Hiroshima

The Bomber

Fifty kilometers south-southeast of Iwo Jima

Dawn, August 6, 1945

As the rest of human civilization enjoyed the last few hours of its prenuclear innocence, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay flew low and alone over a desolate stretch of the Pacific.

Even though the sun had just barely cleared the eastern horizon, the plane's pilot, thirty-year-old Colonel Paul Tibbets, had already had a very long day.

Some six hours earlier and twelve hundred kilometers to the south-southeast, Enola Gay had been parked on the tarmac at North Field, its Tinian Island base in the Marianas. Protected by a cordon of military policemen, the plane was illuminated by klieg lights, looking, in the words of its nineteen-year-old radio operator Richard Nelson, "just like the opening of a supermarket back home." Swirling before this cordon was an excited commotion of Brownian motion that was a cross between a Howard Hughes Hollywood premiere and Lindbergh landing at Le Bourget. The crowd pressing in on the plane consisted of well-wishers and gawkers of all ranks, including generals and admirals too numerous to count and a smattering of civilians one could have gotten arrested for asking the wrong questions. Even though the main event that all had gathered to see was still a couple of hours away, it seemed that everyone who was anyone in the Southwest Pacific Theater was already here. They had come to see off Enola Gay, its crew, and, if they were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it, the top secret wonder weapon carried in the plane's bomb bay. According to rumor, it was supposed to shorten the war by months, if not virtually overnight.

Among the select civilians in this throng who knew exactly what Enola Gay was carrying was a small, rumpled little man in a war correspondent's khaki uniform. This was William L. Laurence, a science correspondent for the New York Times and an early public cheerleader for the then new field of nuclear physics. But the professional credential that allowed him to be the only civilian journalist with security clearance to be on Tinian was his moonlighting occupation as a War Department PR man.

Laurence had witnessed the first test-firing of America's stupendously powerful, potentially war-ending new bomb in New Mexico three weeks earlier. As such, he was fully aware of-if not positively thrilled by-the historical significance of what he was witnessing there on North Field. However, he was also somewhat crestfallen. He had originally been cleared to fly as an observer on one of the B-29s in Colonel Tibbets' strike force, but a last-minute security-clearance snafu had bumped him from the Army transport flight out of California that was to be the first leg of his journey to Tinian. Nevertheless, Laurence was by nature a driven man. If a second combat mission for the new wonder weapon were to prove necessary, he would be sure to find a spot on one of the planes next time.

In a ready room a short truck ride away, the crew members of Enola Gay and six other B-29 bombers were wrapping up their final briefing from Tibbets. In addition to being the Enola Gay's pilot for the mission, the stocky, granite-jawed colonel was probably the Army Air Forces' top expert on the B-29, having been one of its original test pilots when Boeing was working the design kinks out of the aircraft. He was also the commanding officer of the 509th Composite Group-the specialist unit to which everyone in that briefing room and another eight hundred or so pilots, bombardiers, navigators, enlisted clerks, mechanics, and airmen on Tinian belonged. The 509th had been training in the tactics and deployment of their top secret weapon at a secluded base in the Utah desert for nearly a year before shipping out to Tinian the previous June. Today they would be using that weapon in combat for the first time.

At the end of the briefing, the assemblage stood with heads bowed and hands clasped in a special prayer for the occasion written and led by Captain William Downey, a young Lutheran minister from Minnesota presently serving as the 509th's chaplain.

"Almighty Father," Downey began, "Who wilt hear the prayer of them that love Thee, we pray Thee to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies."

Downey continued: "Guard and protect them, we pray Thee, as they fly their appointed rounds. May they, as well as we, know Thy strength and power, and armed with Thy might may they bring this war to a rapid end. We pray Thee that the end of the war may come soon, and that once more we may know peace on earth. May the men who fly this night be kept safe in Thy care, and may they be returned safely to us. We shall go forward trusting in Thee, knowing that we are in Thy care now and forever. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen."

