by Paul Ham
General “Hap” Arnold had hand-picked Tibbets for the project in the summer of 1944. The young man was appointed to command the 509th Composite Group, a unit within the US Army Air Forces specially selected to carry out the top-secret mission. Tibbets’ candor had startled his examiners during his security clearance tests. Asked whether he had ever been arrested, Tibbets admitted he had, ten years earlier, for having sex in the back seat of a car on Florida Beach.29
Tibbets actually enjoyed life at Wendover Field, the loathed air base on the Utah–Nevada border, which Bob Hope, on a brief visit, called “Leftover Field.” The isolation, the rigid command structure, the thoroughly scheduled days, all appealed to this ascetic officer. Orders, methods and results – the stuff of carefully planned action – sustained him. He described his mission to his superiors with the brevity of one for whom words, unless in the service of his appointed task, were a waste of time. His mission was, he said, “to wage atomic war.”30
Tibbets had unlimited security clearance. The young colonel needed only to say the code word “silverplate” and he got what he wanted – for example, the power to raise several squadrons, known as Tibbets’ Private Air Force. The personnel chosen for 509th Composite Group were taken from the 393d Heavy Bombardment Squadron, chosen for its high reputation. Special agents scrutinized every man and reported the slightest security breach to Tibbets, who learned the details of each member’s drinking habits, sex life, family and political orientation. Those who failed were packed off to remote air bases – in North Alaska, for example, where they could talk to “any polar bear or walrus” willing to listen, Tibbets later wrote.31
Those who met Tibbets’ exacting standards formed the kernel of the 509th. Three men convicted of manslaughter and several former criminals who had falsified their names to enlist were among the successful candidates. Tibbets offered to return their conviction files – with matches to burn them – if the mission succeeded. He valued their air skills over their moral rectitude.
The group trained all day, every day. Tibbets would “drill, drill and further drill his crews, until the best of them could hit the ground within just twenty-five feet of the bull’s eye.”32 None of them knew the nature of their mission. Tibbets never spoke of it with his crew, and he was in any case forbidden to use the words “atomic” and “radioactive.”
Tibbets’ confidence and notoriety rose in tandem with the distant respect that attached to his name. He dared even to correct the fearsome Curtis LeMay. The atomic delivery aircraft must fly above 25,000 feet, he told the commander at a meeting in Guam. The “special weapon” would destroy a plane flying under that, he explained.33
Ashworth
Frederick Lincoln Ashworth, a native of Beverly, Massachusetts, had graduated from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1933. Like many of his military colleagues on the Manhattan Project, he had performed with exceptional courage in combat operations prior to joining the atomic mission. As the commander of Torpedo Squadron Eleven (VT-11), a Grumman TBF Avenger unit based on Guadalcanal, he flew patrol, search, spotting, strike, and night mine-laying missions in the struggle for control of the Solomon Islands, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He also participated in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign, as aviation officer on the staff of Vice Admiral Richmond K. Turner’s V Amphibious Corps.34
In November 1944 Ashworth was assigned to the Manhattan Project and, with the rank of commander, became director of operations for Project Alberta, a core part of the larger Manhattan Project. Project Alberta personnel were tasked with dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. A close confident of Groves, Ashworth served as the general’s emissary in apprising top-ranked admirals of the nuclear secret. He was sent to Guam, for example, in February 1945 with a message for Fleet Admiral Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific fleet, signed by Fleet Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations. Ashworth was convinced Groves had written it.
“What the letter said,” Ashworth later wrote, “was that there would be a thing called the atomic bomb in his theater about the first of August.” Nimitz received Ashworth in private, read the letter and asked: “Don’t those people realize we’re fighting a war out here? This is February and you’re talking about the first of August.” Ashworth replied, “Well, this is just to let you know what’s happening.” Nimitz looked out the window, turned and said: “Well, thank you very much, Commander. I guess I was just born about twenty years too soon.”35
Ashworth’s technical ability and combat experience qualified him as one of just two men who met Groves’ exacting standards for the role of “weaponeer” – a uniquely skilled officer who would fly on the bomb-carrying aircraft, arm the bomb and make any necessary tactical decisions. The other man was Ashworth’s commanding officer, Captain Parsons.
Ashworth had worked with Parsons and his technical deputy, Norman F. Ramsey – a scientist, radar expert and future Nobel laureate tenured to the armed forces – in developing the detonation components of the bombs. He had trained at the Wendover base with the crews who would be dropping them. It was agreed in early 1945 that he and Parsons would fly alternating missions. Parsons was therefore slated to command the first atomic mission (headed for Hiroshima), while Ashworth would command the second (whose ultimate target, Nagasaki, would not be confirmed until the plane was over Japan).
