Enola Gay

by Gordon Thomas

  Before takeoff, Onishi himself had poured every man a ceremonial cup of sake and offered him a dish of dried cuttlefish. As each pilot took his cup, he had bowed and lifted the sake in both hands to his lips. Onishi had then handed every pilot a small lunch box, bento, to provide them with the comfort of a last-minute snack.

  At 10:45 A.M., the suicide squadron sighted their enemy, an American carrier force with destroyer escorts.

  The pilots bored in, scattering tinfoil to jam the American radar. Each pilot pulled a toggle which prepared the bomb in his plane for detonation.

  At 10:53 A.M., the first Zero crashed-dived onto the flight deck of the aircraft carrier St. Lo. Plane and pilot disintegrated in a huge explosion. This was the “splendid death,” rippa na saigo, which Onishi had promised.

  The St. Lo began to sink.

  By 10:59 A.M., October 25, 1944, all five planes had hit their targets. The mission had been a total success.

  More would follow.

  12

  The 393rd received its fifteenth stripped-down B-29 on November 24. The squadron was now at full strength. The removal of armor plating and all guns except those in the tail turrets no longer caused comment. Pilots found it gave them extra height and speed, although they were not totally convinced by Tibbets’s contention that in combat they would be out of range of flak and enemy fighters.

  “Today,” Lewis wrote to his parents, “was typical for its routine. Morning briefing followed by bombing practice; back for lunch (good), then more practice. I don’t ask why. Nobody does.”

  The letter would be read by Manhattan Project agents attached to the base post office. They would decide it did not contravene security and allow it to be mailed. The many letters that failed to pass ended up on Uanna’s desk. The watchful major made sure the writers were sufficiently scared by the time they left his office to be more careful in the future about what they wrote home.

  Three hundred blockbuster casings were available for the crews to use on their practice missions to the Salton Sea. Cameramen continued to film the bombs dropping and the aircraft making their jolting 155-degree turns.

  The maneuver, practiced both left and right, was the subject of much speculation. Pilots soon discovered that failing to execute a proper turn meant being temporarily grounded. Such punishments were an integral part of Tibbets’s method. He also encouraged excellence by example. He himself had flown several runs, with Lewis as his copilot, and performed the turn perfectly.

  The bombing circle was being steadily reduced. Now it was no more than four hundred feet in diameter. Ferebee had demonstrated it possible to drop a casing into the circle from thirty thousand feet. Van Kirk proved that on long training flights, and over water, it was feasible to navigate the distance with no more of an error than half a mile. The workshops remained open twenty-four hours. The flight line worked around the clock keeping the bombers aloft.

  Mess officer Charles Perry was told by Tibbets that if he had any problems, “just use the word Silverplate.” Perry was skeptical. But one day, tired of arguing with a food-supply depot, he had used the code word. His goods had arrived within hours. Every air force depot in America had special orders to give priority to Silverplate.

  The 393rd became the best-fed unit in the service. Tibbets had been known to send a transport plane a thousand miles to collect a cargo of tropical fruit. Fresh fish from New Orleans, Miami, and San Francisco were regular items on Perry’s menus. On one occasion, Tibbets himself flew an eighteen-hundred-mile round trip to Portland, Oregon, to pick up a load of coffee cups.

  He took care of his men in other ways. When they tangled with police in Salt Lake City over traffic violations or rowdy behavior, or got involved with the local married women, he intervened—if a man’s work record justified it.

  Executive officer John King struggled to maintain the standards of discipline he thought essential. But Tibbets made it clear he was not overly concerned with smart salutes, knife-edged creases in khakis, or gleaming toecaps. All that concerned him was a man’s capacity to work well. Gradually, the 393rd became one of the most casually attired units in the air force. Earlier in November Tibbets had introduced a new pilot with the most unusual appearance of all: bobbed hair, rouged cheeks, and bright red lipstick. Baggy flying coveralls could not disguise a shapely figure.

