Despite that urgency, O’Keefe adds, August 9 sat less well; “the scientific staff, dog-tired, met and warned Parsons that cutting two full days would prevent us from completing a number of important checkout procedures, but orders were orders.”
The young Providence, Rhode Island, native had been a student at George Washington University in 1939 and had attended the conference there on January 25 at which Niels Bohr announced the discovery of fission. Now on Tinian more than six years later, on the night of August 7, it became O’Keefe’s task to check out Fat Man for the last time before its working parts were encased beyond easy access in armor. In particular, he was required to connect the firing unit mounted on the front of the implosion sphere with the four radar units mounted in the tail by plugging in a cable inaccessibly threaded around the sphere inside its dural casing:
When I returned at midnight, the others in my group left to get some sleep; I was alone in the assembly room with a single Army technician to make the final connection. . . .2718
I did my final checkout and reached for the cable to plug it into the firing unit. It wouldn’t fit!
“I must be doing something wrong,” I thought. “Go slowly; you’re tired and not thinking straight.”
I looked again. To my horror, there was a female plug on the firing set and a female plug on the cable. I walked around the weapon and looked at the radars and the other end of the cable. Two male plugs. . . . I checked and double-checked. I had the technician check; he verified my findings. I felt a chill and started to sweat in the air-conditioned room.
What had happened was obvious. In the rush to take advantage of good weather, someone had gotten careless and put the cable in backward.
Removing the cable and reversing it would mean partly disassembling the implosion sphere. It had taken most of a day to assemble it. They would miss the window of good weather and slip into the five days of bad weather that had worried Paul Tibbets. The second atomic bomb might be delayed as long as a week. The war would go on, O’Keefe thought. He decided to improvise. Although “nothing that could generate heat was ever allowed in an explosive assembly room,” he determined to “unsolder the connectors from the two ends of the cable, reverse them, and resolder them”:2719
My mind was made up. I was going to change the plugs without talking to anyone, rules or no rules. I called in the technician. There were no electrical outlets in the assembly room. We went out to the electronics lab and found two long extension cords and a soldering iron. We . . . propped the door open so it wouldn’t pinch the extension cords (another safety violation). I carefully removed the backs of the connectors and unsoldered the wires. I resoldered the plugs onto the other ends of the cable, keeping as much distance between the soldering iron and the detonators as I could as I walked around the weapon. . . . We must have checked the cable continuity five times before plugging the connectors into the radars and the firing set and tightening up the joints. I was finished.2720
So, the next day, was Fat Man, the two armored steel ellipsoids of its ballistic casing bolted together through bathtub fittings to lugs cast into the equatorial segments of the implosion sphere, its boxed tail sprouting radar antennae just as Little Boy’s had done. By 2200 on August 8 it had been loaded into the forward bomb bay of a B-29 named Bock’s Car after its usual commander, Frederick Bock, but piloted on this occasion by Major Charles W. Sweeney. Sweeney’s primary target was Kokura Arsenal on the north coast of Kyushu; his secondary was the old Portuguese- and Dutchinfluenced port city of Nagasaki, the San Francisco of Japan, home of that country’s largest colony of Christians, where the Mitsubishi torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor had been made.
Bock’s Car flew off Tinian at 0347 on August 9.2721 The Fat Man weaponeer, Navy Commander Frederick L. Ashworth, remembers the flight to rendezvous:
The night of our takeoff was one of tropical rain squalls, and flashes of lightning stabbed into the darkness with disconcerting regularity. The weather forecast told us of storms all the way from the Marianas to the Empire.2722 Our rendezvous was to be off the southeast coast of Kyushu, some fifteen hundred miles away. There we were to join with our two companion observation B-29s that took off a few minutes behind us.
Fat Man was fully armed at takeoff except for its green plugs, which Ashworth changed to red only ten minutes into the mission so that Sweeney could cruise above the squalls at 17,000 feet, St. Elmo’s fire glowing on the propellers of his plane.2723 The pilot soon discovered he would enjoy no reserve of fuel; the fuel selector that would allow him to feed his engines from a 600-gallon tank of gasoline in his aft bomb bay refused to work. He circled over Yakoshima between 0800 and 0850 Japanese time waiting for his escorts, one of which never did catch up. The finger plane at Kokura reported three-tenths low clouds, no intermediate or high clouds and improving conditions, but when Bock’s Car arrived there at 1044 heavy ground haze and smoke obscured the target. “Two additional runs were made,” Ashworth notes in his flight log, “hoping that the target might be picked up after closer observation.2724 However, at no time was the aiming point seen.”
