Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

1

The commanding general of the Second Air Force, Uzal G. Ent, looked up as Colonel John Lansdale of U.S. Army Intelligence led Paul Tibbets into his office.

He glanced inquiringly at the intelligence officer.

Lansdale nodded.

General Ent then introduced the two men seated beside his desk. One was U.S. Navy Captain William “Deak” Parsons, whom he described as an “explosives expert” but who was, in fact, one of the most influential men in the Manhattan Project; the other was a civilian, Professor Norman Ramsey, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard physicist.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets was struck by Ramsey’s comparative youth; he had always associated scientists with gray hair and stooped shoulders. To Tibbets, the two men looked fit enough to fly combat, even if Parsons’s baldness made him appear older than his forty-four years. And it seemed strange that this naval captain should be involved in what appeared to be an Army Air Force meeting.

“Have you ever heard of atomic energy?” Ramsey had the firm, incisive voice of a natural tutor.

“Yes,” said Tibbets.

“How?”

“I majored in physics, so I know the atomic scale.”

There was an expectant pause.

“What do you know of the present situation in the field?” asked Parsons.

Tibbets looked at General Ent. There was no encouragement there. A few days earlier, when Ent first became aware of the Manhattan Project, he himself had been warned he would be court-martialed if any leak of information were traced to him. Tibbets looked to Lansdale, who gave a barely perceptible nod.

As confidently as he could, Tibbets began to speak. He understood there had been some experimenting by the Germans to try to make heavy water so that they could split the atom.

“Good.” Ramsey’s gentle praise was more suited to the campus than the bleak office of a fighting general. He paused, weighing his words, a mannerism Tibbets would come to recognize.

Ramsey continued. “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 the force of twenty thousand tons of conventional high explosive.”

General Ent then told Tibbets he had been chosen to drop that bomb.

It was September 1, 1944. The place was U.S. Army Second Air Force Headquarters, Colorado Springs.

Only moments before this conversation, Lansdale had led Tibbets into the cloakroom adjoining General Ent’s office. There, Lansdale had asked Tibbets a highly personal question.

Tibbets had given no visible reaction. Nevertheless, he was stunned. How did this stranger know of that private event of ten—or was it twelve—years ago; an experience of such a passing nature that he himself could not now exactly remember its date? Why had Lansdale been probing something that had happened all those years back?

Tibbets recognized that this assault upon his privacy, his sense of self-respect, was calculated. But how should he cope with it?

He knew that Lansdale’s question had nothing directly to do with military intelligence. Therefore, he would be perfectly justified in not answering. Then he could walk out, unchallenged, through one of the two doors in the cloakroom. That door would return him to the conventional military world where nobody would dare ask such an intimate question of a much-decorated war hero.

Tibbets decided to tell the truth. “Yes. I was once arrested by the police in North Miami Beach.”

“What for?”

“The chief of police at Surfside caught me in the back of an automobile… with a girl,” confessed Tibbets.

The rest took little telling—his arrest, a spell in the cells, the intervention of a judge who was a family friend, the indiscretion hushed up.

By admitting the truth about the backseat dalliance with a girl whose name he now had difficulty recalling, Paul Tibbets had assured himself of a place in history. Within a year his name would become forever linked with the destruction of Hiroshima, a Japanese city he was yet to hear of.

Until three days earlier, on Tuesday, August 29, 1944, Tibbets had not been considered for the task. Then, late in the afternoon, General Barney Giles, assistant chief of air staff, decided to replace an earlier nominee with Tibbets. Lansdale, one of the less than one hundred men who knew what the Manhattan Project was meant to do, immediately supervised the most thorough investigation of Tibbets, staging the cloakroom meeting as the climax.

Lansdale’s question about a teenage sexual peccadillo was intended as the final test of Tibbets’s character. If he told the truth, he was in. Lansdale was satisfied.

In General Ent’s office, Ramsey and Parsons gave Tibbets a thorough briefing on the history and problems associated with building America’s first atomic bomb. Then Lansdale took over.

“Colonel, I want you to understand one thing. Security is first, last, and always. You will commit as little as possible to paper. You will tell only those who need to know what they must know to do their jobs properly. Understood?”