  “Sure, she’s a lady,” grinned Tibbets as he presented the newcomer. “And they don’t fly any finer than Dora Dougherty.”

  Dora was a veteran pilot who had worked for Tibbets on the B-29 testing program. She had handled the bomber with great skill and assurance at a time when many men pilots were doubtful of its capability. Dora once deliberately cut an engine on takeoff and yet became airborne. On another occasion, she landed a B-29 with an engine on fire. At Wendover, Dora flew a transport. Sometimes Tibbets wished he could send her up with a B-29. But Dora never complained about any assignment.

  Many crewmen were complaining about the training schedules, the long hours, the continual security checks. And, above all, why didn’t somebody explain what this was for?

  In the words of Captain King, the feeling was growing “that there were ‘them’ and ‘us.’ ”

  Or: Tibbets, Ferebee, and van Kirk; and the rest of the 393rd.

  The trio worked and relaxed together. Occasionally, Lewis joined the group. But the once-close relationship between Tibbets and Lewis was cooling. Tibbets felt Lewis was increasingly trying to take advantage of their past association. He was no longer amused by Lewis’s determined forays after women, his partying, the aggressive way he approached everything: cards, volleyball, even conversation.

  But in the air Lewis continued to excel. In the end, that was what Tibbets cared about.

  Beser did not like flying with Lewis “because we had nothing in common.” As for the pilot, he had not discovered why the radar officer “brought along a bunch of boxes and tried to look important.”

  Beser enjoyed the mystery surrounding his function. He was regularly—and unsuccessfully—pumped about his visits to the restricted Tech Area, and the flights he and Tibbets made together to Albuquerque. No flight plans were filed for these journeys.

  At Los Alamos, Beser received further instruction in the intricacies of electronic countermeasures. He would return to Wendover with Los Alamos technicians. They would spend days in the Tech Area helping Beser practice analyzing the intensity variation of successive return waves, or identifying the location, speed, and course of a reflecting object.

  After Beser had become familiar with some of the bomb’s secret radar system, a security agent was assigned to guard him day and night whenever he left the base. The man took his job so seriously that he even stood guard outside a public toilet in a Salt Lake City restaurant while Beser relieved himself. The radar officer reacted characteristically.

  “Listen, Mac. People will think there’s something funny about me, with you standing there.”

  “You listen, Lieutenant. I’m supposed to be in the john with you—not outside!”

  Beser gave up. From now on, he must share every social occasion—a date, a drink with friends, a visit home to his family. In time, he came to accept his shadow.

  Only at Wendover did he feel really free. His bodyguard’s duties ended when Beser set foot on the base.

  Grim winter came early in 1944. The November wind whistled across the salt flats, numbing everything in its path.

  Perry and his cooks tried hard to make Thanksgiving dinner memorable, offering pumpkin pie and an exotic fruit punch to accompany the roast turkey. The mess officer then produced an abundant supply of Cuban cigars to complete the repast.

  Cuba was, in fact, very much on everyone’s mind. The latest rumor said that crews would soon fly south to sunny Havana to continue some form of special training.

  Tibbets, as usual, remained tight-lipped. Groves was in regular telephone contact with him, wanting to be briefed on progress, chivvying and demanding. Tibbets would mention some of the difficulti
es he faced in bringing all the bomber crews to readiness. Groves would listen, grunt, and reply, “Work them hard. That’s what you are there for.”

  Scientists flew in and out of Wendover daily, making new demands involving frequent changes. They asked for the bomb bays to be modified. Conventional bombs were held in place by shackles, but it was decided that for a plane carrying just one large, long atomic bomb, what was required was a single, safe, reliable hook from which the nine-thousand-pound bomb could be suspended. No such hook could be found. Bombardier Kermit Beahan was sent to Britain, and brought back the specifications for the one used by the RAF in their Lancaster bombers. It was adapted and fitted to the 393rd’s B-29s.

