Enola Gay

by Gordon Thomas

  Yokoyama had no doubt: the city was coping. And to anybody challenging him, he would have had a ready answer: Hiroshima was intact.

  Yokoyama continued walking toward the castle. From ahead came a loud, concerted shout. Yokoyama broke into a run. Rounding a corner, he saw a house collapse into the street. Instinctively, he looked skyward. There were no airplanes.

  Through the dust, he saw a group of youths belonging to the Patriotic Volunteer Corps, boys and girls brought in from the country to work as laborers. The group gathered around the house adjoining the collapsed building. Some of them began to saw through the pillars supporting the house; others attached a stout rope to its ridgepole. One of the boys told Yokoyama they were creating a firebreak in case of air attack.

  In many parts of Hiroshima, this demolition work had begun to cut swathes through the city. There had not been such an upheaval since the catastrophic floods of August 6, 1653. On that day in the seventeenth century, hundreds of houses had been ripped from their foundations by nature. Now, enthusiastic youths were achieving what subsequent typhoons had been unable to accomplish.

  For Senkichi Awaya, the mayor of Hiroshima, the order to create firebreaks was the hardest he had implemented since taking office in July 1943. If it had been issued by the army, the fifty-one-year-old civil servant would have vigorously challenged the command.

  But it had come from the Department of the Interior in Tokyo.

  A few days ago, Awaya had telephoned Hiroshima Castle and informed the duty officer of the order. Almost immediately, the regional army headquarters there had issued instructions as to which sections of the city were to be demolished; soldiers would be available to supervise and help with the work.

  Throughout the morning of December 6, Mayor Awaya’s frequent meetings were punctuated by the crash of falling buildings. Finally, hardly able to hear himself speak, he had stood at his second-floor office window and gazed down the street at the clouds of dust rising near the Aioi Bridge. He wondered whether the bridge itself, the most striking in Hiroshima, might also eventually be demolished on the army’s orders.

  He was reassured by his chief assistant, the diminutive, immaculately dressed Kazumasa Maruyama. Without the bridges, the army’s movements within the city would be drastically curtailed; in an emergency it would be necessary to be able to move troops quickly.

  Together the two men watched the destruction. Outside the Town Hall, householders seeking compensation and new accommodations were already forming a line. Maruyama reminded the mayor how limited was the help the city could offer. “We can give them only a few yen.”

  “Just three years—now this. And all because of the army.”

  For Mayor Awaya to have uttered such words in public would have invited imprisonment, even execution. But in the comfortably furnished mayor’s parlor, he and Maruyama now talked openly about such matters. In the sixteen months they had worked together, each man had revealed himself to the other as a devout pacifist and fierce antimilitarist.

  Vastly different in their backgrounds—Awaya was from upper-middle-class stock, while Maruyama was proudly working-class—the men were bound by strong personal ties.

  Awaya had acted as go-between for Maruyama during his assistant’s delicate negotiations with his future wife’s parents. As a devout Christian, one of many in Hiroshima, Mayor Awaya had found it difficult to feel his way through the complicated byplay of such discussions, an integral part of Japanese marriage. But the mayor had completed the marriage contract to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Awaya wished his wife and the four children still at home in Tokyo could be with him; when he had moved to Hiroshima, they had remained behind so that the children’s education would not be disturbed.

  Awaya was one of the most popular mayors the city had known: free from any taint of corruption, easily accessible, and energetic in handling cases of civil injustice. But he knew he was under suspicion because he was a Christian, and that attempts had been made to subvert his staff. Only here, in his office, with Maruyama, could he dare to express himself freely.

  This morning, a familiar topic was again raised, what Awaya called the “terrible decline in our city which can be traced to the folly of the militarists in showa fifteen,” a reference to the events of 1941.

  In just twenty days’ time, December 28, the Hirohito reign of showa would enter its nineteenth year. Both men agreed that showa was now an ironically inept name. (The word means “enlightened peace.”)

