Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Among the Enola Gay’s crew, only Bob Caron, holding a camera alone in his tail turret as the plane raced away, saw the explosion direct—bright even through the very dark goggles Tibbets had ordered him to don, like the rest of the crew, a minute before the attack. He saw the shock wave develop and seemingly rise toward the Enola Gay as if “the ring around some distant planet had detached itself and was coming up towards us.” He yelled to warn the pilots. As he did so, the shock wave engulfed the Enola Gay, throwing her about and creating a massive noise. Both Ferebee and Tibbets thought the effect was that of an antiaircraft shell exploding, while Lewis compared the shock to a giant striking the plane with a telephone pole.

Almost immediately, Caron saw another wave approach. This wave was the reflection of the first from the ground, and its impact was less dramatic but still sufficiently violent to propel Dick Nelson half out of his seat. Once the second wave had passed, the air grew still once more, and Tibbets circled the stricken city as Caron photographed the mushroom cloud, which seemed to rise sixty thousand feet into the air. Tibbets asked Beser to take around to each man a portable wire recorder he had been given and to ask them to record their impressions.

The recordings have been lost, but to Bob Caron it was “beautifully horrible.” He recollected his description in the following words: “A column of smoke rising fast. It has a fiery red core. A bubbling mass, purple-grey in color, with that red core. It’s all turbulent. Fires are springing up everywhere. Like flames shooting out of a huge bed of coals. I am starting to count the fires. One, two, three, four, five, six… fourteen, fifteen…. It’s impossible. There are too many to count. Here it comes, the mushroom shape that Captain Parsons spoke about. It’s coming this way. It’s like a mass of bubbling molasses. The mushroom is spreading out. It’s maybe a mile or two wide and half a mile high. It’s growing up and up and up. It’s nearly level with us and climbing. It’s very black, but there’s a purplish tint to the cloud. The base of the mushroom looks like a heavy undercast that is shot through with flames. The city must be below that. The flames and smoke are billowing out, whirling out into the foothills. The hills are disappearing under the smoke.” Beser himself recorded, “What a relief it worked.” Lewis wrote on his notepad, “My God, what have we done?”

After completing three circuits, Tibbets headed Enola Gay for Tinian. Deak Parsons radioed back a report of success: “Clear cut, successful in all respects. Visual effects greater than Trinity. Hiroshima. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery. Proceeding to regular base.” The chief weaponeer then relapsed into what other members of the crew recalled as “a withdrawn and meditative” mood. Bob Caron could still see the mushroom cloud from his tail turret until they were more than 350 miles from Hiroshima. Tibbets handed the controls to Bob Lewis while he napped for a while. As he flew the plane home, Lewis was assessing events. Later that day he told a reporter, “Even though we had expected something terrific what we saw made us feel that we were Buck Rogers twenty-fifth century warriors.” More soberly he wrote on his pad, “I had a strong conviction that it was possible, by the time we landed, that the Japs would have thrown in the sponge. Because of the total destruction I didn’t feel there was room for anything but complete surrender.” Tom Ferebee wondered whether the radiation to which they had been exposed might make him sterile. Deak Parsons tried to reassure him. [40] Ferebee need not have worried. He later fathered four sons.

Tibbets took the controls again to land on Tinian. As they came to a standstill, they were greeted by a large crowd, the formal welcoming party many times outnumbered by well-wishers. When, pipe in mouth, Tibbets led his men down onto the tarmac through the hatch to the rear of the B-29’s nosewheel, he was surprised to see General Carl Spaatz, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Force, approaching. Tib­bets barely had time to palm his pipe before the general pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on his creased flight overalls. Then a scrum of well-wishers surrounded him, slapping his back, rejoicing in the mission’s success, and eager to hear more about it.

TOWARD MIDNIGHT on 5 August, Hatsuyo Nakamura, the widow of the tailor turned soldier Isawa Nakamura, who had been killed more than three years earlier on the day Singapore fell, heard on her radio a warning to all inhabitants of Hiroshima that two hundred American bombers were approaching. Everyone should go to the safe areas. She woke her three children. With their sleeping rolls they set out from their small wooden house in the part of the city known as Noboricho for their appointed safe area on the northeast side of the city near Hiroshima railway station. They returned at 2:30 a.m. after the all clear signaled that the bombers had passed. Air-raid sirens woke Mrs. Nakamura again at around 7 a.m. as Claude Eatherly’s weather plane approached, but she decided not to disturb her children to take them back to the safe area. The all clear soon sounded once more. Her children were beginning to wake, so she gave them a few peanuts for breakfast and told them to try to sleep, soon made difficult by the noise of a neighbor knocking down his own house to comply with the order to make firebreaks.

Mrs. Nakamura was standing at her kitchen window watching him when, just after 8:15, a white flash enveloped her. Her house, which was only three quarters of a mile from the Aioi Bridge, collapsed about her, burying her under the debris. As she struggled to free herself, she heard her youngest daughter, Myeko, cry for help and, twisting around, saw her buried up to her chest. She could see no sign of her ten-year-old son, Toshio, or eight-year-old daughter, Yaeko. Then, from beneath the collapsed beams and tiles, came separate disembodied cries. Both were alive. Mrs. Nakamura frantically pulled the wood aside to free them. Afterward she released Myeko too.

All four were dusty, dirty, frightened, and confused. Toshio and Yaeko said nothing, but young Myeko kept asking, “Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down?” Mrs. Nakamura got them out into the street, where they saw the neighbor who had been demolishing his own house lying dead. The authorities had previously designated Asano Park, a wooded area along the nearby Kyo River, as the evacuation place for Mrs. Nakamura’s neighborhood. Now, with her children and with a hastily gathered bundle of clothes on her back, she and a neighbor almost instinctively hurried toward the park, past ruined houses. From under the rubble of some came cries for help half muted by the debris. Mrs. Nakamura felt compelled to ignore them as, in her determination to save her children, she pressed on.

About half an hour after the explosion, as the intensity of the fires consuming the city grew ever stronger, heavy rain began. At first it fell in large, sticky, black drops—“black rain”—water intermingled with soot, muddy dust, and debris flung into the air by the explosion. The rain also contained radioactive material released by the bomb. Some desperately thirsty, traumatized people instinctively opened their mouths and let the contaminated water cool their parched throats.

Mrs. Nakamura’s family were among the first to arrive at Asano Park. The park was a private riverside estate with rock gardens, ornamental trees, and bamboo groves. The Nakamuras had not been affected by the black rain. However, once in the park they went down to the river to drink from it. Immediately they began to vomit from the effects of the polluted water, as did all those around them who were doing likewise. The Nakamuras lay prostrate on the ground until, during the afternoon, the fires from the city raging out of control began to catch the trees of the park. Luckily, a storm combining black rain and strong winds held the fires back, and the Nakamuras spent the night where they were. The next day a German Jesuit priest from their neighborhood brought them to safety outside the city, with the children riding on a handcart. On 12 August they moved to live with Mrs. Nakamura’s sister-in-law in a nearby town.