Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

On 3 August Tibbets received the formal targeting order. The operation was to be code-named “Centerboard,” and Hiroshima was the primary target; if it was covered with clouds, the secondary target was Kokura, with Nagasaki as the fallback.

The main briefing for the crews of the seven Super Fortresses to take part in the operation was held on 4 August. Many smoked cigarettes nervously as in the afternoon heat they filed into a tin hut with closed curtains and under armed guard. According to one of those present, “It was so hot and sticky just breathing was difficult.” Soon everyone was wet with perspiration. Deak Parsons was flying on the raid as senior weapons officer. Pale and tight-lipped and pausing frequently to wipe the sweat from his brow and bald head, he gave the lead presentation. He spoke slowly and softly: “The bomb you are going to drop is something new in the history of warfare. It is the most destructive weapon ever devised.” He paused and cleared his throat. “We think it will wipe out almost everything within a three mile area, maybe slightly more, maybe slightly less.” Next he showed a film of the Trinity test.

Afterward Parsons told his visibly stunned audience that no one knew what the exact effect of such a bomb dropped from the air would be; it had never been done. However, a flash of light much brighter than the sun was expected, against which crews would need to protect their eyes. For that purpose he distributed sets of goggles like those worn by welders. They had adjustable lenses, and the crews were told to switch them to the darkest setting. Paul Tibbets told the crews that “he was personally honored, and he was sure all of us were, to have been chosen to take part in this raid which, he said—and all the other bigwigs nodded when he said it—would shorten the war by six months.” Everyone was told, “No talking… no talking, even among yourselves. Loose lips sink ships. Be quiet. Say nothing. And over again, each phrase half a dozen times. And no letters. No writing home. Not to anyone, our wives, our mothers…. The news, when it was released would come from Washington, from President Truman himself.”

Neither Tibbets, Parsons, nor anyone else mentioned the word nuclear or atomic in connection with the bomb. A subdued Leonard Cheshire and William Penney sat at the back, excluded at this late stage from taking part as observers almost certainly by General Groves, who wanted the first use of the atomic bomb to be an all-American affair.

Deak Parsons had seen a number of bombers crash and burn on Tinian’s runways on takeoff. On 5 August, the day before the scheduled first mission, he decided it would be unwise to arm the bomb until the aircraft was in flight in case it exploded in a crash on takeoff and destroyed the island and the twenty thousand service personnel on it. A similar proposal had previously been rejected by General Groves. Although Parsons consulted Groves’s deputy, General Farrell, the senior Manhattan Project officer on Tinian, who agreed that the bomb should be armed in flight, neither informed Groves of the change of plan. Groves later wrote, “They just didn’t have the nerve that was required, that was all. There had been quite a few crashes, but after all we had probably the best pilot in the air force, Colonel Tibbets…. If I had known about it in advance they would have had a very positive order over there.” Parsons practiced the necessary maneuvers in the bomb bay, cutting his hands as he worked in the restricted space amid much sharp metal, but was able to satisfy himself that he could arm the bomb in flight.

On the afternoon of 5 August, in what to Leonard Cheshire resembled “a military funeral cortege,” a tractor moved Little Boy, painted a dull gunmetal gray, on a trailer covered with a tarpaulin under armed guard from the technical area to be winched aboard Tibbets’s plane. Several messages to the Japanese had been scrawled on the bomb’s casing, including one of vengeance for those lost on the Indianapolis. Like the bomb, the plane had gained a name— Enola Gay —after Tibbets’s mother’s first names. He had consulted some of his crew but not Bob Lewis. Lewis had flown the plane much of the time in training and on 4 August had had the difficult task of telling his regular bombardier and navigator that they had to make way for Thomas Ferebee and “Dutch” Van Kirk respectively. When a day later he saw the name Enola Gay freshly painted on the plane he was, he recalled, “very angry” and confronted Tibbets, but the name stayed. Less controversially, Tibbets had also had the arrow on the tail fin noted by Tokyo Rose painted over so that Enola Gay no longer looked any different from any other plane on the base. A little later the Los Alamos scientific team was ordered to move to another part of the island in case of an accident on takeoff. Knowing the power of the bomb, they realized how futile this would be and stayed put.

During the evening, the crew made their personal preparations. Some prayed or, if Catholics, went to confession. Others, including Ferebee, played poker and blackjack. Whatever else they did, most ate. Tibbets shared several plates of his favorite pineapple fritters with Van Kirk and Ferebee. However, he did not share with them that in his pocket he had a tin of cyanide capsules so that he and the crew could, if necessary, choose to die rather than face capture and torture. Tibbets, whose own “tightly wound nerves vetoed the idea” of sleep, held a short final briefing around midnight, at which the Lutheran chaplain said a special prayer. Included were the words “Guard and protect them…. May they as well as we, know thy strength and power, and armed with thy might bring this war to a rapid end.” Jacob Beser, who was Jewish, reflected that in his religion it was more usual to give thanks after coming through than “to ask a special favor beforehand.”

One of the crew of the plane that would carry the scientific monitoring equipment remembered how the last hours felt: “It’s a little difficult to explain the emotions experienced just before a mission, when you know you’re going and at what time and how far it is and what opposition is expected and when, (if of course, always if although you never admit that, even to yourself, especially to yourself) you’ll return. It’s a little like going to the dentist’s office. Once you’ve made the date, you relax a little…. You know it’s just a matter of sweating out the patients ahead of you, and you can’t (or won’t) run away; everything’s set. It’s irrevocable, and you accept it.”

Bob Caron, the Enola Gay’s rear gunner, recalled: “It was about 1 a.m…. when we piled out of the trucks that drove us to the flight line. The Enola Gay was bathed in a flood of lights and the hardstand looked like a Hollywood movie set. A crowd was on hand, consisting of military brass, other interested military personnel, and some civilians whom we knew to be scientists. Cameramen—still and newsreel—seemed to be everywhere. Frequently our preparations for take-off were interrupted to have our pictures taken. Even the photographers did not know why they were taking pictures; they were just following orders. I recall wondering whether we were being photographed for historical interest—or because they didn’t think we were coming back.”

After some time and many photographs, the crew climbed the ladder into the plane and strapped themselves in. Caron took his place in the tail turret, not for fear of attack, but rather because “there was a marginally better chance of survival in the tail” in the event of a crash on takeoff. At 2:4.1; a.m. Tibbets let go of the brakes and opened the throttles. Enola Gay moved down the mile-and-a-half-long chopped-coral runway lined by fire and rescue vessels. Loaded with the 9,700-pound Little Boy and the 7,000 gallons of aviation fuel necessary for the long flight, Enola Gay weighed about sixty-five tons, around seven tons more than the usual takeoff weight for a B-29. Consequently, she picked up speed only slowly. To those on the ground, it seemed that Tibbets was never going to pull back the stick and take off. It seemed so too to Bob Lewis, who, from the adjacent copilot’s seat, urged Tibbets to lift off. But Tibbets wanted maximum speed to lift his heavy load with a “cushion of safety in case we lost an engine at this moment of maximum strain.” Tibbets was, in his words, “little more than 100 feet from the end of the pavement” when he eased Enola Gay from the ground safely and steadily into her climb before she vanished from the view of onlookers into the velvet northern sky.