Jacob Beser controlled electronic countermeasures on the Fat Man mission as he had done on the Little Boy mission before. He remembers of Kokura that “the Japs started to get curious and began sending fighters up after us. We had some flak bursts and things were getting a little hairy, so Ashworth and Sweeney decided to make a run down to Nagasaki, as there was no sense dragging the bomb home or dropping it in the ocean.”2725
Sweeney had enough fuel left for only one pass over the target before nursing his aircraft to an emergency landing on Okinawa. When he approached Nagasaki he found the city covered with cloud; with his fuel low he could either bomb by radar or jettison a bomb worth several hundred million dollars into the sea. It was Ashworth’s call and rather than waste the bomb he authorized a radar approach. At the last minute a hole opened in the cloud cover long enough to give the bombardier a twenty-second visual run on a stadium several miles upriver from the original aiming point nearer the bay. Fat Man dropped from the B-29, fell through the hole and exploded 1,650 feet above the steep slopes of the city at 11:02 A.M., August 9, 1945, with a force later estimated at 22 kilotons. The steep hills confined the larger explosion; it caused less damage and less loss of life than Little Boy.
But 70,000 died in Nagasaki by the end of 1945 and 140,000 altogether across the next five years, a death rate like Hiroshima’s of 54 percent. The survivors spoke with equal eloquence of unspeakable suffering. A U.S. Navy officer visited the city in mid-September and described its condition then, more than a month after the bombing, in a letter home to his wife:
A smell of death and corruption pervades the place, ranging from the ordinary carrion smell to somewhat subtler stenches with strong overtones of ammonia (decomposing nitrogenous matter, I suppose).2726 The general impression, which transcends those derived from the evidence of our physical senses, is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without hope of resurrection. And all this is not localized. It’s everywhere, and nothing has escaped its touch. In most ruined cities you can bury the dead, clean up the rubble, rebuild the houses and have a living city again. One feels that is not so here. Like the ancient Sodom and Gomorrah, its site has been sown with salt and ichabod1 is written over its gates.
The military leaders of Japan had still not agreed to surrender.2727 The Emperor Hirohito therefore took the extraordinary step of forcing the issue. The resulting surrender offer, delivered through Switzerland, reached Washington on Friday morning, August 10. It acknowledged acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration except in one crucial regard: that it “does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”2728
Truman met immediately with his advisers, including Stimson and Byrnes. Stimson thought the President would accept the Japanese offer; doing so, he wrote in his diary, would be “taking a good plain horse sense position that the question of the Emperor
was a minor matter compared with delaying a victory in the war which was now in our hands.”2729 Jimmy Byrnes persuasively disagreed. “I cannot understand,” he argued, “why we should go further than we were willing to go at Potsdam when we had no atomic bomb, and Russia was not in the war.”2730 He was thinking as usual of domestic politics; accepting Japan’s condition, he warned, might mean the “crucifixion of the President.”2731 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal proposed a compromise: the President should communicate to the Japanese his “willingness to accept [their offer], yet define the terms of surrender in such a manner that the intents and purposes of the Potsdam Declaration would be clearly accomplished.”2732
Truman bought the compromise but Byrnes drafted the reply. It was deliberately ambiguous in its key provisions:
From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. . . .
The Emperor and the Japanese High Command will be required to sign the surrender terms. . . .
The ultimate form of government shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.
Nor did Byrnes hurry the message along; he kept it in hand overnight and only released it for broadcast by radio and delivery through Switzerland the following morning.
Stimson, still trying to bring his Air Force under control, had argued at the Friday morning meeting that the United States should suspend bombing, including atomic bombing. Truman thought otherwise, but when he met with the cabinet that afternoon he had partly reconsidered. “We would keep up the war at its present intensity,” Forrestal paraphrases the President, “until the Japanese agreed to these terms, with the limitation however that there will be no further dropping of the atomic bomb.”2733, 2734 Henry Wallace, the former Vice President who was now Secretary of Commerce, recorded in his diary the reason for the President’s change of mind:
Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, “all those kids.”2735
The restriction came none too soon. Groves had reported to Marshall that morning that he had gained four days in manufacture and expected to ship a second Fat Man plutonium core and initiator from New Mexico to Tinian on August 12 or 13. “Provided there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre,” he concluded cautiously, “the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August.”2736 Marshall told Groves the President wanted no further atomic bombing except by his express order and Groves decided to hold up shipment, a decision in which Marshall concurred.
