Enola Gay

by Gordon Thomas

  Tibbets had come on the practice flight to see why the aim was erratic. The weather was perfect: clear skies, easily computed wind drift. With Lewis holding the B-29 steady on the run up to the aiming point, Tibbets watched Ferebee crouching over the Norden bombsight.

  The sight had been totally stripped and reassembled, a mechanically perfect instrument.

  Ferebee called out that he had the AP in his cross hairs. He lifted himself a few inches off his seat to bring his face closer over the viewfinder. Below, through the optical sight, he could see the bombing circle clearly. Satisfied, he eased himself back on his seat, his head still glued to the viewfinder.

  “Bomb away.”

  Lewis put the aircraft into the mandatory 155-degree turn. By the time ground control reported on the drop, the B-29 was nearly eight miles away.

  The bomb had fallen outside the circle.

  Tibbets ordered Lewis to fly back toward the AP. He told Ferebee to repeat his actions. He watched intently as the bombardier began to line up the circle in his sights. At the last moment, he rose off his buttocks again.

  Tibbets shouted, “That’s it!”

  He had solved the problem. At the crucial moment, Ferebee, like any other bombardier, lifted himself off his seat to bring his eyes to the sight. The movement was no more than an inch or two. But it was enough. Each time he lowered his eyes to the sight, his head was at a slightly different angle against the viewfinder. If he had been bombing from a few thousand feet, this small movement would have had little effect. But from thirty thousand feet, nearly six miles up, with his head at a slightly different angle each time, it meant the error could ultimately work out to be several hundred feet by the time the bomb hit the ground.

  Within hours, Tibbets had ground crews construct and fit a padded headrest to the bombsight. Using it, Ferebee’s head was forced into exactly the same position each time. From then on, he bombed with consistent accuracy.

  17

  In the cold dawn light, mess officer Charles Perry surveyed his resources: rows of plump farm turkeys and cured hams, mounds of vegetables, trays of mince pies, and, dominating the kitchen tables, scores of huge Christmas puddings. Silverplate had ensured that this first Christmas of the fledgling 509th would be a memorable one.

  The elements had also contributed to the festive mood. Overnight, heavy snow had fallen, covering the ground inches high. At the main gate, shivering MPs fashioned a couple of snowmen, complete with hats and tree branches for carbines.

  Beyond the gate, in their home, the Tibbets family were unwrapping their Christmas presents. Tibbets had given Lucie a gift he had purchased at the last moment in the base commissary. He was always at a loss about what to buy his vivacious wife; it was one of the many small reasons that their marriage was foundering. Lucie felt that her husband was unromantic; a warmhearted Southern belle from Georgia, she found the practical and pragmatic Tibbets often cool and distant. She knew there was no other woman in his life, but she could not understand why he seemed to place his work ahead of herself and the children. Once she had complained to Beser, who often used to baby-sit for the Tibbetses, that “Paul never seems to have time to sit down and talk or play with the children. And when he does talk, it’s only about work.”

  Tibbets had tried to explain that he was by nature “a loner”; he had not added what many of his officers knew: that he really was happy only when he was flying.

  His preoccupation with work carried over to his choice of Christmas presents for his small sons. Paul, Jr., and baby Gene both received models of B-17s. There had been a run on the toy bombers at the PX.

  This morning the children found several B-17s in their stockings—presents from Lewis, van Kirk, Ferebee, and Beser.

  Breakfast over, the Tibbets family went to the morning service at the base church.

  Chaplain William Downey greeted his commander warmly. He could not remember when Tibbets had last attended church. Once, shortly after he had arrived on the base, Tibbets had told him that “when I pray I go directly to God without a middleman.”

  Downey had not been offended; he knew many men like that. He respected their views. And in doing so, the chaplain had earned respect for himself. Articulate and refreshingly earthy, Captain Downey was the ideal spiritual adviser for the high-living 509th. He wasn’t shocked by their escapades. Though he wasn’t much older than many of the men he cared for, he somehow gave the impression of being a tolerant, worldly-wise man, ready to have a drink, crack a joke, be a “regular guy,” without ever losing his dignity.

