Enola Gay

by Gordon Thomas

  The potential was heady and limitless. So far, a prototype had killed a laboratory rat. This modest success gave Asada hope. The next step Asada planned was to direct the death ray at a larger mammal.

  9

  Surprising the enemy was the abiding concern of Major General Seizo Arisue. Surprises were his business. He created them, spread them, anticipated them, and defused them.

  He was head of Imperial Army Intelligence, Japan’s acknowledged spy master.

  This bantam-sized man with a formidable intellect and a fearful temper to match his harsh, rasping voice kept a file on every important Japanese politician and officer. He knew more secrets than any man in the army, and often used them to maintain his own position.

  In turn, the file on Arisue kept by his rivals in naval intelligence described him as “arrogant, supremely confident in his own abilities, and dangerously ambitious.”

  The relationship between the two intelligence branches was icy. They were locked in a power struggle over which could provide the most valuable information.

  Arisue was coming to believe that at last he might have the opportunity to resolve that issue with a striking espionage coup. He had been in his cramped office in a wing of the monolithic General Army Headquarters in Tokyo since early morning, trying to verify an intriguing report sent by his contact in Lisbon. Ordinarily, the report would not have reached Arisue personally. But he had given an explicit order that he must see “everything relating to America.”

  Some of it came from the Abwehr in Berlin; there were outdated snippets from Madrid and Mexico City. The weekly summaries of the American press were more helpful. Army intelligence subscribed to 140 American newspapers and magazines. Very often The New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Time, and Newsweek contained clues of troop movements and battle casualties that helped Arisue piece together a surprisingly accurate mosaic of the United States at war. At first he had been suspicious of the material gleaned from the American press. He thought it might be a trap laid by enemy intelligence. But repeatedly he had been able to confirm independently the newspaper reports. He grew astonished at the American censors for allowing such important material to be published.

  Now, as he studied the Lisbon report, he wondered what the Portuguese censors had made of it. No doubt they had passed copies on to British and American intelligence; in the past six months he had suspected this was happening regularly.

  Arisue’s man in Lisbon had picked up a whisper that the United States had embarked on a huge new war project.

  After hours of pondering, Arisue knew there was only one way to verify the truth of this claim. He must slip an agent into the United States.

  That would be the most difficult operation he had yet mounted. No native Japanese could hope to remain undetected for long in North America. Arisue could call upon the flourishing German spy network in South America to provide an operative, but it might take months to clear matters through Berlin, especially as the tide was turning against Hitler. The Italians were already in disarray.

  Arisue ruled out any help from the Axis.

  He considered his own resources. His Lisbon contact was not qualified for such a dangerous mission. His men in Madrid and Mexico City were local recruits, capable of little more than acting as intelligence “post boxes.”

  Brazil—he put a question mark next to the name of his agent there. He was a good man. But where would he begin?

  The message from Lisbon had given no clue as to where the new American war project was being carried out, or what it was.

  The problems were immense. But if he could discover what this new American war project was, it might be enough to stiffen the government’s resolve to fight on to the end.

  Arisue sent for Lieutenant Colonel Kakuzo Oya, chief of the American Intelligence Section at Arisue’s headquarters. The two officers spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the prospects of infiltrating a spy into the United States.

  10

  Orders crackled over the B-29’s intercom. “We’ll do it by the book. They’re all gonna be watching. Nobody’s gonna screw it up. Right?”

  The crew of the huge bomber didn’t respond to the pilot, Captain Robert Lewis. For the past hour they had been “doing it by the book,” strictly following the procedures laid down in the buff-colored manual. They had checked the outside of the bomber, clambered aboard, stowed their parachutes, and begun the pre-flight countdown.

  Duzenbury, the engineer, and Caron, the tail gunner, who had flown with Lewis many times before, were surprised at how serious he was this crisp fall morning at Wendover. They knew Lewis as a joking twenty-six-year-old who wore a battered peaked cap and a stained flying jacket. He looked like a combat veteran, even though he had never seen action.