“Perfectly understood, Colonel.”

General Ent concluded the meeting by formally assigning the 393rd Heavy Bombardment Squadron, based in Nebraska, to Tibbets. Its fifteen bomber crews would provide the world’s first atomic strike force, capable of delivering nuclear bombs on Germany and Japan. Their training base would be at Wendover, Utah. The code name for the air force’s part of the project would be “Silverplate.”

Tibbets briefly wondered who had chosen such a homely name for a weapon “clearly designed to revolutionize war.” Even so, he still could not accept that one bomb dropped from a single aircraft could equal the force of twenty thousand tons of high explosive. Ordinarily, some two thousand bombers would be required to deliver such a payload.

But he had more pressing problems to deal with. He must gather together some of the trusted men who had served with him before; he must inspect Wendover; he must devise a training program; finally, he must be prepared to work alongside “a bunch of civilians who would give me a glimpse of Pandora’s box.”

As Tibbets was leaving the office, General Ent stopped him.

“Colonel, if this is successful, you’ll be a hero. But if it fails, you’ll be the biggest scapegoat ever. You may even go to prison.”

2

Tibbets was a stocky, medium-sized man with a crisp, detached manner. It would have been hard to guess that he was one of America’s most successful bomber pilots; a combat veteran who had flown the first B-17 across the English Channel on a bombing mission in World War II; who had piloted General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Mark Clark to Gibraltar to plan the Allied invasion of North Africa; who had taken Clark on to Algiers, landing on a field being bombed and strafed. Tibbets later led the first American raid on North Africa. Returning to the United States, he took charge of flight-testing the new B-29 Superfortress at a time when the bomber was thought too dangerous to fly; it had killed its first test pilot. Tibbets was courageous, used to command, able to give and execute orders with speed and efficiency.

Some people, though, found him difficult to work with. He did not suffer fools, and, by his own standards, there were many fools. Restrained and reticent, Tibbets appeared the paragon of service correctness. Few knew he concealed his sensitivity by steely control, that behind his outward appearance was a shy man who had suffered acutely the loss of any of his fliers in action. All that invariably showed on his face was a pleasant, noncommittal intelligence.

Tibbets was born in Quincy, Illinois, in 1915. His father, a wholesale confectioner, was a strict disciplinarian who severely punished the slightest infringement of the many rules which hedged in his son’s formative years. Paul’s mother, Enola Gay, was as gentle as her unusual forenames. She adored her only son and strongly opposed her husband’s decision to send Paul, at the age of thirteen, to the Western Military Academy at Alton, Illinois. Afterward, it was his mother who first encouraged him to be a doctor, and later, against strong family opposition, to join the U.S. Army Air Corps; she quietly accepted Paul’s wish to abandon medicine in favor of flying. But in those difficult post-Depression days a military career was not viewed with great favor in the middle-class community of which Paul Tibbets’s father was a pillar. When his son enlisted in 1937, his father’s last words on the subject were, “You’re on your own.” His mother had said, “Son, one day we’re going to be real proud of you.” She reminded him always to “dress neatly,” never to promise more than he could do, and always to tell the truth.

It was because Tibbets had followed her advice that he was able, in such unlikely surroundings, to answer truthfully Lansdale’s intimate question.

3

When Brigadier General Leslie Groves took command of the Manhattan Project, he was answerable only to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and, through him, to President Roosevelt.

Both knew more about this man with old-fashioned manners than they did about any other serving officer. An FBI check—the only occasion the bureau became involved in the atomic project—turned up Groves’s passion for candy, his concern about middle-age spread, his mean tennis playing, his ability to solve complicated mathematical problems while eating. The probe revealed Groves was known as “Greasy” at West Point, that he had few interests outside his work, that he was stable and happily married.

Stimson also knew his professional background: an outstanding West Point engineering graduate who had helped build the Pentagon; a man reputed to be the “best barrack-builder in the Army.”

His service record showed Groves to be a corner-cutter, a dimesaver, tough, tireless, and resilient. He was used to working to time and budget. He got things done. Although he tended both to ruffle the tempers of his equals and inspire fear in his subordinates, Groves seemed to Stimson and Roosevelt the best possible choice to run the world’s biggest-ever military project.