  Awaya raised a theme he increasingly brooded over. “We may have to pay dearly for the mistakes that have been made.”

  Both men knew how inadequately prepared the city was for an air raid. There were insufficient shelters; the water pressure to the fire hydrants was low; the few evacuation routes out of the city could easily become clogged.

  Nor did Awaya feel the fire lanes would provide adequate protection. “Whole areas within the lanes could simply burn themselves out. The lanes can hope only to stop the city being destroyed all at once.”

  There was one aspect, however, that Awaya believed they should be grateful for. “The rivers dividing our city provide excellent natural firebreaks. And if necessary, the citizens could take refuge in those rivers from the heat generated by fires.”

  Four hundred years old, built on a mound surrounded by a moat, Hiroshima Castle was the centerpiece of a vast military complex. Within its keep were the divisional and regional army headquarters, along with some forty thousand men. The area also contained an infantry training school, a hospital, and ammunition and supply depots. Under the castle was the civilian defense headquarters, the unit responsible for alerting the city to air attack, and the central fire control for the antiaircraft batteries.

  The perimeter of this multipurpose installation was adjoined by dozens of small factories producing armaments. The larger factories were located on the banks of the rivers.

  Yokoyama’s visits to the castle provided him with visible reaffirmation of the power of the army; there were always rows of fieldpieces and armored vehicles on display. Within the grounds that the army had garrisoned for nearly a hundred years, the mood was optimistic. Officers and men talked only of great victories to come. Nobody drew attention to shell casings made from inferior metals, or the near-empty fuel tanks of the half-tracks and armored cars.

  The mood of senior officers at the defense review meeting was buoyant. One followed another to expound a similar theme. Hiroshima, like all other Japanese cities, was ready to meet the enemy. There was loud agreement with the words of the elderly officer who spoke last. “Let the American bombers come—and soon. They will fall from the skies under our guns!”

  His eyes swept the room, lighting on the coterie of young antiaircraft officers that included Yokoyama. “The honor will fall to you to strike the first blows. The enemy is arrogant. He believes he can enter our skies with safety, to bomb our women and children. He will be shown otherwise. Do not fail. We will repeat the success of Pearl Harbor.”

  14

  In Tokyo, Major General Arisue was showing signs of strain; his face was a shade grayer, the pouches under his eyes darker. He was suffering from lack of sleep, proper meals, and fresh air. These past two months had made severe inroads into his considerable stamina.

  His Lisbon contact was unable to provide further details about the mysterious American war project. And without hard information, Arisue could not brief his agent in Brazil, who was packed and ready to slip into the United States.

  Increasingly, his department was under pressure from the high command. Data were urgently requested on the B-29s that had started to raid Tokyo and other cities. The arrival of the huge bombers had astonished the Japanese. They had never seen aircraft so big, so fast, so well armed. Information was requested about their bases. Arisue had pinpointed the Marianas, and cursed the lack of spies he had on the islands. He was unable to answer specific questions on the number of American bomber squadrons based there, the supply backup they posses
sed, the sort of intelligence which would help produce an accurate profile of American strength.

  His special listening posts were monitoring nothing of importance in the brief air-to-air conversations between enemy pilots over Japan; ground defenses had been largely unsuccessful in shooting down B-29s. Arisue’s tough interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Oya, was finding it difficult to get even the few American airmen who had been captured to talk.

  The latest, Colonel Brian Brugge, Oya had seen soon after he was shot down nine days before, on December 3. Brugge was an important catch; he was deputy chief of staff of the Seventy-third Bomb Wing, based on Saipan.

  According to Oya, the stubborn West Pointer refused to cooperate. “We interrogated him thoroughly. He kept a tight lip. He wouldn’t crack. Later, he began to suffer from malnutrition. He disliked Japanese food. He died.”

