Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

On 26 July, at the end of her ten-day voyage from San Franscico, the USS Indianapolis reached Tinian. Two days later, the Japanese prime minister rejected the Potsdam offer. His government would “ignore it [and] press forward resolutely for the successful conclusion of the war.” The Tokyo newspaper Mainnichi dismissed the Potsdam Declaration as “a laughable matter.”

TINIAN IS A SMALL ISLAND about twelve miles long and only five miles wide at its broadest. Fringed by pale sand and coral reefs, Tinian was the center of the American strategic bombing offensive against Japan, which lay some thirteen hundred miles directly to the north. The four parallel runways of North Field, one of the two airfields on the island, were, at 8,500 feet, said to be the longest in the world at the time and could launch four B-29s simultaneously at forty-five-second intervals, or more than three hundred planes per hour. Many of the streets on the base were named after those in Manhattan, such as Park Avenue and Riverside Drive. The area reserved for Paul Tibbets’s 509th Composite Group was known as “the Columbia University District.”

Their compound was surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire with an inner compound of windowless huts surrounded by more barbed wire and guards. Here a thirty-seven-man-strong technical team, including Luis Alvarez and William Penney and under the command of Deak Parsons, worked on the assembly of the two bombs. Conditions in general on Tinian were fairly primitive, and the 509th officers’ club was made of plywood from recycled packing crates, canvas, and mosquito netting. Many of the officers and men lived in tents. One of their occupants wrote: “The bathroom is a pipe in the open connected to a waterpipe; the tank itself is made out of salvaged bomb containers; there is no hot water. Beside the coral path leading to the bathroom is a derelict Japanese foxhole. Beyond it by the sea is the graveyard of 1,100 marines who died in the battle for the island.” Despite such discomforts, the 509th had the highest priority rating on the island and the best of everything going. Their priority status provoked jealousy among the base’s other personnel, who were entirely ignorant of the mission of their pampered neighbors. Some disgruntled spirits threw stones over the wire onto the corrugated iron roofs of the group’s accommodation huts to keep the occupants awake at night.

Each night also, U.S. marines went out to hunt the small numbers of Japanese soldiers still holding out in the luxuriant jungle or in caves in the one-hundred-foot-high cliffs overlooking the air base and its surrounding sugarcane fields. One of them, Chief Warrant Officer Kizo Imai, later claimed to have noticed the special compound set up for the 509th and pondered how best to get out a message for it to be attacked. Paul Tibbets recalled that the Japanese propagandist Tokyo Rose mentioned the distinctive arrow marking on the tails of the 509th’s bombers in one of her radio broadcasts. Perhaps an unknown Japanese soldier did get a message through.

The crews of the £09th spent July 1945 in training, including flying daylight missions of two or three bombers over Japan, during which they dropped orange pumpkin-shaped practice bombs containing only sufficient powder to show where detonation occurred. These practice sessions confirmed to Tibbets the crews’ competence and the inability of Japanese antiaircraft fire to reach thirty thousand feet. Fighters were only rarely seen, and Tibbets hoped that the insignificant effects of the practice bombs might lull the Japanese into a false sense of security about lone high-flying bombers. Tib­bets himself went on none of these flights, forbidden to fly over enemy territory in case he was shot down and captured. Instead he worked out with senior officers the operational plans for the final bombing mission. Because August was often cloudy over Japan and the mission needed clear weather, his bomb-carrying plane would be preceded by three weather aircraft: one to check the weather over the primary target, and the others over each of the alternates. The bombing plane would be accompanied by a plane carrying scientists and scientific instruments and another to take photographs. A spare aircraft would fly as far as Iwo Jima, halfway along the six-hour route to Japan. In the event of any mechanical problems aboard the lead plane, it would land at Iwo Jima and the bomb would be transferred to the spare plane, which would complete the mission.

The Indianapolis had anchored one thousand yards offshore because there was no quay deep enough for her to berth alongside. Her secret cargo was transferred to a tank landing craft, brought ashore, and carried to the windowless huts. The Indianapolis then sailed unescorted for Guam. C-54 Green Hornet transport aircraft delivered some final components for the uranium bomb, Little Boy, on 28 July, and the bomb’s assembly was virtually complete by 31 July. Little Boy was 120 inches long, 28 inches in diameter, and weighed about 9,700 pounds. To one observer it looked like “an elongated trash can with fins.”

The final components—the bomb casings—for the plutonium implosion bomb, Fat Man, the same type tested in the Jornada del Muerto, did not arrive until midday on 2 August. Among the other cargo in one of the B-29s transporting them was a ten-foot-high statue of Christ being taken to Tinian at the request of one of the chaplains. The components of Fat Man were hurried to the secure inner area, where Luis Alvarez began quickly to assemble them.

One of Britain’s most experienced bomber pilots, Captain Leonard Cheshire, holder of Britain’s highest decoration, the Victoria Cross, and a former leader of the famous 61 7 “Dam Busters” squadron, was on Tinian expecting to be an observer on the first atomic bomb mission. He shared a tent with William Penney, who also expected to fly on the mission as a British scientific observer. In early August Cheshire dropped in on the assembly of Fat Man. He recalled how Luis Alvarez “straightened up and without much formality began explaining the basic functions of the gadgetry… little of which I grasped despite his obvious efforts to keep it simple. Then… he walked across to a yellow box lying on the floor and casually kicked it open with his foot. Inside I saw what appeared to be a metallic sphere about the size of a football…. it did not strike me as anything very special.” Then Alvarez told him it was the plutonium core of the bomb.

“I must have looked startled, for he told me not to worry; it was perfectly harmless and I was quite free to touch it if I wanted, provided I wore a pair of gloves…. Disbelief that the new monster bomb could be lying haphazardly on the floor… was followed by a sense of awe. Then I pulled myself together, accepted the gloves that Alvarez offered me and touched it. The sensation was rather like that of the first time you touch a live snake: you recoil from what you know will feel slimy and repulsive, and then to your surprise find that it is warmish, almost friendly…. Hitherto the bomb had conjured images of devastating, unimaginable power…. True, there was a potentially lethal side to it: but equally an inert side that left it totally subservient to man’s will.”

Just after midnight on the morning of 30 July, the cruiser Indianapolis was torpedoed en route to Guam by a Japanese submarine and sank before being able to send a distress call. However, U.S. signals intelligence routinely intercepted and decoded a message from the Japanese submarine reporting the sinking of a “battleship of Idaho class.” Intelligence passed the decode to naval headquarters on Guam on the morning of 30 July, but no action was taken because no battleships were known to be in the region. It was not until 2 August that a plane on a routine patrol spotted survivors from the air. Only 318 sailors out of the crew of 1,169 were still alive to be rescued; of those who survived the initial attack, 484 had died in the water of their wounds or of exposure or had been eaten by sharks. It was the greatest loss at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy and the last major warship to go down in World War II. When news of the Indianapolis’s sinking reached Tinian, it darkened men’s moods, particularly Jacob Beser, who, before the cruiser left, had enjoyed a convivial reunion with an old schoolfriend serving aboard her who was now among the dead.