From the outset, Groves worked a fifteen-hour day, seven days a week. He gave up tennis and put on weight, sustaining himself with pounds of chocolates which he kept locked in the safe where he also stored the project’s most important secrets.

But Groves was not just a builder going from site to site with a bag of candy in his pocket. Even his friends in the project—and they numbered few—believed, in the words of one, that Groves “not only behaves as if he can walk on water, but as if he actually invented the substance.” Another, less cruel, claimed “he has the most impressive ego since Napoleon.”

Forty-eight years old, with a vocabulary capable of blistering a construction worker—though many found more unnerving his deep sigh at a piece of misfortune—Groves came from the same mold as MacArthur and Patton.

Ultimately, nobody could withstand his barrage of orders and demands. Opposition was crushed and arguments he regarded as pointless ended with a crisp “Enough.” He drafted industrial tycoons as if they were buck privates, and drove his work force to exhaustion as he built and ran his empire.

Bullying, cajoling, bruising, buffeting, occasionally praising, and rarely apologizing, Groves had achieved a feat he himself had once thought impossible. In two years he had brought the atomic bomb from the blueprint stage to the point where it would soon be ready for testing.

Groves would allow no one to stop that momentum.

He had approved the choice of Tibbets as the commander of the special atomic strike force because he had all the professional qualities Groves believed were needed to get the job done.

Working from a temporary office in the Pentagon, Tibbets was coming to realize, a week after the meeting in Colorado Springs, just how vast his powers were as commander. He could demand anything he wanted, merely by mentioning the code name Silverplate. Using that prefix, he had instituted a search for some of the men who had served with him in Europe, North Africa, and on the B-29 testing and training program. Some had already been traced and were on their way to Wendover in Utah; others were having their orders cut.

Here, at the Pentagon, General Henry Arnold, chief of the Army Air Force, had said, “Colonel, if you get any trouble from anybody, you can call on me.”

Arnold had designated two senior officers to serve as liaison with Tibbets when he got to Wendover. Arnold’s order to them was simple. “Just give him anything he wants without delay.”

Tibbets had stopped at Wendover on his way from Colorado Springs to Washington. He found it “the end of the world, perfect.” It was close enough to Los Alamos by air, an important consideration, for Ramsey had warned him that “the scientists will be bugging you day and night.” It was only some five hundred miles by air from the Salton Sea area in Southern California, an ideal bombing range. The location of Wendover would simplify security. The existing facilities on the base were suitable for immediate occupancy.

He knew his men would hate the place.

But he planned to work them so hard that they would not have time to dwell on their surroundings.

By now, Tibbets had surmised there were only two possible targets for him to bomb: Berlin or Tokyo. He thought the Japanese capital more likely; the war in Europe was already approaching a decisive stage.

If it was to be Japan, then he would need a base within striking distance of the Japanese home islands.

He recalled reading that the U.S. Marines had recently captured the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. The newspapers had dubbed one island “the place where the Seabees are going to build the largest aircraft carrier in the world.” It was just thirteen hundred miles from Japan. Its name was Tinian.

Tibbets filed it in his memory.

4

The fall of Tinian in late July had totally failed to shake Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama’s belief in the invincibility of the Imperial Japanese Army.

This September evening, as usual before gunnery practice, the forty men at the antiaircraft gun post on Mount Futaba, in the northeastern outskirts of Hiroshima, were lectured by their young commander on the need to keep faith with the high command’s belief in ultimate victory.

In appearance, Yokoyama at first glance seemed the classic caricature in countless American cartoons: buck teeth, slanted eyes, sloping forehead; a wiry figure in baggy blouse, with sloppy leggings encasing bandy legs.

But his image was deceptive. He was a crack rifle shot at seven hundred yards. He was capable of carrying four hundred rounds of ammunition—double that carried by an American infantryman—and trained to exist on a bowl of rice and fish a day. He regarded surrender as the greatest shame he could inflict upon his family and country. Deeply religious and hyperpatriotic, he devoutly believed in the divinity of the emperor and the sacred duty of the army to protect his majesty. He would not spare his family, his soldiers, or himself to serve the emperor.

