At Los Alamos the same week Groves, Parsons, Conant, Oppenheimer, Kistiakowsky, Ramsey and several other leaders met in Oppenheimer’s office to discuss preparing Pumpkins—they called them blockbusters—for Tibbets’ 509th Composite Group.2198 The first Fat Man design, the 1222, had already been changed because it had proved so difficult to assemble—assembly required inserting, threading nuts onto and tightening more than 1,500 bolts—and redesign meant the loss of about 80 percent of the tooling work done at the Pacific Aviation Company in Los Angeles through the autumn. The first unit of a new, simpler design, the 1291, would be ready in three days, on December 22. “Captain Parsons said that the blockbuster production for the 1291 gadget between 15 February and 15 March would require a minimum of 30 blockbusters,” the minutes of the meeting report, “so that each B-29 could drop at least two. . . . An additional 20 blockbusters should be produced for H.E. testing. . . . Following that, 75 units should be produced for overseas shipment.”2199
Groves wanted none of it. He wanted no dummy 1291’s drop-tested outside the continental United States and he saw no reason to build 75 Pumpkins for overseas target practice for Tibbets’ crews. It was the end of 1944 and he was feeling the pressure of accumulating Manhattan Project delays: “General Groves indicated that too much valuable time was being taken from other problems to devote time to the blockbuster program.” Conant asked how long the blockbuster program would have to continue; Parsons answered combatively that it would have to continue as long as Tibbets’ group operated so that 509th crews could maintain their bombing skills. He relented to reveal that “Colonel Tibbets’ Group expected to reach peak combat training by 1 July.”
Since Parsons had not succeeded in person in convincing Groves of the importance of bomb-assembly and bombing practice he wrote the general a forceful memorandum on the day after Christmas. There were major differences, he pointed out, between the “gun gadget” and the “implosion gadget,” particularly in terms of final assembly:
It is believed fair to compare the assembly of the gun gadget to the normal field assembly of a torpedo, as far as mechanical tests are involved. . . . The case of the implosion gadget is very different, and is believed comparable in complexity to rebuilding an airplane in the field. Even this does not fully express the difficulty, since much of the assembly involves bare blocks of high explosives and, in all probability, will end with the securing in position of at least thirty-two boosters and detonators, and then connecting these to firing circuits, including special coaxial cables and high voltage condenser circuit. . . . I believe that anyone familiar with advance base operations . . . would agree that this is the most complex and involved operation which has ever been attempted outside of a combined laboratory and ammunition depot.
Parsons’ simple and compelling point: the assembly team as well as the bombardiers needed practice. Groves relented; Tibbets got his Pumpkins.
More conventional bombs were falling regularly now on Japan, if not yet to devastating effect. Robert Guillain, the French journalist, remembers the first night raid over Tokyo at the end of November:
Suddenly there was an odd, rhythmic buzzing that filled the night with a deep, powerful pulsation and made my whole house vibrate: the marvelous sound of the B-29s passing invisibly through a nearby corner of sky, pursued by the barking of antiaircraft fire. . . . I went up on my terrace roof. . . . The B-29s caught in the sweeping searchlight beams went tranquilly on their way followed by the red flashes of ack-ack bursts which could not reach them at that altitude. A pink light spread across the horizon behind a near hill, growing bigger, bloodying the whole sky. Other red splotches lit up like nebulas else-where on the horizon.2200 It was soon to be a familiar sight. Feudal Tokyo was called Edo, and the people there had always been terrified by the frequent accidental fires they euphemistically called “flowers of Edo.” That night, all Tokyo began to blossom.
While Parsons and Groves were debating Pumpkins, Lauris Norstad, who had succeeded Hansell in Washington as Hap Arnold’s chief of staff when Hansell moved to the Marianas, passed along word to his predecessor that a trial fire raid on Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city, was an “urgent requirement.” Hansell resisted. “With great difficulty,” he wrote Norstad, he had “implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of primary targets by sustained and determined attacks using precision bombing methods both visual and radar” and he was “beginning to get results.” Ironically, he feared that area bombing would slacken his crews’ hard-won skills. Norstad sympathized but insisted that Nagoya was only a test, “a special requirement resulting from the necessity of future planning.”2201 Nearly one hundred of Hansell’s B-29’s flew incendiaries to Nagoya, at the southern end of the Nobi Plain two hundred miles southwest of Tokyo, on January 3, 1945, and started numerous small fires that resisted coalescing.
In three months of hard flying, taking regular losses, Hansell had managed to destroy none of his nine high-priority targets. His determination not to rise to the bait Washington was offering—Billy Mitchell, the Air Force’s earliest strategic champion, had pointed out the vulnerability of Japanese cities to fire as long ago as 1924—doomed his command. Norstad flew out to Guam to relieve Hansell of duty on January 6. Curtis LeMay arrived from China the next day. “LeMay is an operator,” Norstad told Hansell, “the rest of us are planners. That’s all there is to it.”2202 As if to encourage the new commander to independence, Hap Arnold suffered a major heart attack on January 15 and withdrew for a time to Miami sunshine to heal.