  Lewis was treating this flight, in the words of Caron, “as if he had on board the president and the Cabinet.”

  Squashed in the tiny tail turret, the gunner was tempted to snap on the intercom and tell the pilot to relax.

  The impulse passed. The checking continued.

  “Equipment secure, Navigator?” The intercom emphasized Lewis’s Brooklyn accent.

  “Secure.”

  Captain Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk, the navigator, settled himself more comfortably in the padded seat with its fitted armrests. He wondered who Lewis was trying to impress. In the week he had been at Wendover, van Kirk had noticed that Lewis enjoyed an audience.

  Tibbets had tried to reassure the navigator. He told van Kirk that Lewis was “just letting off tension. In the air, he’s a natural.” Van Kirk had his own ideas about “naturals.” Too often he had found them “daredevils trying to prove things to other people.” He hoped Lewis was not like that.

  Lewis had always thought all navigators a strange breed, with their blind belief that any pilot could steer a course to an absolute degree. Today, though, the pilot intended to follow explicitly any course change van Kirk indicated. In that way, Lewis could not be blamed for any foul-up.

  Seated in the cockpit watching the winking lights on the instrument panel, Lewis experienced a familiar feeling of well-being; he had come a long way.

  In his boyhood days on the streets of Brooklyn, a swift pair of fists had been better than a classy accent; in flying school, he knew, his abrasive manner had worked against him. But in the end, even his most demanding instructor had conceded that Lewis was a highly gifted pilot. He’d never forgotten the pride his mom and pop had shown when they first saw him in an officer’s uniform, and his own satisfaction while walking through his Brooklyn neighborhood and being “greeted as somebody.” Then there had been the day he had taken the legendary Charles Lindbergh up in a B-29. After the flight, Lindbergh had said he would have been happy to have had Lewis fly with him on his epoch-making flights.

  It was Tibbets who had developed Lewis into one of the most experienced B-29 pilots in the air force. The summons to Wendover had not surprised Lewis. He had written to his father: “Paul needs me because I am so good at my job.”

  Modesty, as Lewis would admit, was not one of his endearing qualities. But he had others: generosity and a fierce loyalty to his crew, especially the enlisted men. Down on the flight line, mechanics hero-worshiped Lewis because he bent regulations to get them better working conditions.

  He had joined his flight crew a few days earlier when the B-29 arrived, the first one to be delivered to Wendover. There had been keen competition among the pilots to fly it, and Lewis had been almost schoolboyishly excited when he was chosen to do so. He immediately began to talk of “my crew” and “my ship.”

  But for this flight van Kirk and Ferebee had taken the places of his usual navigator and bombardier. Tibbets explained to Lewis that van Kirk and Ferebee would take turns flying with all the crews. Tibbets added a promise. “It will be just like the old days, Bob.”

  That cheered Lewis. The “old days” were when he had “a one-to-one relationship with Paul without other people getting in the way.”
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br />   In his ten days at Wendover, it had not been like that. Lewis felt that Tibbets never had time to sit down with him and reminisce about those old days. Worse, “He didn’t laugh at my jokes, he wasn’t so tolerant if I made a small mistake. I put it down to nerves over a new command.”

  The last flight checks were ending. Lewis asked van Kirk the estimated flying time to the initial point, or IP, the map reference from which the bomber would commence its bombing run. From the IP to the AP, the aiming point, would be a matter of a few miles. Over that distance, Lewis would work with the bombardier, Ferebee. He had disliked Ferebee from the day they met. He thought the bombardier acted “superior,” talked like “a playboy in the movies.”

  One night, Lewis and Ferebee had played poker. Lewis had lost half his month’s salary. He could ill afford to do so; a broken marriage had left him short of cash. Half-jokingly, Tibbets had told Lewis to stay in his “own league.”

  Tibbets knew Ferebee was one of the best poker players in uniform. He also felt Lewis was a “poor loser”—an accusation the pilot would always hotly deny—and Tibbets did not “want card games creating unnecessary problems.”

