Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

The B-29’s two bomb bays had already been turned into one, and two twenty-seven-foot pneumatically operated bomb doors replaced the four twelve-foot ones. Bomb hooks of the type used to hold the largest conventional bombs—the British Lancaster’s ten-thousand-pound “Tallboys”—were then installed to hold the atomic bombs in the enlarged bay.

Tibbets specified to his pilots how best to make the 15-degree diving turn he thought necessary after they had released the bomb to get them away from the much-feared shock wave. He had carefully worked out that the bomb would take only forty-three seconds to fall from thirty-one thousand feet to its explosion height of around two thousand feet. The shock wave would take about forty seconds to travel eight miles, the minimum distance at which the plane was advised to meet the wave. However, the B-29 would need two minutes, not one minute twenty-three seconds, to fly eight miles, so the sharp diving turn was necessary to pull the plane eight miles diagonally from the detonation before the wave struck. (The plane was fastest in a dive.)

Tibbets then moved his crews on to practice bombing using casings simulating the likely shape of the atomic bomb. Tibbets tried to hide his frustration as the scientists regularly varied the weight and shape, seemingly oblivious to the impact on the performance of the plane and the mode of delivery.

In December 1944 Tibbets’s command was redesignated the 509th Composite Group to reflect that, in addition to the 393rd Bomb Squadron’s B-29s, it contained a scientific group and other elements to make it self-sufficient in communications and supply. In January 1945 many of Tibbets’s planes flew down to Cuba for four weeks to continue their training from Batista Field, twelve miles from Havana. In the better weather of the Caribbean they could practice long flights over water and the transition from flying over water to over land, which would be important on approaching enemy coasts. In March Captain Deak Parsons visited Wendover to give Tibbets his first briefing on the detailed mechanics of the bomb and its fusing. The premature explosion of a dummy unit carrying only a small amount of black powder did not improve the crew’s feelings about the safety of their mission.

At the end of June 194 c, reequipped with new, stripped-down planes with improvements such as fuel-injection engines and reversible-pitch propellers to replace the older models worn out by months of testing, the group took off for the Pacific. Their destination was the airfield on Tinian, one of the northern Mariana Islands. Captured by U.S. marines less than a year earlier, the field was only thirteen hundred miles from Japan.

Tibbets had had the rare privilege of choosing his own aircraft off the assembly line at Omaha, Nebraska, on 9 May, the day after the German surrender. A foreman assured him that the workmen had been so careful to check and recheck everything that “even the screws on the toilet seat were given an extra turn.”

On 27 June Robert Lewis piloted Tibbets’s as yet unnamed plane to Tin­ian. Tibbets, Ferebee, and Van Kirk, as commander, group bombardier, and group navigator, were not with him, as they did not fly frequently themselves, though when they did, it was nearly always with Lewis. A nineteen-year-old radio operator named Richard Nelson had joined Lewis’s crew at the end of April. He was both thrilled and scared when Lewis buzzed the Wendover base in a hair-raising good-bye gesture.

While Tibbets and his crew had been training, Allied bomber squadrons had undertaken major raids against both Germany and Japan, causing massive devastation and heavy casualties. At the Yalta Conference in early February 1940, the Russian high command asked for assistance from the British and American bomber commands to prevent the transfer of large numbers of German reinforcements to the eastern front. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed. The targets would be the transport hubs of Dresden and Leipzig.

Neither the British nor the Americans had previously targeted Dresden, a historic city with many fine baroque buildings. The British attacked first, in two waves on the night of 13–14 February, aiming at the marshaling yards and creating a massive firestorm with temperatures at its center of above eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war in the city at the time, wrote that bodies dissolved in “the semi-liquid way that dust actually returns to dust.” In the morning 450 American bombers arrived to add to the destruction. One survivor wrote, “Dead, dead, dead everywhere. Some completely black like charcoal. Others completely untouched, lying as if they were asleep.” Another saw nothing but parts of bodies being shoveled into a big heap, then burned. The casualties numbered at least sixty thousand and perhaps significantly more, since the city was filled with refugees in addition to its recorded inhabitants. The inscription on one of the mass graves reads:

How many died?

Who knows the number?

Some in the Allied command thought that, over and above its tactical benefits, the destruction had given the Russians a salutary demonstration of Allied air-power.

After a precision raid on a Tokyo aircraft factory on 4 March, the U.S. air force, under its recently appointed commander, Curtis Le May, decided on the carpet bombing of whole Japanese cities. The first target was Tokyo. On 9 March, more than three hundred bombers took off from Tinian, and at around 11 p.m. (Tokyo time) pathfinder planes dropped colored target markers illuminating the city. Then came the bombers, flying lower than usual because of the lack of antiaircraft fire. They dropped two thousand incendiary bombs, some containing, for the first time, a new American invention, “sticky fire”—napalm. The flaming napalm ran down the city’s buildings, most of which were of wood. Fire was blown from one building to the next, creating a firestorm that destroyed sixteen square miles of Tokyo and killed more than one hundred thousand people. Tokyo residents followed government directions to form bucket chains, but many suffocated from smoke inhalation or from the deprivation of oxygen as it was burned from the air, even before the flames consumed them. One survivor saw piles of blackened bodies piled outside the Meiji Theater, so burned and disfigured that she could not even identify their sex or anything else about them. Radio Tokyo condemned the attacks as “slaughter bombing.”

Over the following three months Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya were destroyed by fire, and the death toll rose to at least a quarter of a million, but still the resistance of the Japanese government and its obedient, patriotic people did not seem to crack, although Emperor Hirohito was said to have known the war was lost when he saw charred corpses heaped by the side of the river in Tokyo. In a later raid on Tokyo on 13 April an incendiary bomb set fire to the laboratory in which Yoshio Nishina and his team were still trying unsuccessfully to persuade their thermal diffusion column to separate U-235 from U-238. The fire destroyed the laboratory and in the ashes perished any faint, lingering hope that Japan might progress toward a nuclear weapon.

Hiroshima remained intact, but the authorities were nervous. Most of the city’s houses were timber-framed with wooden walls and paper partitions under a tiled roof and so were highly inflammable. At the beginning of 1940 the government ordered the mayor of Hiroshima to begin demolishing buildings to construct firebreaks against incendiary bombing raids to supplement the natural barriers afforded by the city’s rivers. Both adults and schoolchildren went at the demolition work with a will. Wood from the fallen buildings could be used for fuel in the winter cold or, if a few nails could also be salvaged, turned into wooden sandals for the many who by then lacked them.