Enola Gay

by Gordon Thomas

  In addition to the engineer, there was another new face on board, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson of the First Ordnance Squadron. In the roomy cabin he shared with the navigator and radioman, Jeppson had rigged up a control panel to monitor the bomb’s complex internal electronics before it was dropped from the plane.

  A religious and reserved young man, Jeppson quietly went about his work, oblivious of all the banter around him. He knew the fliers were curious about his presence, and he sensed they were eager to pump him about the First Ordnance. But he admired the way they restrained themselves. He liked that sort of discipline.

  Jeppson was a physics graduate who while in the service had studied at Yale and Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His talents were noticed, and he was assigned to the First Ordnance.

  He took an immediate liking to Lewis. The pilot was friendly, suggesting where he could store his equipment and telling him what he should expect on the flight. So far, it had been uneventful. The feedback from the cables running from his control panel to the bomb revealed that the weapon was “acting normally.”

  “Two minutes to AP.”

  Lewis acknowledged Ferebee’s words. He prepared to slam shut the bomb-bay doors the moment the bombardier announced the blockbuster was on its way down.

  The engineer had a duplicate of the bombsight Ferebee crouched over. If the bombardier’s instrument malfunctioned, the bomb could still be dropped by Ferebee’s ordering the engineer to pull a lever.

  For his own purposes, the engineer synchronized his movements with every adjustment Ferebee was making.

  “One and a half minutes to AP.”

  Suddenly the B-29 leaped higher into the air.

  “Je—sus!”

  Ferebee’s strangled cry was followed closely by another from Lewis. “You’ve dropped the bomb too soon!”

  Ferebee corrected him. “I didn’t. That engineer must have done it.”

  Lewis yelled at the engineer over the intercom. “Did you touch anything?”

  “I thought we were at the drop point!”

  Ferebee’s next words stopped Lewis’s flow of invective. “It’s falling straight into the town!”

  He watched, transfixed, as the bomb plummeted earthward. Though it contained only a small amount of explosive, with its ballast and electronic equipment the blockbuster weighed over nine thousand pounds; it could do considerable damage.

  “Bob, hold her steady.”

  Lewis held his original heading.

  Jeppson calculated that the bomb needed about a minute to reach the ground.

  Thirty seconds passed.

  Then Ferebee spoke. “It’s going to miss.”

  The bomb fell half a mile beyond Calipatria.

  Within hours, Manhattan Project agents had sealed off the area and were searching for the unit. It had buried itself ten feet underground. It was recovered, and bulldozers filled in the hole. No one in Calipatria knew how close the town had been to being hit.

  The flight back to Wendover was a tense one. The wretched engineer’s attempts to apologize met with icy silence.

  At Wendover he was bundled into a car and driven to Salt Lake City. There he was put on a train by project agents and told he would never again be allowed near the air base.

  Tibbets glanced in angry disbelief at one of his most trusted officers, a short, trimly built lieutenant colonel. Uanna, seated beside Tibbets, continued to question the officer. “You admit you took a B-twenty-nine without authority to fly home on a weekend pass?”

  The officer maintained his aggressive pose. “I have the authority to take a plane.”

  Uanna’s reproof was mild. “Nobody in the entire air force has the authority to take our most top-secret bomber for pleasure purposes.”

  Tibbets took over. “You took the plane and left it unguarded for two whole days on a civilian airfield?”

  “Yes. But the plane was locked.”

  “And then you gave your father a conducted tour of an airplane that few servicemen on this base are allowed to go near?”

  “My father’s interested in flying. I didn’t think there was any harm.”

  Tibbets exploded. “I don’t want to hear about your father’s interests! And it seems to me that you have never been able to think!”

  “Colonel, I’m prepared to apologize—”

  “Apologize! You think that settles matters? You’ve broken every goddam security rule. And you call yourself an officer! I’m going to make an example of you!”

  The officer waited uneasily.

  His decision made, Tibbets wasted no time in delivering sentence. “You’ve got just sixty minutes to pack. A plane will be waiting for you. Its destination is Alaska. You’re going to spend the rest of your war talking to penguins!”

  “Colonel—”

  “Another word and I’ll have you court-martialed. Now, get out!”

  The disgraced officer left.

  This was the third case of the week in which security regulations had been breached. Two days earlier, on March 20, a couple of lieutenants on duty at the telemetering station at the Salton Sea bombing range had left their highly secret ballistic-measuring equipment and driven across the border into Mexico “for a little fun.” They, too, had been swiftly sent to Alaska.

  Privately, Tibbets sympathized with the three officers, but even if he had wanted to, he could not have shown them compassion. That might have opened a floodgate, and the carefully wrought security protection he and Uanna had built up could have been swept away.

  Tibbets knew his actions did not make him popular. But as he had once told van Kirk, he wasn’t “trying to win a goddam beauty contest.”