  In his mind, Lewis ran through the main points of the briefing Tibbets had given. He was to climb to thirty thousand feet and fly south to the bombing range, the man-made lake, Salton Sea, in Southern California. There, Ferebee would try to drop a single blockbuster, filled with ballast, into a seven-hundred-foot circle on the northern edge of the lake. Tibbets had told Lewis that once the bomb was dropped he was to execute a 155-degree diving turn, which would take him back in the direction from which he had just come. Tibbets had emphasized, “Keep your nose down, and get the hell out of the area as fast as you can.”

  Tibbets hoped the maneuver would provide the answer to how an aircrew could survive the expected shock wave from an atomic bomb. He had calculated that Lewis should be some seven miles away when the test blockbuster hit the ground. He did not explain to Lewis the reason for this action, “because that would have meant telling him too much too soon.”

  Shortly before boarding the B-29, Lewis had received another surprise. Beser had arrived on the apron saying he was bringing along on the trip some three hundred pounds of special equipment.

  “Can’t tell you why,” said Beser cheerfully. “It’s a matter of security.”

  That didn’t endear Beser to Lewis. Waiting for takeoff, the radar officer was squatting on the floor of the B-29, aft of the toilet in the rear section of the plane, with his spectrum analyzers, direction finder, search receivers, and antennas.

  Beser was about to make the first flight in which he would practice coping with enemy attempts to interfere electronically with an atomic bomb. Some of his instruments had been specially modified at Los Alamos. During the flight, they would receive signals from the ground simulating enemy radar beams. It would be Beser’s task to recognize, anticipate, and deflect the beams.

  “Ready to start engines?”

  Duzenbury studied the engineer’s panel before answering Lewis. He was, at thirty-one, the oldest man in the crew. Duzenbury hadn’t questioned why Tibbets had brought him to Wendover. It was enough for him “to work for the finest gentleman in the air force.”

  He also liked Lewis; next to the colonel, Lewis was the best pilot Duzenbury knew.

  “Start engines, Captain.”

  One by one, each of the four Wright Cyclone turbine engines roared into life, and the tower cleared Lewis for takeoff. At the end of the runway he boosted the engines to 2,300 rpm while Duzenbury checked the magnetos and generators. Then, Lewis advanced the throttles to their full power position and slowly released the brakes. At 95 mph, just as the manual said, Lewis lifted the largest bomber in the world into the air.

  Exactly on time, he reached the IP. Minutes later, Ferebee announced he had the AP in his Norden bombsight. “Bombs away. Correction. Bomb away.”

  Lewis banked the bomber violently to the right, dropping its nose to give him more speed. A surprised Caron far back in the tail shouted into the intercom. “Cap’n, it’s like a roller coaster back here!”

  Lewis shouted back. “I’ll charge you for the ride when we get home.”

  Beser was too involved to notice the maneuver; two of his instruments had lost power, and he had no idea how effective his electronic countermeasures had been against the invisible beams. Disgusted, he gave up monitoring.

  The blockbuster fell within the circle. Cameramen from the Manhattan Project reported they had managed to record its fall. Their films were flown to Los Alamos, where they were studied by scientists still trying to determine the best final shape for the atomic bomb.

  Measuring instruments around the AP calculated that Lewis was over seven miles away when the bomb hit.

  Tibbets was relieved. The maneuver meant that an aircraft should be able to avoid the atomic bomb’s shock wave. He expressed his relief to one of the scientists who was with him on the bombing range.

  The man gave Tibbets a chilling response. “Seven miles, twenty miles, fifty miles. There is no way of telling what the safe distance is until we drop a real atomic bomb.”

  It was evening when Tibbets returned to Wendover. In his office he continued to review the tactical requirements for delivering an atomic bomb.