Yokoyama had three heroes: first, Minoru Genda, the young officer who had convinced the high command that an unexpected, carrier-based air attack on Pearl Harbor was feasible and militarily desirable; second, Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, Genda’s close friend, who had led the 354 planes to Hawaii. Both had connections with the city where Yokoyama was now based. Genda had relatives in Hiroshima; Fuchida sometimes visited friends there. Yokoyama’s third hero was General Hideki Tojo, “The Razor,” Japan’s architect of war.

Yokoyama told his men that they should look upon the “withdrawal” from the islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas as a predetermined action, part of a carefully prepared plan to draw the enemy closer to Japan.

There, as they all knew, a vast army was waiting, and eager, to deal America and her Allies a blow which would send them reeling. The Americans could win a battle, he reminded his men, but Japan had never lost a war since 1598. He told them that the Japanese “departure” from the Marianas meant the day must be approaching when enemy bombers launched from there against Japan would at long last come within range of their guns.

In anticipation of that moment, he drove his bored gun crews hard. The men knew he would punish them severely at the first sign of slackness. Under his commands the guns moved smoothly on their greased bearings, their slim barrels traversing the air over Hiroshima.

Yokoyama passed among the gunners, urging them to imagine they were in action. Suddenly, one of the guns jammed. Yokoyama saw that a piece of waste cotton had been left in the mechanism. He halted the practice and furiously ordered the crews to strip, clean, and reassemble the guns. He then returned to his quarters to write up the incident in the daily report book and to think of a suitable punishment for the errant crew. He decided on two extra drills.

But first he would enjoy a ritual he performed every evening. At the window of his billet, he surveyed the city through binoculars. He knew there would have been little change during the last twenty-four hours, but the panorama always soothed him.

When he had first surveyed the city from his vantage point close to the crest of Mount Futaba a year before, Yokoyama had been struck by an oddity: Hiroshima resembled a human hand. By holding out his right hand, palm down, fingers spread, he reproduced a rough outline of the city. The port was at his fingertips in the south; beyond lay the depths of Hiroshima Bay and the Inland Sea. His wrist corresponded to that area where the Ota River ended its uninterrupted flow from the hills in the north and entered a broad, fan-shaped delta. There it broke into six main channels, which divided the city into islands. These were linked by eighty-one bridges. Directly under his palm was Hiroshima Castle, the center of a huge military operation.

Yokoyama amused himself by identifying various installations and placing them in the corresponding positions on the back of his hand. At the tip of his index finger was Hiroshima Airport, with its military aircraft. On his thumb he located Toyo Industries—the company made rifles and gun platforms for warships. At the end of his little finger was the Mitsubishi works, with its dockyards and cranes.

The factories, together with the dozens of smaller plants in the city, maintained round-the-clock shifts. A recent edict had inducted schoolchildren into working eight hours a day making weapons. Almost every man, woman, and child in the city was actively engaged in the war effort.

Now, in September 1944, most factories in Hiroshima faced a shortage of materials. The patrol boats used for coastal duty were immobilized for lack of fuel, and training flights from the city’s airfield were curtailed.

Yet this evening the war seemed as remote as ever to Yokoyama. The city below him was peaceful, a vast cluster of black-tiled roofs encased in a natural bowl of reclaimed delta surrounded by green hills and peaks.

But in Yokoyama’s opinion Hiroshima was highly vulnerable to air attack. All a bomber need do was drop its load within the bowl to be almost certain of causing damage. Apart from a single kidney-shaped hill in the eastern sector of the city, about half a mile long and two hundred feet high, Hiroshima was uniformly exposed to the spreading energy that big bombs generate.

Structurally—like San Francisco in the earthquake and fire of 1906—Hiroshima was built to burn. Ninety percent of its houses were made of wood. Large groups of dwellings were clustered together. And, unlike San Francisco in 1906, Hiroshima in 1944 had antiquated firefighting equipment and poorly trained personnel.

From where he stood, Yokoyama could clearly see the city boundaries. Only thirteen of Hiroshima’s twenty-seven square miles were built up, and only seven of these densely, but in that area some thirty-five thousand people were crammed into every square mile. His battery on Mount Futaba was there to protect them.