  There were constant changes, too, in the bomb’s shape and weight. After each change, the scientists flew back to Los Alamos, telling Tibbets before they left that they were satisfied, that no more changes were contemplated, and that he could plan his training program with confidence. A few days later they would return, asking for new modifications as they discovered further aerodynamic-flow or other problems necessitating another alteration in the shape.

  Tibbets often found himself in sympathy with the exasperation felt in the base machine shops where the changes had to be made by service personnel. At times they became almost openly hostile to these unknown civilians who descended on them and scrapped a long night’s work with the briefest of apologies. Matters were not helped by security’s insisting that the scientists pass themselves off as sanitary engineers—a piece of flummery which led to some very ribald comments. Prohibited from answering some of the questions his own engineering officers and men asked, Tibbets knew that to many of them he seemed cold, aloof, and hard-nosed. The loneliness of leadership which his mother had once warned him about was becoming increasingly clear.

  His command had assumed impressive proportions. Besides the 393rd, he now had the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron, the 390th Air Service Group, the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron, and the 1027th Air Matériel Squadron.

  Between them they fetched, carried for, and served the 393rd. To police them was the 1395th Military Police Company; supporting them were now some fifty agents from the Manhattan Project. Under Uanna’s instructions, they continued to try to get the airmen to talk about their work, but they rarely succeeded. The word was out: if Wendover was bad, Alaska was worse.

  But that did not solve the problems associated with the daily management of some twelve hundred servicemen. There was an outbreak of venereal disease. The security men were concerned that a number of men had shacked up with local married women whose husbands were away in the service. There was a renewed spate of fistfights and drunken brawls in Salt Lake City involving base personnel.

  On one memorable night in the city’s Chi Chi Club, a tipsy Captain Eatherly knocked out an infantry major who had ordered him to leave. Eatherly escaped through the club’s back door as MPs arrived at the front.

  This time Eatherly avoided arrest. But he was being regularly summoned to Tibbets’s office to explain his misdemeanors. There was a wad of speeding tickets he had collected. Tibbets made him pay. Another incident concerned liquor permits. In Utah a state permit was needed to buy liquor. The permits were good for a bottle a week. Police found Eatherly with fifteen permits. Tibbets blasted his pilot and squared the law.

  Eatherly continued to spend many of his nights shooting dice at a hundred dollars a throw at the State Line Hotel in Wendover. Sometimes he lost—and won back—his month’s salary in a few hours. Security agents reported his gambling to Uanna, who complained to Tibbets, “The guy’s a psycho.”

  Tibbets said, “Maybe. But he’s a hell of a pilot. That is all that matters.”

  Eatherly had demonstrated his flying skill strikingly in mid-November. While he was making a final approach to the field, one of the activating switches in his B-29 went into reverse, a serious mechanical failure. The B-29 began to roll “until it was standing straight up on a wing tip.” Eatherly calmly righted the plane and made a perfect landing.

  That night, he lost a sizable sum in a poker game. Eatherly shrugged aside such losses, hinting of a huge ranch back in Texas whose income could meet any of his debts. He claimed he had left the ranch at seventeen to become a pilot, and that he later fought the Japanese in the Pacific. He told the stories well.

  Nobody suspected they were pipe dreams, the first signs of the instability which would eventually have Claude Eatherly committed to mental hospitals. His fellow fliers recognized only that he seemed to have a yearning to be famous.

  13

  Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama had allowed a full hour for the walk from his gun battery on Mount Futaba to Hiroshima Castle. There he was due to attend the monthly review of the city’s defenses. He would not be expected to speak, merely to listen as the local commanders discussed the situation. He doubted if any of them even knew his name. That did not upset him; it would be enough if—like last month—the minutes of the meeting were to note again “the alertness of the Mount Futaba battery during practice.”

  The days were over when he would arrive at the meeting in a motor-pool car shared with other junior officers. Only the most senior officers were now entitled to use precious gasoline, and then strictly on military business.