  Though by October 21 he knew a great deal more than he had a month earlier, he was far from reassured. The uncertain nature of the explosion—nobody could be positive how big it would be—and the predicted shock wave—another imponderable—had helped to rule out the use of a fighter escort. To be sure of surviving the shock wave, fighters would have to be so far away from the explosion just when the bomber was at its most vulnerable that it was unlikely they could provide proper protection. Further, a fighter escort might succeed only in drawing attention to the bomber. Tibbets made up his mind.

  The bomber would go in alone.

  That, too, raised problems: flak and enemy fighters. It was likely that the final approach would be made over enemy-held territory, at least part of which would undoubtedly have fighter protection. The more Tibbets thought about it, the less the chance of success seemed. The bomber could be destroyed long before it reached its objective.

  Then Tibbets recalled his experience in New Mexico.

  Months before, he had been there carrying out tests to assess a B-29’s susceptibility to fighter attack. He had been irritated to find that his usual B-29, the one he used for all his tests, was out of commission. He was offered another one—stripped of its guns.

  He decided to fly it to give the fighter pilots a chance to practice. Tibbets quickly discovered the stripped B-29 could operate some four thousand feet higher than his usual bomber. It was faster and more maneuverable. He was able to outpace the P-47 fighters making mock attacks on him. Finally, at thirty-four thousand feet, the fighters had to give up; the strain on their engines was too great.

  As he recalled the experience, Tibbets began to feel excited. Flak was largely ineffective at over thirty-two thousand feet, and Tibbets knew that a P-47 fighter was similar in performance to a Japanese Zero.

  With Japan likely to provide a target city, Tibbets reasoned his best possible chance of survival would be to use a stripped-down B-29 for the mission. He would take out all the armor plating and all the guns, apart from the two in the tail.

  He telephoned the flight line and told the ground crews to begin work at once on stripping down the two bombers already at Wendover.

  “Tonight?” asked an incredulous line chief.

  “Now,” said Tibbets firmly.

  The mechanics thought the idea “plumb crazy.” Later, they would christen the emasculated bombers Sitting Target One and Sitting Target Two.

  11

  In tight formation, five aircraft flew east over the Pacific. All their pilots hoped to die soon.

  The fliers wore white scarfs loosely knotted around their necks. Under their leather flying helmets, concealed by their goggles, each man also wore a hachimaki, a rep
lica of the headband that samurai warriors had traditionally worn in battle in ancient Japan. This morning the band was the symbol of the Special Attack Corps of suicide pilots, the shimpu, or “divine wind.” Later these pilots, and many others like them, would be called kamikazes, a Western transliteration of the characters that in Sino-Japanese are pronounced shimpu. The first shimpu were the momentous typhoons of 1241 and 1281 which, according to legend, rescued Japan from the fury of the Mongols.

  The men chosen to launch this new shimpu had been told just before taking off a few hours earlier that they were “gods without earthly desires.” Their Zeros contained 250-kilogram bombs. The pilots planned to crash-dive onto the ships of the American fleet now just beyond the horizon.

  This plan had been devised only six days previously by Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi. To all the adjectives applied to the moon-faced commander—arrogant, brilliant, condescending, and uncompromising—another could be added in these last days of October: desperate.

  Onishi was no longer the confident leader who had helped devise the attack on Pearl Harbor; who had launched the crippling assault on Clark Field, Manila, which had wiped out America’s air force in the Far East; who had sent his pilots marauding through the Pacific.

  Those days were over. Retaliation was on the way. A huge American fleet had been spotted heading toward the Philippines. If those islands fell, Japan’s supply lines would be fatally ruptured. Onishi was given command of the First Air Fleet, operating from Manila. This once-impressive force consisted now of less than a hundred aircraft. But they were enough for Onishi. On October 19, he had presented his plan for shimpu.

  There had been an enthusiastic response from his pilots. The men now over the Pacific were about to deliver the first blow.

  They had, of course, written their final letters and farewell poems. Some had left brief wills. Each, in accord with the tradition of samurai leaving for their final battle, had enclosed locks of hair and nail parings, all that was to remain of their bodies on earth.