  Arisue was unhappy that his enthusiastic interrogator had not been able to extract any useful information from this senior American officer. Then, at his lowest ebb, knowing his reputation was being seriously challenged in certain quarters, Arisue received a further piece of unsettling news.

  For some days he had been sure that his archrival, naval intelligence, was in contact with a Swedish banker, Per Jacobsson, in Bern, Switzerland. He knew that the purpose of this move was to make contact through Jacobsson with the Americans, leading, hopefully, to a negotiated peace.

  In Japanese eyes, there was a fundamental difference between a negotiated peace and surrender. Even so, Arisue’s first reaction had been to expose the plotters. Caution stayed him. They undoubtedly included some of the highest-ranking naval officers. If he failed to prove a case against them, he would be in serious trouble. However, he could not help but wonder. Supposing Japan could not win the war? Supposing a negotiated peace was the only answer?

  Even two months ago, such thoughts would have been unthinkable for Arisue. But throughout this day they gnawed at him. He sent for situation reports; he questioned staff officers; he studied projections of enemy intentions. Whichever way he turned, the one inescapable truth faced him: the war was going badly. Japan, in his later words, “was short of everything except courage.”

  By evening, he had come to the conclusion that there was no way Japan could achieve victory. Equally, he knew that so long as the country kept fighting, it was not defeated.

  With these thoughts in mind, without consulting anyone, General Arisue decided he would prepare the groundwork for a negotiated peace. He knew that if he were discovered, he would be branded a traitor and executed. But by nightfall he was making his first moves to establish a link in Bern with Allen Dulles, European director of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency.

  15

  Seated at a writing desk in his suite in the Carlton Hotel, a few convenient blocks away from the White House, financier Alexander Sachs had little time to study the newspapers or listen to the radio programs marking the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

  Sachs, the man who had been instrumental in alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of atomic weapons, was about to reenter the scene.

  Yet, for Sachs and millions of Americans, December 7 was a day when the media were particularly compelling. Commentators continued to return to a single theme in recalling Pearl Harbor: the country could neither forgive nor forget Japan’s treachery; the “Day of Infamy” would have to be avenged.

  Vastly better equipped on land, sea, and in the air, American forces were about to pull a drawstring around the enemy. The Japanese air force was spent; if the kamikaze planes still struck terror in those who were facing them in increasing numbers, newspapers played down the suicide planes as a passing phenomenon, a last, reckless throw by a desperate enemy.

  Tokyo Rose’s taunt of “Come and get us” was now receiving a confident rejoinder on Stateside radio stations. “We’re coming, Rose, we’re coming!”

  Nobody doubted that America’s youth was paying a high price for the long journey to Rose’s Tokyo lair. An average of five thousand Americans were dying each week in the relentless push across the Pacific. But as the newspapers pointed out, the numbers were grimmer for the enemy. The decisive aircraft carrier engagement off Guam had become known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” while the loss of the islands had cost the Japanese fifty thousand dead.

  The mood this morning throughout America was uncompromising. The enemy, in the words of one commentator, “must be hit with everything we’ve got.”

  Alexander Sachs knew that “everything we’ve got” was likely soon to include an atomic bomb. Five years after first calling on Roosevelt to authorize its construction, Sachs now wanted the president to put a curb on when and how the bomb would be used.

  The financier had been successfully lobbied by the group of scientists beginning to have second thoughts about the weapon. Among them were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who had been so vocal in 1939 about the need for America to equip itself with an atomic arsenal. They now argued that the world situation had changed. The Nazi capability to produce atomic bombs could be discounted. They believed Japan could be beaten by conventional weapons. Any brief military advantage that nuclear bombs would bring America could be outweighed by political and psychological losses. The damage to American prestige, argued Szilard, could be immense if the United States were the first to drop the bomb. If America did so, then Einstein foresaw a worldwide atomic armaments race.