  Even Beser, normally critical of all organized religion, thought Downey was a “helluva sky pilot. If he hadn’t been a Lutheran, he would have been a fine rabbi.”

  By noon on Christmas, the officers’ club was full of officers and their wives.

  Paul and Lucie Tibbets held gracious court; for the moment, their private tensions and troubles were put aside. Tibbets reminisced with Ferebee and van Kirk about Europe, and wondered how London was shaping up to the “Bob Hopes”—the nickname of the flying bombs raining down on the British capital—“You bob out of the way and hope they miss you.”

  Before long, a number of the officers were happily crocked and gathered around the club radio singing carols along with Bing Crosby in Hollywood.

  The singing was followed by a newscast which brought them sharply back to reality. American troops in Europe were trying desperately to repel a surprise German counterattack that was to become the overture to the Battle of the Bulge. German troops in GI uniforms were creating confusion in the American lines. The news from the Pacific was encouraging: the Japanese homeland was beginning to feel the weight of American bombs.

  Lucie Tibbets whispered the hope of any wife. “Honey, maybe you won’t have to go after all.”

  18

  The end of the year was hectic for Groves. His days stretched well beyond their regular fifteen hours; the box of candy he kept in his office safe with the atom secrets needed frequent replenishing. Steadily munching his way through chocolates, Groves issued orders that would eventually change warfare.

  He sent for Tibbets on December 28. From a beginning of wariness on both sides, their relationship had passed through several phases to the present state of acceptance by Groves of Tibbets. The project chief found the flier could be as flinty as he was; he learned not to tamper with Tibbets’s judgments on flying matters.

  The top-secret notes of their conversation show how far he now trusted the 509th’s commander.

  Tibbets gave June 15, 1945, as the date he would be ready to deliver an atomic strike.

  Groves accepted this without demur; the question was then raised “as to what the weather conditions would be over Tokyo between June 15th and 15 July.”

  It was the first time the Japanese capital had been openly spoken of as a target for atomic attack.

  But there might be a weather problem. The notes recorded that “rain could be expected rather frequently [over Tokyo] up to August 15 [1945]. It is not desirable that missions be made in rain.”

  Apart from weather considerations, Groves set out the governing factors in target selection:

  The targets chosen should be places the bombing of which would most adversely affect the will of the Japanese people to continue the war. Beyond that, they should be military in nature, consisting either of important headquarters or troop concentrations, or centers of production of military equipment and supplies. To enable us to assess accurately the effects of the bomb, the targets should not have been previously damaged by air attacks. It is also desirable that the first target be of such size that the damage would be confined within it, so that we could more definitely determine the power of the bomb.

  Groves doubted if Tokyo would meet all these requirements. The likelihood was that the city would be heavily bombed in the coming months with conventional weapons.

  Personally, he favored Kyoto as a target. Kyoto was the ancient capital of Japan, a “historical city and one that was of g
reat religious significance to the Japanese.” With an estimated population of a million, Kyoto, Grove reasoned, “like any city of that size in Japan must be involved in a tremendous amount of war work.” Therefore, it would be a legitimate target.

  Further, he found Kyoto was “large enough to ensure that the damage from the bomb would run out within the city, which would give us a firm understanding of its destructive power.”

  At a meeting in Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos on December 19, Groves had decided the gun-type firing mechanism of the uranium bomb was so reliable it need not be tested before it was used on the enemy. However, the more complicated mechanism in the plutonium bomb would need proving. That was to be done at the Alamogordo firing range in the New Mexico desert on a date still to be decided.

  Alone in his office on December 30, Groves decided to take a momentous step. He wrote a memo to General George C. Marshall, chief of staff.