With an echoed "Amen," the crews filed off to the 509th's mess hall, affectionately dubbed the "Dogpatch Inn" after the fictional Appalachian setting of the comic strip Li'l Abner. Although North Field was home to more than three hundred B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force, the 509th got special treatment and priority in all matters, from regularly replaced engines and extra-mile maintenance attention to (relatively speaking) sumptuous quarters and chow. To wit, for their preflight meal that night, their mess sergeant, Elliott Easterly, had put up paper decorations on the walls, prepared a spread of American comfort food, and made mimeographed menu cards keeping with the Dogpatch Inn's hokey "hillbilly" theme. While Tibbets tanked up on black coffee, tablemates tucked into "Sas'sage . . . We think it's pork," "Apple butter . . . Looks like axle grease," and other delicacies. As with practically everything else on the island aside from the airplanes and their crews, these items had been shipped across the Pacific by the Twentieth Air Force's proprietary (for all intents and purposes) Merchant Marine fleet, tucked between the tens of thousands of tons of incendiary bombs and dozens of Olympic-sized swimming pools' worth of aviation fuel Major General Curtis E. LeMay's B-29s burned through every month raining hellfire on Japanese cities every night.




As Tibbets was getting up to leave the mess hall, he was pulled aside and quietly handed a small pillbox by the 509th’s flight surgeon, Captain Donald A. Young. The pillbox contained twelve cyanide capsules-one for Tibbets and one each for the other eleven men who would be flying with him today.

After being trucked to the personal equipment supply hut at the airfield, the crews were issued the rest of their gear for the mission: parachutes; "flak suits" for protection against antiaircraft shrapnel; survival and flotation gear; and .45-caliber sidearm pistols and ammunition, among other items. It was at this point that Tibbets broached the subject of the cyanide capsules with the eight other members of his flight crew and the three special passengers for the day's mission. The latter were present at the behest of "Project Alberta," the code-named team of Tinian-based representatives of the Manhattan Project, the top secret Army Corps of Engineers program that had just spent nearly two billion dollars developing and producing four atomic bombs for America's wartime arsenal. One of those bombs-the one-off design its builders and minders had come to refer to as "Little Boy"-had been loaded into the bomb bay of Enola Gay earlier that evening.

The only person to take up Tibbets' cyanide-capsule offer was one of the Project Alberta passengers, Captain William Parsons. The lanky, balding Navy officer was a top-secret-clearance ordnance weapons specialist who knew the inner workings and mysteries of Little Boy as intricately and thoroughly as Tibbets knew the cockpit instruments and flight characteristics of a B-29. It would not do for the Japanese to capture him alive, and the same went for Tibbets, who prudently stowed the pillbox in a pocket of his flight suit. Out of everyone who would be aboard the Enola Gay today, only Parsons and Tibbets had enough knowledge about atomic bomb technology and American plans for its use to reveal vital information about those ultra-top-secret topics in the unlikely-but still possible-event of their capture and interrogation (assuming an enraged mob of Japanese civilians did not beat them to death first-this was a real and ever-present danger for any Allied airman shot down over Japanese territory). In consideration of this risk, upon the 509th's posting to the Pacific earlier that summer, Tibbets had been grounded from flying over Japanese-controlled territory or waters for the specific purpose of avoiding just such a catastrophic security breach. This meant that he had not participated in any of the recon missions and practice bombing runs over Japan that the other B-29 pilots and crews of the 509th had been flying for the past month. Today's flight to (and hopefully back from) Japan would be his first.

Conversely, the fact that none of the other crew members had taken up the cyanide offer was not necessarily problematic. Since there was no "need to know" about the Manhattan Project on their part in order to perform their individual tasks on the plane, none of them even knew yet that the special weapon they would be deploying today was an "atomic" bomb. And anyone who had just spent nearly a year, as they had, in the draconian security environment at the 509th's training base in Utah and now on Tinian had long since learned never to engage in rumormongering or imprudent inquiry of any kind related to the unit's ultimate mission or decision-making above their pay grade and specific job assignment. As far as they were concerned, the only things they knew about "the gadget" or "the gizmo"-as they were wont to hear it referred to in briefings-were that it was top secret, that it was very expensive, and that it was going to make a very large explosion with a lot of fire that was going to kill a very large number of people.