  Transferring a senior and two junior officers to the icy wilds of Alaska would be a deterrent. But it would not alleviate the tensions. For six months, Tibbets had driven his men at a relentless pace. And, until a few days ago, Tibbets himself had not been that familiar with “the object of all this slave driving,” the top-secret nuclear mechanism inside the bomb. Then, Parsons had flown to Wendover with schematic drawings of the uranium bomb in order to discuss with Tibbets a new series of fuzing tests. Tibbets already knew the bomb would be about ten feet long, twenty-eight inches in diameter, and weigh something over nine thousand pounds, but what he learned from Parsons caused him to be “amazed by the sweet simplicity of the thing.”

  The bomb’s uranium core would weigh only about twenty-two pounds, split into two unequal segments kept six feet apart inside the barrel of a cannon, which was itself inside the bomb’s casing. Between the two pieces of uranium 235 was a “tamper,” a neutron-resistant shield made from a high-density alloy. The tamper was to stop the two pieces of uranium from reacting with each other—to help prevent premature “crit”—which would cause an unscheduled nuclear explosion.

  The smaller piece of uranium 235 would weigh five pounds. This was the atomic “bullet” which, when the gun was activated by the proximity-fuzing system, would be fired down the gun barrel at the “target,” the larger piece of uranium 235 fixed to the muzzle of the cannon just a few feet away. The “target” would weigh about seventeen pounds.

  When fired, the force of the uranium “bullet” would make it sever the pins previously holding it in place, break through the tamper, and ram it into the “target”—causing the nuclear explosion.

  After the description, Tibbets was jolted when Parsons told him that despite all the planning and testing, the scientists at Los Alamos still did not know if the uranium bomb would actually work. Tibbets remembered how “Parsons just sat there and said there was no way of being certain the weapon would go off—until it was used. He didn’t think the risk of failure was high. But it was there.”

  Ever since, Tibbets had been mulling over what Parsons had told him. That, coupled with the security breaches by the three officers, made him edgy. Then, in the evening, he was called from dinner to interview a man who had checked into Wendover’s State Line Hotel. Security agents ha
d discovered he was using a false name. For thirty minutes the man resisted Tibbets’s questions. Then one of the agents spoke. “We’re going to turn you in as a spy. Spies in this country go to the electric chair.”

  The man talked. He admitted he was using an alias, in the hope of selling phony magazine subscriptions on the base. He was escorted to Salt Lake City and warned to stay out of Utah.

  The episode further worried Tibbets. Inside the base, it was now an open secret that the group was going to drop “a big bomb” on Japan. Tibbets thought it was only a matter of time before there was a serious security leak.

  30

  Even here in Warm Springs, Georgia, President Roosevelt could not shake off the cares of war. At noon, a messenger appeared in his study with a leather pouch. The mail from Washington had arrived to intrude upon the rest that his doctors had ordered for the chief executive.

  In some ways, he had reason to be cheerful. The Allies were winning. Germany was on the verge of collapse. In the Pacific, landings had been made on Okinawa by 183,000 soldiers and marines.

  But already the death toll was high. This morning, as usual, the president had the latest casualty figures—6,481 Americans had died in battle during the past week, bringing the total to 196,669 American lives lost in the fight against the Axis.

  He was still studying these figures when Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the portrait painter, arrived.

  Roosevelt was dressed, as she had requested, in a Harvard tie and a vest, neither of which he liked. He allowed her to slip his cloak over his shoulders. Its dark cloth contrasted with the curious luminosity of the president’s features. His skin had become parchmentlike, and this morning was aglow with an intense brightness that seemed to come from deep within.

  Suddenly, he raised his left hand to his forehead and pressed hard against the skin. His hand fell back on his lap, and his fingers began to twitch. He dropped his cigarette and raised his right hand to massage the back of his neck. He closed his eyes and began to moan softly. Then his head slumped forward, and he slid down in his seat, limp as a puppet.

  The president’s doctor arrived in moments.

  At 3:35 P.M., April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was pronounced clinically dead.

  The free world had lost a statesman, America a leader, and the Manhattan Project, at this most crucial stage, its benefactor.

  Oblivious of what had just happened in Georgia, Harry S. Truman, thirty-fourth vice-president of the United States, this afternoon acting in his capacity as president of the Senate, appeared to the assembled senators to be taking copious notes of the debate in progress. Many thought it was typical of the way Truman did things: he was a meticulous fact-gatherer.

  In reality, he was writing a letter to his mother, full of chatty news. He ended with a reminder.

  Turn on your radio tomorrow night at 9:30 your time and you’ll hear Harry make a Jefferson Day address to the nation. I think I’ll be on all the networks, so it ought not to be hard to get me. I will be followed by the President whom I’ll introduce.

  At 4:56, the Senate recessed, and Truman dropped into Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office for a bourbon and water. He was still there when Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, telephoned and asked Truman to “please come over and come in through the main Pennsylvania Avenue entrance.”

  Truman did not ask why. He assumed Roosevelt was back from Warm Springs and wanted to raise some minor point with him.

  Truman was shown up to Eleanor Roosevelt’s second-floor study. She walked toward him and grasped his arm. Her voice was calm and measured. “Harry, the president is dead.”

  Dumbfounded, Truman instinctively looked at his watch to remember the moment he had heard the unbelievable news. It was 5:25 P.M.