***
The Pentagon meeting on May 28 concentrated on the aiming points within the targeted cities. The plane carrying the atomic bomb “should avoid trying to pinpoint” military or industrial installations, because they were “small, spread on fringes of city and quite dispersed.” Instead, aircrews should “endeavor to place . . . [the] gadget in [the] center of selected city.” The committeemen were quite explicit about this: The bomb should be dropped on the heart of a major city. One reason was that the aircraft would have to release their bombs from a great height – some 30,000 feet – to escape the resulting shock wave and avoid the radioactive cloud. That limited potential targets to large urban areas easily visible from the air.
Parsons gave another reason to drop the bomb on a city center: “The human and material destruction would be obvious.”36 An attack on a previously intact urban area would show off the bomb to great effect. Destroying military barracks, ordnance and munitions factories, while desirable from a publicity viewpoint, was incidental to this purpose – and did not influence the final decision. “No one on the Target Committee ever recommended any other kind of target,” McGeorge Bundy, a young Washington fixer (who would become John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser), later wrote, “and while every city proposed had quite traditional military objectives inside it, the true object of attack was the city itself.”37
The committeemen unanimously dismissed talk of giving Japan a prior warning or demonstration in a remote place, with specially invited UN and Japanese observers. Parsons had persistently rejected such suggestions: “The reaction of observers to a desert shot would be one of intense disappointment,” he had warned in September 1944. Even the crater would be “unimpressive,” he said.38 Groves shared Parsons’ contempt for “tender souls” who advocated a non-combat demonstration. Oppenheimer, too, later wrote that he agreed completely with Parsons about “the fallacy of regarding a controlled test as the culmination of the work of this laboratory.”
When the discussion ended, the committee had no doubt about how the first atomic bomb would be used: It would be dropped on the heads of hundreds of thousands of civilians living in the heart of a city.39
***
In June 1945 the Target Committee narrowed the choice of cities. On June 15, the committee drew up a memo enlarging upon Kyoto’s attributes. It was a “typical Jap city” with a “very high proportion of wood in the heavily built-up residential districts.” There were few fire-resistant structures. It contained universities, colleges and “areas of culture,” as well as factories and war plants, which were in fact small and scattered, and in 1945 of negligibl
e use.40
Nevertheless, the committee confirmed Kyoto’s place on the updated “reserved” list of atomic targets – that is, the list of cities that had been spared LeMay’s conventional firebombing raids. The raids had thus far incinerated more than 60 Japanese cities, killing or wounding hundreds of thousands of civilians and producing millions of refugees.
At about this point came an unexpected and, for Groves, highly unwelcome intervention. War secretary Henry Stimson abruptly ordered Kyoto’s immediate removal from the target list.
Stimson had discovered the city’s presence on the list by chance. In June he had asked Groves, while in the general’s office on a different matter, whether the target list had been decided. Groves said it had, but refused to name the targets, pending the approval of General Marshall, the army’s chief of staff.
Stimson insisted on seeing the list, and within days Groves relented. What Stimson saw disturbed him. In 1926 he and his wife had visited Kyoto and admired the ancient capital’s temples and shrines. It disturbed him to see this symbol of Japanese culture and history, with no evident military use, marked for atomic destruction.41 He ordered it struck off the list. Groves fudged. Hap Arnold, commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, supported Groves, and favored keeping Kyoto on the list.
The elderly Stimson, his influence waning, was adamant: “This is one time I’m going to be the final deciding authority,” Stimson told Groves. “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do on this. In this matter I’m the kingpin.’42
Groves was not so easily deterred, and dragged out the argument. Kyoto was an ideal target, he argued. The city was “large enough an area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of the atomic bomb,” he said, while “Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect.’43
There was a personal dimension to Groves’ insubordination. He felt a sense of proprietorial control over the bomb and how and where it should be used. Hadn’t he almost built the gadget? It was nearly ready for testing, and with the project going so well, these meddlesome politicians irked him; he felt that the choice of target was his to decide.
For a fortnight, Groves continued to refer to Kyoto as a target despite Stimson’s clear instructions to the contrary. Then, on June 30, the general bowed to Stimson’s seniority. He reluctantly informed the chiefs of staff that, on the direction of the secretary of war, Kyoto had been eliminated as a possible target for the atomic fission bomb and all other future bombing. At the same time, he provocatively left the city on the short list of four places to be preserved from conventional attack, implying it remained a possible nuclear target.
In July, in a further poke in Stimson’s eye, Groves authorized the dispatch of the following message to generals Arnold and MacArthur and admirals Nimitz and King, who together controlled the US army and naval forces then ranged against Japan: “Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kokura and Niigata will not be attacked [by conventional forces] . . . unless further directions are issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.’44 Up until the last moment, Groves maneuvered to drop the first atomic bomb on Kyoto.
Henry Stimson’s Committee
In parallel, in Washington, another high-level committee was limbering up, eager to shape America’s atomic mission and postwar nuclear program. The new committee would serve as a personal platform for war secretary Henry Stimson, a man whose personal failure and crisis of conscience would resonate well after the bombs fell.