  It is now reasonably certain that our operations plans should be based on the gun-type bomb, which, it is estimated, will produce the equivalent of a ten thousand ton TNT explosion. The first bomb, without previous full scale test, which we do not believe will be necessary, should be ready about 1 August, 1945.

  Groves had committed the Manhattan Project to a date.

  19

  A sailor carefully erased the legend I.58 from the conning tower of the submarine and painted the flag of the kikusui immediately above the Rising Sun emblem. The kikusui was the battle standard of the ancient warrior Masashige, who had fought against overwhelming odds, knowing he had no chance to survive.

  With the kikusui flag gleaming wetly in the winter sunlight, Commander Hashimoto completed the transformation of his submarine by ordering a seaman to raise the boat’s new war banner, Masashige’s hiriho kenten, meaning “God’s will.”

  Banner and flag signified that the submarine was now a human torpedo carrier, the latest weapon devised by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The human torpedoes, or kaitens, were the underwater counterpart of the kamikaze.

  Since January 1943 at the top-secret Base P, an island in Hiroshima Bay just south of Kure, the navy had been experimenting with the use of human torpedoes, projectiles which could be launched from a mother craft and steered by volunteers toward an enemy ship. The navy hoped these weapons would offset the increasing losses they were experiencing, and help halt the American advance on Japan.

  Hashimoto’s submarine had been chosen to be one of the flag carriers for Operation Kaiten. To accommodate the weapons, workmen had removed the housing for the reconnaissance plane the submarine sometimes carried, its catapult, and its deck gun. That made room on the boat’s deck for six kaitens.

  The torpedoes, shaped like miniature submarines and weighing eight tons each, had explosive warheads. They had a range of thirty miles and a top speed of twenty knots. They were not recoverable. Once a kaiten pilot squirmed through a narrow tunnel from the parent submarine into his torpedo and was cast off, there was no returning. Either he exploded against his target or he was blown up by the enemy before reaching it.

  It took several hours to winch the kaitens onto the submarine’s deck, where they were shackled securely.

  Late in the morning, the pilots for these craft came aboard and were greeted by Hashimoto. He was struck by the youthfulness of the kaiten crewmen; there was also an air of fanaticism about them that chilled him. He, too, believed in the emperor and the traditional concept of dying. But these youths were intoxicated with their patriotism; they told him proudly how they had literally fought for the privilege of making this kaiten mission, and how they longed for death. Kaiten means “the turn toward Heaven.”

  As the moment of departure approached, the pilots sat astride their craft, white towels wrapped around their heads and brandishing their ceremonial swords. To Hashimoto, it seemed they were “trying hard to be strong men.”

  Fenders and berthing wires were detached from the submarine’s long, narrow casing. Water on the starboard quarter began to boil. Foam surged around the boat as the ballast tanks were blown to full buoyancy. The freeboard began to increase.

  Farewell shouts came from the groups of dockyard workers on the wharf. The pilots raised their swords higher.

  Hashimoto watched approvingly as the last ropes were released by the shore crew and hauled in by the seamen on the deck. Weeks of hard practice had paid off; the men moved today with dexterity and skill.

  The electric motors silently drew the submarine from the shore, her bow now pointing away from Hiroshima toward the sea. A flotilla of motorboats accompanied the submarine, their occupants chanting in unison the names of the pilots. The submarine increased speed, the escorts fell away, the chanting faded. The boat trembled as the diesel motors started their rhythmic pounding.

  In his log, Hashimoto noted on December 29: “Passed through Bungo Channel and turned south, proceeding on surface. Through evening haze took farewell look at the homeland.”

  Two and a half weeks later, the cry rang out: “Smoke on the port beam!”

  The lookout’s shout brought the men on the conning-tower bridge scrambling down the ladder into the control room.

  “Dive! Dive! Dive!”

  Moments after Commander Hashimoto’s order, the submarine was sealed, the main vents opened, and the needle of the depth gauge turned steadily as the boat’s bow tilted toward the seabed.