He saw that the gun crews were ready. Another practice began. Yokoyama watched them. The men were stripped to the waist, sweating in the warm evening air. Load, aim, unload. A new traverse. Load, aim, unload. A swift, stylistic ritual of crisp commands and grunts.

He was pleased with them now, the way they responded promptly to his orders. They were the same commands he had given them for every drill since the battery was commissioned as part of the Hiroshima antiaircraft defense system in May 1943. Twenty-one guns of various calibers now defended the city. They had yet to be fired in anger in the third year of the war.

The practice over, the crews were about to relax when Yokoyama ordered the first punishment drill. As soon as that ended, he began the second one, watchful for any signs of slackness. That would earn the crews further punishment.

Satisfied, he relieved the gunners and led them to their quarters. There, as usual, he listened solicitously to their small talk. It was part of his duty to listen, just as he was expected to eat, drink, and sing with his men, to lend them money from his pocket, to invite them to visit his parents’ home in Tokyo. This was traditional behavior for a Japanese officer—the fostering of a comradely feeling, the encouraging of a relationship in which he was both father figure and close friend. It was what had helped to make the Imperial Japanese Army so formidable.

This evening his crews asked him a familiar question: when would they see action?

He understood their desire to fight. It was part of the samurai tradition, of the two-thousand-year history of Japan. The wish for battle was coupled with an absence of fear. Japan, more than any other nation, had excised fear from its warriors; death for them was part of living.

Yokoyama told his men to be patient. But he worried whether they would ever have the chance to shoot, to taste that special excitement. He wondered whether the story he had heard was true. A man who worked in local government had mentioned it to him. Yokoyama had at first dismissed it. But his friend had been so insistent, so specific, claiming “inside sources” for his information. Could there be any substance to the tale that many people in Hiroshima had relatives in San Francisco and Los Angeles who had petitioned Roosevelt to spare Hiroshima from attack and that he had agreed to do so as “a gesture of goodwill”?

Yokoyama knew that if this were true, then the enemy bombers would never come to Hiroshima, and all his practices would have been in vain.

5

Tibbets arrived at Wendover three days before the 393rd Heavy Bombardment Squadron. His prediction proved to be right. The officers and men hated Wendover, the bleaching heat, the inhospitable desert, the primitive accommodations, the dust, the rank drinking water, the termites, the rats and mice, the sheer remoteness of their position.

They hated not knowing why they were there.

On September 12, their second morning at the base, they awakened to find further cause for hatred. A formidable wire fence now penned them in. Inside its perimeter were warning signs. The largest, beside the base exit gate, read:

Sentries stopped anybody leaving.

Thickly coiled barbed wire barred the entrance to a number of hangars and workshops. Freshly painted notices announced that behind the wire lay the ordnance, armament, engineering, and radar shops. Each notice carried the legend:

The wire was thickest around hangar No. 6. There, a notice announced:

What was a Tech Area? Why “C”? Where were “A” and “B”? Nobody knew.

Those who tried to talk their way past the military policemen guarding the Tech Area were curtly told they faced arrest if they persisted.

A week ago, at the end of their training in Nebraska, the men of the 393rd had been proud that their squadron’s record was way above average. They had expected to go overseas soon. Some of the more enterprising had purchased quantities of silk stockings, soap, and perfumes to tempt the English and French girls they had heard so much about. One enlisted man had packed his record collection of jitterbug 78s, planning to sell them on London’s black market.

Instead, the 393rd had been shuffled off to Wendover.

There were no bombers at Wendover. Just a few rundown transport planes. Rumor said they had come to Wendover to pick up factory-fresh B-29s. But where were they? And why here?

Nobody knew.

The brief optimism withered. Other rumors rose, welled, and faded. Officers, like their men, had no idea of what was happening. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Classen, had gone into the base headquarters on arrival and had hardly been seen since. And when he did appear, he deflected all questions.

By breakfast time, MPs were everywhere, their motorcycles and jeeps sending scuds of dust into the air. The 393rd had never tasted such sand. It permeated their clothes, skin, and food. The flavor to their cereals, eggs, and hash-browns this morning came from the great salt flats around the airfield.