Disturbed by the atomic bomb’s implications for world security – assuming, of course, that the gadget worked – in April Stimson had proposed that a committee be created to oversee the development and use of nuclear weapons in war and peace. Truman agreed and, on May 1, 1945, approved the formation of the Interim Committee – “interim” because it was assumed that a permanent body would, in time, control atomic energy. Its ostensible role was to advise the president on the future of nuclear power for military and civilian use. Its actual role was less clear; indeed, its early meetings were spent discussing where, and in what circumstances, the first bomb should be used – issues the Target Committee had already discussed and agreed upon. It is hard not to see the hand of Groves in the formation of this powerless platform for those who, like Stimson, had interfered with his work.
On paper, the Interim Committee looked impressive. Its permanent members were Stimson; James Byrnes, who was then the president’s “personal representative” (pending his appointment as secretary of state); Vannevar Bush, a scientist, inventor and engineer who had helped establish the Manhattan Project and who directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development; James Conant, an organic chemist who had pioneered the development of poison gases during the First World War, served a radical tenure as Harvard president in the 1930s, and then headed the National Defense Research Committee; the physicist Dr. Karl Compton, president of MIT; Ralph Bard, under secretary of the navy; William Clayton, assistant secretary of state; and banker George L. Harrison, special consultant to the war secretary. The Manhattan Project scientists Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton (Karl’s younger brother), Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi sat on the committee’s scientific panel. Generals Groves and George Marshall received open invitations to attend.45
Stimson
Henry Stimson was the consummate Washington old boy, a conscientiously Christian, Ivy League alumnus who had served as Roosevelt’s secretary of war and continued to do so under Truman. By 1945 Stimson had turned 77. He had been born in the late 19th century, an era of sabres and rifled musketry, and had lived to see both the machine guns of the Western Front and the recent firebombing of German cities. Now Stimson contended with the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
Stimson’s outlook was Victorian; his morals, patrician. An “unabashed elitist,” he believed “richer and more intelligent citizens” should guide public policy, and that Anglo-Saxons were superior to the “lesser breeds,” as he was apt to say.46 He dedicated his term as war secretary to eradicating the nastier aspects of war: He detested the submarine; embraced the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact that called for the renunciation of war; and campaigned tirelessly for arms control, international cooperation and mutual trust.47 Indiscriminate slaughter troubled the conscience of this traditional gentleman.
After Roosevelt’s death, on April 12, 1945, Stimson was the first to alert Truman to the plans for the new weapon. On April 24 he wrote:
Dear Mr. President,
I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not mentioned it since on account of the pressure you have been under . . .48
Truman met Stimson the next day and heard the full story of a weapon so powerful it could “end civilization.” Reading from a long memo, Stimson divulged the details of a secret organization larger than the biggest US corporation; of tens of thousands working on an enterprise, the purpose of which they were ignorant; of huge factories and laboratories situated on mesas, deserts and valleys; of swathes of American businesses given over to developing new and untested processes; of immense resources, deadly substances and remarkable scientific advances; and of the cost to US taxpayers, upwards of US$2 billion.
“Within four months,” Stimson continued, “we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” Britain had contributed technical know-how, he explained, but the US controlled the resources and processes used in the construction, giving the Americans a position of global dominance they expected to hold for many years to come.
“The world . . . would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon,” Stimson wrote. “With its aid even a very powerful unsuspecting nation might be conquered within a very few days by a very much smaller one . . . Modern civilization might be completely destroyed.” Control of the “menace” of atomic power “would involve such thoroughgoing rights of inspection and internal controls which we have never heretofore
contemplated . . . The question of sharing it with other nations and . . . on what terms, becomes a primary question of foreign relations.”
The United States “had a certain moral responsibility” to control the weapon and avoid the disaster that threatened civilization, Stimson added, giving voice to his deep personal misgivings about the nature of modern warfare; on the other hand, if properly used, nuclear power might afford America the opportunity to bring peace to the world and “save our civilization.”49
Truman studied the memo with composure; he did not wish to appear alarmed. In the anteroom, Groves, the man in overall charge of building the bomb, impatiently awaited his turn with the new president, having been ushered in via the back door to escape the attention of the press. Ever in a hurry, when he was finally admitted, Groves raced through the schedule of the atomic program with the president and Stimson. The first gun-type (uranium) bomb should be ready for use about August 1, 1945, he told them, and the first implosion-type (plutonium) bomb should be ready for testing in early July 1945.50
Byrnes
One man did more than any to sink Stimson’s boat in the coming meetings: James Byrnes, due to be sworn in as the next secretary of state on July 3, who served as the president’s representative on the Interim Committee.
Byrnes was obsessed with privacy, which makes it hard to gain a complete picture of him, as he destroyed many of his own letters and often left no record of his discussions. This has led some historians and other writers to speculate about what a man of his character might have done or said in certain situations, rather than focusing on the known facts about his actual part in the coming events.