  Yokoyama did not mind the walk. It was his way of keeping in touch with the changing situation in the city.

  The tangle of black-lettered signs directing military traffic to the port were now faded. It was almost three years to the day since the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had boarded his flagship, anchored in Hiroshima Bay along with other Japanese battleships, to hear the first radioed reports from his forces attacking Pearl Harbor and British Malaya. A few days later, he was given the news of the sinking off Singapore of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. But now the revered Yamamoto was dead, killed in 1943 when the plane in which he was traveling was shot down by American fighters, and Hiroshima Harbor contained not one battleship.

  Nor were there truckloads of troops winding their way through the streets of Hiroshima to the gaisenkan, the “Hall of Triumphant Return.” Almost every soldier fighting in the Pacific had embarked through Hiroshima’s gaisenkan; now it was empty, waiting for the triumphant return of the troops.

  Three years ago, the jetties had been lined with thousands of civilians chanting exhortations to those departing troops; now the only civilians in the area who were not directly employed by the port authority were those tending the vegetable patches that sprouted amidst the cranes and sheds.

  Everywhere in the city there were slogans urging people to grow more vegetables, even to cultivate weeds. There were also posted warnings of severe penalties for black-marketeering, profiteering, and spreading irresponsible rumors.

  Hiroshima’s narrow streets had undergone changes in this past year. There were fewer trucks, and no taxis; apart from streetcars, bicycling or walking was the only way to get around.

  Cafés offered a tasteless green tea, often served lukewarm because of increasing fuel shortages. Coke balls for the hibachi stoves were regularly dampened in water to make them burn longer. Some restaurateurs had devised a method of balling up pages of the city’s newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, dipping the wads in water, and burning them with the coke. Four wadded pages were sufficient to boil a pint of water in ten minutes.

  There were thousands of improvised gardens. Flat roofs were coated with layers of soil to raise beans, carrots, squash, spinach, and Chinese cabbages. Wooden barrels, drums, even worn-out pots and pans were used for growing leeks and radishes.

  Neighborhood associations had been formed to handle bulk rations, issued only to ticket holders; there were also tickets for free medicine and dental treatment. During the first week of December, the associations would distribute to each family in their care a cake of bean curd, one sardine or small horse mackerel, two Chinese cabbages, five carrots, four eggplants, and half a pumpkin. The stalk end of the pumpkin was highly prized. Usual
ly an inch or two long, it would be thinly sliced and stewed as an extra vegetable.

  Bramble shoots were peeled and sucked as a starter; sorrel was soaked in brine and used with a rice substitute for a main course. Reeds from the Ota River were cut and parboiled. Grubs found in fruit bushes and fig trees were boiled and served with imitation soy sauce. Beetles and worms of all kinds were roasted on slivers of wood.

  Kindergartens and elementary schools were now being closed, their pupils and teachers evacuated to the countryside to avoid air raids and to ease the city’s rationing problems.

  The women of Hiroshima had never looked so drab. Most of them dressed like the men: both sexes favored a badly cut, high-buttoning jacket and trousers. The government encouraged this apparel.

  Only the girls in the red-light district continued to wear kimonos. There were thousands of prostitutes in the rat-infested houses of joy. But the nights were gone when ten thousand soldiers en route to the Pacific would swarm through the area.

  For those who remained in Hiroshima, even the task of washing was an unpleasant business. The only soap available was made from rice bran and caustic soda. It created a rash. Tooth powder was now a black-market commodity; the accepted substitute was a vile-tasting salty paste.

  Movie houses and theaters were popular. The films and plays were often inferior, but the collective heat generated from several hundred people squashed together was a pleasant experience.

  Many people solved the problem of keeping warm by baking flat stones or tiles in their stoves, wrapping them in layers of old newspapers, and placing the bundles next to their skin. As the stones cooled, the newspapers were removed layer by layer. Then, when the heat was finally dissipated, the stones were reheated.