The Japanese government learned of Byrnes’ reply to its offer of conditional surrender not long after midnight on Sunday, August 12, but civilian and military leaders continued to struggle in deadlocked debate. Hirohito resisted efforts to persuade him to reverse his earlier commitment to surrender and called a council of the imperial family to collect pledges of support from the princes of the blood. The Japanese people were not yet told of the Byrnes reply but knew of the peace negotiations and waited in suspense. The young writer Yukio Mishima found the suspense surreal:
It was our last chance. People were saying that Tokyo would be [atomicbombed] next. Wearing white shirts and shorts, I walked about the streets. The people had reached the limits of desperation and were now going about their affairs with cheerful faces.2737 From one moment to the next, nothing happened. Everywhere there was an air of cheerful excitement. It was just as though one was continuing to blow up an already bulging toy balloon, wondering: “Will it burst now? Will it burst now?”
Strategic Air Forces commander Carl Spaatz cabled Lauris Norstad on August 10 proposing “placing [the] third atomic bomb . . . on Tokyo,” where he thought it would have a salutary “psychological effect on government officials.”2738 On the other hand, continuing area incendiary bombing disturbed him; “I have never favored the destruction of cities as such with all inhabitants being killed,” he confided to his diary on August 11. He had sent off 114 B-29’s on August 10; because of bad weather and misgivings he canceled a mission scheduled for August 11 and restricted operations thereafter to “attacks on military targets visually or under very favorable blind bombing conditions.” American weather planes over Tokyo were no longer drawing anti-aircraft fire; Spaatz thought that fact “unusual.”2739
The vice chief of the Japanese Navy’s general staff, the man who had conceived and promoted the kamikaze attacks of the past year that had added to American bewilderment and embitterment at Japanese ways, crashed a meeting of government leaders on the evening of August 13 with tears in his eyes to offer “a plan for certain victory”: “sacrifice 20,000,000 Japanese lives in a special [kamikaze] attack.”2740 Whether he meant the 20 million to attack the assembled might of the Allies with rocks or bamboo spears the record does not reveal.
A B-29 leaflet barrage forced the issue the next morning. Leaflet bombs showered what remained of Tokyo’s streets with a translation of Byrnes’ reply. The Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal knew such public revelation would harden the military against surrender. He carried the leaflet immediately to the Emperor and just before eleven that morning, August 14, Hirohito assembled his ministers and counselors in the imperial air raid shelter. He told them he found the Allied reply “evidence of the peaceful and friendly intentions of the enemy” and considered it “acceptable.”2741 He did not specifically mention the atomic bomb; even that terrific leviathan submerged in the general misery:
I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer. A continuation of the war would bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of persons. The whole nation would be reduced to ashes. How then could I carry on the wishes of my imperial ancestors?
He asked his ministers to prepare an imperial rescript—a formal edict—that he might broadcast personally to the nation. The officials were not legally bound to do so—the Emperor’s authority lay outside the legal structure of the government—but by older and deeper bonds than law they were bound, and they set to work.
In the meantime Washington had grown impatient. Groves was asked on August 13 about “the availability of your patients together with the time estimate that they could be moved and placed.”2742 Stimson recommended proceeding to ship the nuclear materials for the third bomb to Tinian. Marshall and Groves decided to wait another day or two. Truman ordered Arnold to resume area incendiary attacks. Arnold still hoped to prove that his Air Force could win the war; he called for an all-out attack with every available B-29 and any other bombers in the Pacific theater and mustered more than a thousand aircraft. Twelve million pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese, even as word of the Japanese surrender passed through Switzerland to Washington.
The first hint of surrender reached American bases in the Pacific by radio in the form of a news bulletin from the Japanese news agency Dōmei at 2:49 P.M. on August 14—1:49 A.M. in Washington:
Flash! Flash! Tokyo, Aug. 14—It is learned an imperial message accepting the Potsdam Proclamation is forthcoming soon.2743
The bombers droned on even after that, but eventually that day the bombs stopped falling. Truman announced the Japanese acceptance in the afternoon. There were last-minute acts of military rebellion in Tokyo—a high officer assassinated, an unsuccessful attempt to steal the phonograph recording of the imperial rescript, a brief takeover of a division of Imperial Guards, wild plans for a coup. But loyalty prevailed. The Emperor broadcast to a weeping nation on August 15; his 100 million subjects had never heard the high, antique Voice of the Crane before:
Despite the best that has been done by everyone . . . the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while t
he general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.2744 Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. . . . This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint declaration of the Powers. . . .
The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all ye, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictate of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable. . . .
Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation.
“If it had gone on any longer,” writes Yukio Mishima, “there would have been nothing to do but go mad.”2745
“An atomic bomb,” the Japanese study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki emphasizes, “ . . . is a weapon of mass slaughter.”2746 A nuclear weapon is in fact a total-death machine, compact and efficient, as a simple graph prepared from Hiroshima statistics demonstrates:
The percentage of people killed depends simply on distance from the hypocenter; the relation between death percentage and distance is inversely proportional and the killing, as Gil Elliot emphasizes, is no longer selective:
Making of the Atomic Bomb Page 102