LeMay officially took command on January 20. He had 345 B-29’s in the Marianas and more arriving. He had 5,800 officers and 46,000 enlisted men. And he had all Hansell’s problems to solve: the jet stream; the terrible Japanese weather, seven days of visual bombing a month with luck and not much weather prediction because the Soviets refused to cooperate from Siberia, whence the weather came; B-29 engines that overheated and burned out while straining up the long climb to altitude; indifferent bombing:
General Arnold needed results. Larry Norstad had made that very plain. In effect he had said: “You go ahead and get results with the B-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired. If you don’t get results, also, there’ll never be any Strategic Air Forces of the Pacific. . . . If you don’t get results it will mean eventually a mass amphibious invasion of Japan, to cost probably half a million more American lives.”2203
LeMay set his crews to intensive training. They were beginning to get radar units and he saw to it that they were able at least to identify the transition from water to land. He ordered high-altitude precision strikes but experimented with firebombing as well; 159 tons on Kobe on February 3 burned out a thousand buildings. Not good enough: “another month of indifferent operations,” LeMay calls February:2204
When I summed it all up, I realized that we had not accomplished very much during those six or seven weeks. We were still going in too high, still running into those big jet stream winds upstairs. Weather was almost always bad.
I sat up nights, fine-tooth-combing all the pictures we had of every target which we had attacked or scouted. I examined Intelligence reports as well.
Did actually very much in the way of low-altitude flak exist up there in Japan? I just couldn’t find it.
There was food for thought in this.
There was food for thought as well in two compelling February horrors. One occurred halfway around the world, in Europe, where LeMay had flown so often before. The other began nearby. The hardbitten general from Ohio who despised failure and was failing in Japan could not have avoided learning in detail of both.
The European event was the bombing of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, on the Elbe River 110 miles south of Berlin, famous for its art and its graceful and delicate architecture. In February 1945 the Russian front advanced to less than eighty miles to the east; refugees streamed west from that deadly harrowing and into the Saxon city. Lacking significant war industry, Dresden had not
been a bombing target before and was essentially undefended. It counted in its suburbs 26,000 Allied prisoners of war.
Winston Churchill instigated the Dresden raid.2205 The Secretary of State for Air responded to a phone call from the Prime Minister sometime in January with tactical proposals; the P.M. countered as testily as he had countered in the matter of Niels Bohr:
I did not ask you last night about plans for harrying the German retreat from Breslau. On the contrary, I asked whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany should not now be considered especially attractive targets. I am glad that this is “under consideration.” Pray report to me tomorrow what is going to be done.2206
Dresden’s number thus came up. On the cold night of February 13, 1,400 Bomber Command aircraft dropped high explosives and nearly 650,000 incendiaries on the city; six planes were lost. The firestorm that ensued was visible two hundred miles away. The next day, just after noon, 1,350 American heavy bombers flew over to attack the railroad marshaling yards with high explosives but found nine-tenths cover of cloud and smoke and bombed a far larger area, encountering no flak at all.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was a young prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the attack. He described his experience to an interviewer long after the war:
The first fancy city I’d ever seen. A city full of statues and zoos, like Paris. We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn, and we went to work every morning as contract labor in a malt syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we’d hear some other city getting it—whump a whump a whumpa whump. We never expected to get it. There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off—it was February 13, 1945—and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone. . . . The attack didn’t sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries. . . . They burnt the whole damn town down. . . .2207
Every day [afterward] we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded onto wagons and taken to parks, large, open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. One hundred thirty thousand corpses were hidden underground.
Nearer at hand Curtis LeMay could see the intensity and ferocity of Japanese resistance increasing as American forces fought their way toward the home islands. The latest hellhole was Iwo Jima—Sulfur Island—a mass of volcanic ash and rock only seven square miles in area with a dormant volcano at one end, Mount Suribachi, that had risen from the sea within historic times.2208 Miasmic with sulfur fumes, a steam of rotten eggs, Iwo lacked fresh water but supported two airfields from which Japanese fighter-bombers departed to attack LeMay’s B-29’s shining on their hardstands on Guam, Saipan and Tinian. It was nine hundred miles closer to Tokyo than the Marianas and its radar outposts gave Honshu antiaircraft batteries and defensive fighter units ample warning when B-29’s dispatched for strategic assault passed overhead.