At a briefing two days before the mission, Captain Parsons had talked to the assembled crews to give them some idea of what to expect-and what some Japanese city had in store for it-when "the gadget" exploded: "The bomb you are going to drop . . . is something new in the history of warfare. It will be the most destructive weapon ever devised. . . . We think it will wipe out almost everything within a three-mile area. . . . One bomb . . . one single solitary bomb will do all that. And maybe more."

The math could not have been simpler, nor the consequences more stark: one plane, one bomb, one city gone.

If any of the crewmen harbored personal doubts about participating in such bloodletting, they could convince themselves that today's mission would not really be that different in terms of civilian casualties from one of Curtis LeMay's incendiary raids being flown out of North Field or his other Mariana Islands airfields on Tinian, Guam, and Saipan. As far as they were concerned, the most significant difference about the death and destruction they would be unleashing was that it would be accomplished risking only one plane and a crew of eleven instead of the typical mass formations of hundreds of bombers with thousands of men flying into harm's way. To the young men who had to face the enemy flak and fighters, destroying a Japanese city by putting only 1 percent of the usual number of American lives at risk to accomplish the same objective would have sounded like a bargain. From the perspective of their limited knowledge of the bomb that they would be using on the mission, this was not necessarily an unreasonable leap of moral logic. Nor were they alone in this respect.

In August 1945, not even the planners at the Manhattan Project and the decision-makers at the Pentagon and the White House had really given much thought about what Little Boy and its rotund atomic sibling, Fat Man, were going to do to human bodies beyond the usual effects one would normally expect to be involved when incinerating wooden Japanese cities. And as for making any moral distinction between "military" and "civilian" when planning attacks on Japanese targets, American air strategists had long since let that consideration-if it had ever really existed to begin with-fall by the wayside over four years of brutal fighting against enemies who seemed to resist more savagely, desperately, and stubbornly the closer they staggered toward defeat.

For the men in Washington privileged with a better grasp of the big picture, the frustration and desire to just get the war over with already would have been as palpable as those of the men in that Tinian Quonset hut listening to Captain Parsons describe Armageddon: Why didn't the Japanese just give up already and stop the bloodshed-and do so before the Soviets had time to join the fight against their country and do to half of Japan what they were doing to half of Germany?

Perhaps, the thinking went, Little Boy and his brothers would bring the Japanese to their senses.




Once on the tarmac at North Field, the crews of the other six B-29s participating in the day’s mission headed off to their planes to attend to their final preflight checks and other preparations for takeoff. While all of this runway activity was happening behind them, Tibbets and his crew were kept standing in front of Enola Gay, where they squinted under klieg lights and were ushered this way and that to pose singly and in groups for cameras. As flashbulbs popped, the men fielded interview softballs from Twentieth Air Force PR types.

The first mission planes to depart were three weather reconnaissance B-29s. Nearly an hour ahead of Enola Gay's scheduled departure, they took off from North Field, headed for the Japanese Home Islands. Once there, they would report back on weather and visibility conditions over three separate target option areas: The B-29 named Straight Flush would be headed for the mission's primary target, Hiroshima; Jabit III and Full House would be headed for the secondary and tertiary targets at Kokura and Nagasaki, respectively.

The fourth B-29 to leave the field was an emergency standby replacement "strike plane" headed for Iwo Jima. Cheekily named Top Secret, it was equipped and crewed to deploy Little Boy in Enola Gay's stead, for example, in the event of some major mechanical malfunction or the sudden disability of a key crew member.

As was well-known to the American authorities on Tinian in August 1945, there were still Japanese survivors of the battle for the island a year earlier who were holed up in the heavily wooded hills and jungles around North Field. If any of these holdouts had been watching the buzz of activity currently underway at the airfield, it would not take a military intelligence genius among their number to figure out that something very significant was afoot tonight. And if any of these lurking observers had access to a radio transmitter, Tibbets' strike force could be in for a surprise welcome party upon its arrival over the Japanese Home Islands.