  Roosevelt had rejected these arguments. Perhaps he felt the scientists underestimated the enemy’s ability to keep fighting under almost any circumstances.

  Sachs had agonized for days over his draft for a startling proposal. But now, in his neat handwriting, he had outlined the conditions he believed Roosevelt should insist upon before ordering the bomb to be dropped.

  Following a successful test there should be arranged:

  a) A rehearsal demonstration before a body including internationally recognized scientists from all Allied countries and, in addition, neutral countries, supplemented by representatives of the major faiths;

  b) That a report on the nature and the portent of the atomic weapon be prepared by the scientists and other representative figures;

  c) That thereafter a warning be issued by the United States and its allies in the Project to our major enemies in the war, Germany and Japan, that atomic bombing would be applied to a selected area within a designated time limit for the evacuation of human and animal life;

  d) In the wake of such realization of the efficacy of atomic bombing an ultimatum demand for immediate surrender by the enemies be issued, in the certainty that failure to comply would subject their countries and people to atomic annihilation.

  Sachs spent over an hour alone with the president. No record was made of their conversation.

  A few months later, when Roosevelt was dead, Sachs would claim that the president had accepted his proposals. His implication was clear: those in favor of using the bomb had later persuaded the president to change his mind. It is more likely that Roosevelt, a skilled exponent of the tactic, had led Sachs to believe he had heard what he wanted to hear.

  Groves thought Sachs’s suggestion that Hitler and the Japanese militarists could be swayed by a memo about an explosion in some distant place naive in the extreme. Further, the financier’s proposal totally removed the surprise element that Groves believed essential. The project chief had always maintained that, forewarned, the enemy would mount an effective counterattack, destroying the plane carrying the atomic bomb either in aerial combat or by ground fire.

  However, on December 7, scientists working on the Manhattan Project were satisfied that the Japanese were not far enough advanced in theoretical physics or technology to manufacture an atomic bomb. Therefore, some argued, it would be “unthinkable” to use the weapon against Japan.

  The battle lines had been drawn. Even now, the more radical among the scientists were planning fresh strategies to halt the project.

  16

&nbs
p; On December 17, the five squadrons at Wendover became formally unified under Tibbets as the 509th Composite Group, attached to the 315th Bombardment Wing of the Second Air Force. The group’s strength was 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men.

  Ferebee and van Kirk joined the 509th’s headquarters staff as group bombardier and group navigator. They rarely flew now, spending their time preparing and analyzing training programs. When they did fly, they usually went with Lewis, taking the place of his regular bombardier and navigator.

  Lewis’s crew continued to return one of the best flying records. Their main competition came from Eatherly’s crew and crew No. 15, commanded by the effervescent Major Charles Sweeney.

  Beser liked to fly with Sweeney “because of the way he kidded everyone along.” He was forming lasting judgments on many of the fliers, for “the day was coming when I’d have to trust my life to them.”

  The radar officer had warmed toward Tibbets; he saw, correctly, a shy man behind the aloof commander. He had become aware that Tibbets had a marriage problem, and decided that Tibbets was “only truly happy in the air, but there he was magnificent.”

  Beser thought Lewis, on the ground, sometimes acted “like Peck’s bad boy; in the air he occasionally got overexcited.”

  Van Kirk and Ferebee were tagged by Beser as “professionals who never have any problems.”

  This December morning, at thirty thousand feet over the Salton Sea bombing range, Tibbets and Ferebee were trying to solve a problem that had worried them for a week.

  The bombardier had failed to drop dummy practice bombs consistently into the aiming circle, now reduced to three hundred feet. There seemed no reason why some bombs fell into the circle while others landed outside it.

  Tibbets was concerned, and he reminded Ferebee why precision was so important. “Tom, when the time comes, we have to be as near on target as we can get. Radar is out because it’s still too uncertain. So it’s got to be visual. You’ve got to be able to see the target and then hit it on the nose. And that means we’ve got to drop within that circle every time.”