  Regularly, ever since reaching the area of the Marianas two weeks earlier, Hashimoto had been dodging antisubmarine aircraft patrols flying from Guam. Now, two hundred feet below the waves, undisturbed by the Pacific swell, he and his crew listened for the throb of ships’ propellers.

  Somewhere above them, approaching, were two enemy ships, probably destroyers.

  Hashimoto wondered whether their presence was connected with the daring attack he had launched three days ago. Then, under cover of darkness, he had surfaced eleven miles off Guam and fired four of his human torpedoes against the mass of shipping in Apra Harbor.

  It was I.58’s first strike and Hashimoto’s first use of kaitens. Just before entering his suicide craft, one of the kaiten pilots had pressed into the captain’s hands a farewell note Hashimoto would treasure all his life.

  Great Japan is the Land of the Gods. The Land of the Gods is eternal and cannot be destroyed. Hereafter, no matter, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of boys, and we now offer ourselves as a sacrifice for our country. Let us get away from the petty affairs of this earthly and mundane life to the land where righteousness reigns supreme and eternal.

  With the four human torpedoes launched, Hashimoto had submerged to periscope depth. As daylight came, he saw great clouds of smoke rising from the harbor. He stole away to safer waters. Later, he had led the crew in prayer for the souls of the four warriors.

  Now, the presence of the subchasers above them reminded the crew that they, too, could be swiftly dispatched to join their dead companions.

  Hashimoto ordered the submarine rigged for silent running so that nothing could give away their presence. Orders were relayed in sign language or in whispers; nobody moved unnecessarily. All equipment not essential to survival underwater was switched off.

  The crew strained their ears for the sound of propellers. It came closer: constant, on course, the high-pitched note of steel blades turning steadily through water. The ships were moving slowly, and it sounded as if each blade was striking the water separately. The screws passed overhead and began to fade.

  A look of relief crossed the faces of the men around Hashimoto.

  He shook his head, warning.

  The sound increased again. Hashimoto drew a circle with his finger in the air: the ships were circling. He guessed that the hunters were hoping their echo sounders could get a fix and give cross bearings. It would be easy then to calculate the settings for their depth charges.

  The propeller noise grew fainter, almost disappeared, then returned as a new circle began.

  Somebody scuffed the deck plates with
his boots. Hashimoto glared fiercely.

  The propellers passed overhead, faded—and this time did not return. The ships had either given up the search or extended it elsewhere.

  For two more hours, the submarine remained silent in its position. Then Hashimoto ordered it to resume course for Kure.

  There it would arrive safely on January 20, having passed on the way other kaiten-carrying submarines heading for the waters around Guam.

  20

  Tibbets knew he was facing a clear choice. He could either have Lewis court-martialed—or hope the pilot had learned a lasting lesson. Even now, days later, the details of Lewis’s adventure made Tibbets shudder.

  On December 17, the day Tibbets had solved Ferebee’s problem with the bombsight, Lewis had “illegally borrowed” a C-45 twin-engine transport plane. With no copilot or proper maps, and a faulty radio, he had set off on a twenty-five-hundred-mile flight to New York because he “wanted to be home for Christmas.” His traveling companion was the 509th’s senior flight engineer, hitching a ride to his wedding. Over Columbus, Ohio, the plane’s radio, altimeter, and compass had all failed within minutes of each other. Lewis had nosed the transport groundward, “trying to navigate by street lights.” A blizzard had blocked out that hope. For two hours in zero visibility, Lewis had searched for Newark Airport, New Jersey. He had eventually landed there with practically no fuel left in his tank.

  Christmas over, Lewis had met the new bride and groom at Newark. He had lent the girl his flying jacket and cap as a disguise and ignored the regulations forbidding civilians to fly in military aircraft. Over Buffalo, another snowstorm had forced Lewis to land. Finally, on December 29, he and the newly married couple had landed at Wendover.