The Japanese understood the island’s strategic position and had prepared for months, often under bombardment from U.S. Navy and Air Force planes, to defend it. Fifteen thousand men turned Iwo Jima into a fortress of bunkers, ditches, trenches, 13,000 yards of tunnels, 5,000 pillboxes and fortified cave entrances, vast galleys and wards built into Suribachi, blockhouses with thick concrete walls. The emplacements were armed with the largest concentration of artillery the Japanese had assembled anywhere up to that day: coastal defense guns in concrete bunkers, fieldpieces of all calibers shielded in caves, rocket launchers, tanks buried in the sand up to their turrets, 675-pound spigot mortars, long-barreled anti-aircraft guns cranked down parallel to the ground. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, taught his men a new strategy: “We would all like to die quickly and easily, but that would not inflict heavy casualties. We must fight from cover as long as we possibly can.”2209 His soldiers and marines, increased in strength now to more than 21,000, would no longer throw away their lives in banzai charges. They would resist to the death. “I am sorry to end my life here, fighting the United States of America,” Kuribayashi wrote his wife. “But I want to defend this island as long as I can.”2210 He expected no rescue. “They meant to make the conquest of Iwo so costly,” says William Manchester, who fought not this battle but the next one, Okinawa, “that the Americans would recoil from the thought of invading their homeland.”2211
Washington secretly considered sanitizing the island with artillery shells loaded with poison gas lobbed in by ships standing well offshore; the proposal reached the White House but Roosevelt curtly vetoed it.2212 It might have saved thousands of lives and hastened the surrender—arguments used to justify most of the mass slaughters of the Second World War, and neither the United States nor Japan had signed the Geneva Convention prohibiting such use—but Roosevelt presumably remembered the world outcry that had followed German introduction of poison gas in the First World War and decided to leave the sanitizing of Iwo Jima to the U.S. Marines.
They began landing on Saturday, February 19, at 9 A.M., after weeks of naval barrage and bombing. A less well-defended foe would have been pulverized by that battering; the Japanese dug in on Iwo Jima were only groggy from the long disturbance of their sleep. The Navy ferried the marines to shore in amphtracs, gave them over to the deep and treacherous black pumice of the beaches and ran out to reload. The Japanese commanded Suribachi, the high ground; they had zeroed in on every point of consequence on the flat island and now stood back to fire. On the beaches, says Manchester, men were more often killed by artillery than by bullets:
The invaders were taking heavy mortar and artillery fire. Steel sleeted down on them like the lash of a desert storm. By dusk 2,420 of the 30,000 men on the beachhead were dead or wounded. The perimeter was only four thousand yards long, seven hundred yards deep in the north and a thousand yards in the south. It resembled Doré’s illustrations of the Inferno. Essential cargo—ammo, rations, water—was piled up in sprawling chaos. And gore, flesh, and bones were lying all about.2213 The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent. There seemed to be no clean wounds; just fragments of corpses. It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue dissecting room. Often the only way to distinguish between Japanese and marine dead was by the legs; Marines wore canvas leggings and Nips khaki puttees. Otherwise identification was completely impossible. You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos. As night fell the beach reeked with the stench of burning flesh.
After that first awful night, when the Japanese might have squandered themselves in counterattacks but chose instead to hold fast to their defensive redoubts, the leaders of the invasion understood that they would pay with American lives for every foot of the island they captured. Kuribayashi’s final order to his men demanded of them the same sacrifice: “We shall infiltrate into the midst of the enemy and annihilate them,” he exhorted.2214 “We shall grasp bombs, charge the enemy tanks and destroy them. With every salvo we will, without fail, kill the enemy. Each man will make it his duty to kill ten of the enemy before dying!” Slow, cruel fighting continued for most of a month. In the end, late in M
arch, when shell and fire had changed the very landscape, victory had cost 6,821 marines killed and 21,865 wounded of some 60,000 committed, a casualty ratio of 2 to 1, the highest in Marine Corps history. Of Japanese defenders, 20,000 died on Iwo Jima; only 1,083 allowed themselves to be captured.
That so many were dying to protect his B-29 crews when their results were inconsequential to the war catalyzed LeMay to radical departure. The deaths had to be justified, the debt of death repaid.
One more incendiary test, 172 planes over Tokyo on February 23, produced the best results of any bombing so far, a full square mile of the city burned out. But LeMay had long known that fire would burn down Japan’s wooden cities if properly set. Proper setting, not firebombing itself, was the problem he struggled to solve.
He studied strike photographs. He reviewed intelligence reports. “The Japanese just didn’t seem to have those 20- and 40-millimeter [antiaircraft] guns,” he remembers realizing. “That’s the type of defense which must be used against bombers coming in to attack at a low or medium altitude. Up at twenty-five or thirty thousand feet they have to shoot at you with 80- or 90-millimeter stuff, or they’re never going to knock you down. . . . But 88-millimeter guns, if you come in low, are impotent. You’re moving too fast.”2215
Making of the Atomic Bomb Page 82
