looked over Tibbets’ shoulder through a large opening in the clouds. A sprawling city lay below. “Do you agree that’s the target?” Tibbets asked.

  “Yes,” said Parsons with a nod.

  It was 8:09 A.M. “We are about to start the bomb run,” Tibbets announced over the intercom. “Put on your goggles and place them up on your forehead. When the countdown starts, pull the goggles over your eyes and leave them there until after the flash.”

  Lewis added another line to his log, the only in-flight record of the mission: “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.”

  The instrument plane, The Great Artiste, dropped back 1,000 yards. The other escort, Number 91, began circling to mark time and position itself for photographs.

  Enola Gay’s bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, was leaning forward, left eye pressed to the Norden bombsight, his mustache flaring to either side. At 8:13 plus thirty seconds Tibbets said, “It’s yours.” Ferebee’s bombsight required flight corrections in autopilot as the Superfortress headed west 31,600 feet over Hiroshima at a ground speed of approximately 285 miles an hour. The clouds had scattered and Ferebee could clearly distinguish what was already so familiar from target photographs—the seven tributaries of the Ota River which formed the six islands. The aiming point, the center of Aioi Bridge, crept to the cross hairs of the bombsight.