  Mrs. Roosevelt spoke again. “Harry, is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now.”

  She invited him to use the study telephone, and left to attend to the funeral arrangements.

  At 7:00, Truman went to the Cabinet Room in the White House to be sworn in. The Cabinet watched in silence as Chief Justice Harlan Stone explained the brief ceremony to Truman.

  Stone consulted a piece of paper and asked Truman to confirm that the “S” in his name stood for “Shippe.”

  Truman’s twangy drawl cut through the doom-laden atmosphere. “The ‘S’ stands for nothing. It’s just an initial.”

  The chief justice erased “Shippe” from the oath. An aide whispered to Stone that they still could not begin, as they did not have a Bible. They all waited in strained silence until a frantic search of the White House produced one.

  At 7:09 P.M., the Bible was handed to Truman, who repeated after Stone the presidential oath of office. “I, Harry S. Truman, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

  Truman impulsively kissed the Bible. Then he motioned for the Cabinet to join him at the long table. He made them a promise. “It will be my effort to carry on as I believe the president would have done.”

  For Truman, the new president, for all the men in the room, Franklin D. Roosevelt was still “The President.”

  Truman asked Roosevelt’s Cabinet to stay on in office. But he gave a hint of things to come when he closed the meeting with another promise: “I will assume full responsibility for such decisions as have to be made.”

  The Cabinet filed out. At the door, Stimson lingered. When he spoke to Truman, his voice was unsteady. “Mr. President, I must talk to you on a most urgent matter.”

  Truman nodded.

  “I wish to inform you about an immense project that is under way—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.”

  Stimson paused.

  Truman waited, but the secretary of war did not elaborate.

  On the first morning of his presidency, Truman awoke at his customary hour of 6:30. This Friday the thirteenth was going to be a hot, sticky day. Then it struck him that a president of the United States did not concern himself with forecasts unless they affected important issues. Whatever the weather, he now had to run the country.

  At the White House, Truman showed himself a swift decision maker. That morning he dealt quickly and surely with certain domestic issues and was briefed by members of the Cabinet.

  At 2:30, James Byrnes arrived. Truman had two questions he wanted Byrnes to answer. First, would Byrnes give him a written report on the Yalta Conference? Byrnes had taken copious notes there for Roosevelt, and he immediately agreed to provide a memorandum.

  The second question was more surprising. Truman began by reminding Byrnes that because of the way he had become president, there now was no vice-president. According to the Constitution, if Truman died or became seriously incapacitated and unable to remain president, the secretary of state would succeed him.

  Truman asked if Byrnes would like that post. It was a surprising offer in view of their previously cool relationship. As the unofficial “assistant president,” Byrnes had been far closer to Roosevelt than Truman, and at times had used his power to snub the vice-president. But in asking Byrnes to become first in line of succession to the presidency, Truman was displaying the political skill that made him so formidable. He wanted Byrnes on his side; he was prepared to buy him.

  Byrnes accepted.

  Then, speaking in a voice Truman felt was one of “great solemnity,” Byrnes made an announcement more startling and mysterious than Stimson’s had been on the previous evening. “Mr. President, we are perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world. It might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”

  31

  Beser, like most of the 509th, had heard the news of Roosevelt’s death over the radio. Some of the men had been listening to NBC’s “Front Page Ferrell”; others had been tuned to CBS’s “Wilderness Road”; by far th
e majority had been following the adventures of ABC’s highly popular “Captain Midnight.”

  At 5:49, the first flash interrupted all three programs. By 6:30, local radio stations in Utah were broadcasting details of the poignant cable Eleanor Roosevelt had sent to her four sons: two of them were in the navy, sailing off the coast of Okinawa.

  DARLING: PA SLIPPED AWAY THIS AFTERNOON. HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO. BLESS YOU. ALL OUR LOVE. MOTHER.

  Beser turned off the radio. His reason for doing so was understandable. “By switching it off, I believed I could deny the truth. President Roosevelt had been leading us for so long that his death was impossible to immediately accept.”

  That evening, members of the officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs on the base made their gesture: there would be no gambling or drinking until Roosevelt was buried. Eatherly surprised many by being one of the most vociferous supporters of this pledge.

  Bob Lewis touched a popular emotional chord with his words. “I never met the guy. But I felt that I had lost a great buddy.”

  For many of these young men, who could hardly remember when he had not been president, the thought of an America without FDR in the White House was impossible to comprehend. Gradually, though, the talk at Wendover, as elsewhere, turned to the new president. Of most immediate concern to the 509th was his attitude toward the prosecution of the war. Everybody at Wendover knew where Roosevelt had stood. Many of them could quote from his speeches with their recurring theme that the enemy must be pursued to its lair. Roosevelt had almost lived to see the pursuit reach Berlin.

  But would Truman be so keen to conquer Tokyo?

  A well-rehearsed team, pilot Charles Sweeney and bombardier Kermit Beahan brought the B-29 toward the aiming point. For this test, they were using the makeshift range that had been laid out on the salt flats a few miles from Wendover.