Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Necessities such as real soap and toothpaste were available only on the black market, and there were continual reminders of severe penalties for those trading there. Most people made do with an ersatz soap of rice-bran and caustic soda, and with a gritty, salty paste for their teeth. Now that the Japanese forces had mainly departed for overseas and their return was largely prevented by Allied aircraft and submarines, there was little trade for the kimono-clad prostitutes collected in Hiroshima’s red-light districts’ “houses of joy.” Their few customers were asked to pay in food, not cash.

ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1944, on a U.S. Air Force base in New Mexico, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets climbed into the pilot seat of one of the new B-29 Super Fortresses, the world’s first pressurized bomber, which had been designed for long-range conventional bombing attacks against Japan. [35] The prefix B in B-29 did not, as often thought, stand for Boeing, its manufacturer. Under a military naming convention introduced in 1924, B was for bomber, and 29 meant that the plane was the twenty-ninth model of bomber. Fighters had the designation P for pursuit, although they are now assigned the letter F. His destination was Colorado Springs. The twenty-nine-year-old had taken his first flight seventeen years earlier in Florida. At that time pilots were hired to make low advertising runs over public gatherings, and a barnstormer had taken the eager eleven-year-old aloft with him to rain promotional chocolate bars on the crowds on the local racecourse. This, the greatest thrill of young Tibbets’s life, inspired him with the wish to fly, and in 1937 he joined the U.S. Air Corps. After the United States’ entry into the war, he had flown twenty-five combat operations in a B-17 Flying Fortress over occupied Europe and North Africa. In so doing, he had acquired a high reputation as an excellent and unflappable pilot before returning to the United States to spend nearly a year as one of the test pilots for the Super Fortress.

That day in Colorado began with a grilling from a security officer about his personal life. Tibbets began to suspect that the possible new assignment, which was the subject of his visit, was “considerably more important than I had imagined.” The last question was whether he had ever been arrested. Tib­bets confessed that when he was nineteen, a nosy policeman had interrupted what Tibbets called “a love-making episode” in a parked car on “a secluded beach in Florida.” With this confession Tibbets satisfied the security officer, who identified himself as Colonel Lansdale. Lansdale took Tibbets to meet another group of men, including Deak Parsons, who was introduced as an explosives expert. One of the men asked Tibbets whether he had ever heard of atomic energy and then went on to tell him that “the United States has now split an atom. We are making a bomb based on that. The bomb will be so powerful that it will explode with a force of 20,000 tons of conventional high explosive.” Tibbets had been chosen to command the air force operation to drop the bomb. He was told that although it had the potential to end the war, the weapon was an unknown quantity that might not be ready for twelve months. If it exploded successfully, the bomber might suffer structural damage or even be thrown out of control, unless it put at least eight miles between itself and the explosion.

It would be up to Tibbets to lead a team to modify the B-29 aircraft to carry the bomb, which might weigh as much as ten thousand pounds, and to develop tactics for the operation. He would be given the 393rd Bomb Squadron as an operating nucleus but should recruit other men as he thought necessary. Tibbets was given a choice of three remote locations as his base. He chose Wendover Field in Utah, “only” 125 miles from Salt Lake City and “surrounded by miles and miles of salt flats” in a “virtually uninhabited” part of the state. It was, however, within easy flying distance of Los Alamos and of suitable test-bombing ranges.

The next stage in Tibbets’s briefing included a meeting with General Groves, whom he described as “of bulldozering efficiency.” Tibbets summed up his own position as he began his task as “we would be organized for the purpose of dropping a bomb that hadn’t been built on a target that hadn’t been chosen.”

Undaunted, Tibbets recruited further personnel. A key choice was that of Major Thomas Ferebee, a farmer’s son from North Carolina, as his bombardier. They had flown in the same crew in Europe, and together they co-opted others from their previous crews. In particular, from their European tour of duty, they chose navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, tail-gunner Staff Sergeant George “Bob” Caron, and flight engineer Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenberg, and from Tibbets’s B-29 testing days, pilot Robert Lewis from New Jersey. Among those from 393rd Bomb Squadron whom Tibbets chose to involve closely in the project was the squadron radio officer Jacob Beser.

Beser had enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and had secured some of the top marks in his training class. He would be responsible for the sophisticated radio and electronic equipment being developed to forestall any Japanese attempt to detonate the bomb prematurely or confuse the aircraft’s navigational systems. On 19 September 1944 he was at Los Alamos with Tibbets, being given further details of the project. To Beser it was “the most fantastic day in my life” being introduced to scientists such as Bethe and Oppenheimer and learning the importance of the work in which he was engaged. Leaving the offices for the guest house in the late evening, he took a wrong turn and walked straight into Oppenheimer’s quarters, where he found his wife, Kitty, alone and stark naked lying on a sofa sipping a cocktail. Considerably less embarrassed than Beser, she gave him directions and continued with her drink.

As he made further visits to Los Alamos, Tibbets became increasingly at ease with the scientists, recalling, “Although some did indeed have their heads in the clouds, others had the same interests as the normal everyday citizen.” He was particularly impressed by Oppenheimer, whom he thought “unpretentious… highly-nervous,” and so able he could do at least three things at once. Tibbets remembered how Oppenheimer once glanced into a room and saw a puzzled scientist staring at a blackboard covered in scribbled formulae. After going a few steps farther, Oppenheimer turned back, entered the room, erased a few numbers from the board, inserted some more, and left the scientist exclaiming, “My God, how did you do it? I’ve been looking for that mistake for three days.”

General Groves had some private reservations that Tibbets was “too young” for the job, and he was unconvinced of his abilities as a commander, as distinct from those as a pilot. He therefore took particular care to impress Tibbets with the need for strict security and provided him with a security group of about thirty men, led by Major William “Bud” Umana. His job, according to Tibbets, was “literally to spy on our people to be sure there was no information leak.” In addition to monitoring mail and phone calls and eavesdropping, Umana went so far as to deploy his men as agents provocateurs. They accosted airmen as they left the Wendover Field for leave, asking seemingly innocent questions about the base’s work. Those who blabbed always received a severe dressing-down from Tibbets and often a posting to Alaska.

Among Tibbets’s first tasks was to supervise modifications to the B-29s chosen to carry the atomic bombs. [36] Serious consideration had been given to the use of the British Lancaster bomber, which would have needed less modification, but the proposal was rejected by Groves, who found it “beyond comprehension to use a British plane to deliver an American A-bomb.” The modifications were code-named “silver-plate” and were accorded the highest priority by material command. To allow the aircraft to fly higher than the limit of about thirty thousand feet that antiaircraft flak could reach, and to provide extra speed to outrun enemy fighters, Tib­bets ordered all the guns except the two twenty-millimeter cannon in the tail turret, as well as the armor plating, to be stripped from the planes. By so doing, he saved seven thousand pounds in weight and achieved his goals of increased height and speed.