After the meal, the squadron listened in stunned disbelief as their intelligence officer, Captain Joseph Buscher, tried to make light of their situation. He reminded them that he was a lawyer, used to pleading—and he said he was pleading with them now to “give the place a chance.”

Buscher admitted that he could not tell them why they were at Wendover, but he could tell them that the base was “only 125 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. Elko in Nevada was “as close.” Buscher hoped they would find Wendover itself “fascinating.” The town, with a population of 103, was split down the middle by the Utah–Nevada state line. Half of Wendover ran their lives according to Utah’s Mormon Church. On the other side of town, there were bars, eateries, and slot machines.

“What about broads?”

The questioner was Captain Claude Eatherly, a tall, wickedly handsome pilot with a way with girls, cards, and a bottle of bourbon. With his small-boy grin, Texas drawl, and fund of jokes, Eatherly was the squadron playboy.

Buscher ignored Eatherly’s question and launched into a solemn recital of how the flats had been formed, how the pioneer wagons of 1846 had foundered in the salt. For those who liked exploring, enthused Buscher, the tracks of some of the wagons were still embedded in the flats.

“So will our bones be if we stay here!”

The words were spoken by a frustrated first lieutenant, Jacob Beser, the squadron’s radar officer. Beser longed for action. When Britain had gone to war, he had tried to join the Royal Air Force. His parents had stopped him, insisting he complete his engineering studies at Johns Hopkins University. The day after Pearl Harbor, Beser had overcome parental opposition and enlisted in the Army Air Force. He had eventually become one of the service’s highest-rated radar officers. Radar was new and growing in importance. That did not impress Beser—not unless he could use his knowledge “to kill a few Nazis.”

Beser was a Jew. A small, wiry, quick-witted man, fiercely proud of his middle-class background, he held strong opinions on almost everything. They did not always make him popular. Some of his fellow officers thought him an oddball. The enlisted men looked upon him as a “longhair” because of his university background.

When the squadron was posted to Wendover, Beser had applied for a transfer to a combat unit. His request had been turned down.

But now, listening to the urbane Buscher struggling to extol the virtues of Wendover, Beser began to feel excitement. “The place sounded so goddam awful that there just had to be a good reason for my being there,” he later recalled.

Tibbets’s old friend, Major Thomas Ferebee, had also arrived. His formidable combat record in Europe made Ferebee one of the most seasoned and respected bombardiers in the air force. He was the perfect choice to train the 393rd’s bombardiers in the precision-bombing techniques that Professor Ramsey had told Tibbets were going to be essential for dropping an atomic bomb.

Although he was glad to see Ferebee, unexpected problems stopped Tibbets from sitting down with him for a relaxed talk.

For a start, there was the delicate position of Classen. The 393rd’s CO was a Pacific veteran with a distinguished combat record. His leadership qualities had made the squadron a cohesive unit. To move him at this stage would be unthinkable. Tibbets had discussed the situation with Classen, explaining that in effect the squadron would have two commanders: Classen would be responsible for its day-to-day running; Tibbets would make all the important policy decisions. He had told Classen he trusted this somewhat unusual arrangement would work. Classen had shown no real reaction.

Tibbets had tried to sweeten matters by giving Classen a briefing on their unique mission. He hoped that would instill a mood of equally divided responsibility “in all but a few areas.” But after Classen had gone, Tibbets wondered whether dual command was really possible.

Other matters soon pushed such thoughts from his mind.

Since breakfast, two men had been closeted with him. He knew the older man well. Lieutenant Colonel Hazen Payette had served with him in England and North Africa as intelligence officer. A shrewd and penetrating questioner, Payette was at Wendover to supervise security at Tibbets’s request.

Major William L. “Bud” Uanna had arrived unannounced. He politely explained that Colonel Lansdale had sent him, plus some thirty agents detached from the main Manhattan Project, to help “police” the 393rd.

Tibbets liked Uanna’s style. He was coolly pleasant and uninterested in anything but his work.

Uanna had arrived with a bulky briefcase. The files it contained were a further reminder to Tibbets of the vast intelligence-gathering resources of the Manhattan Project.

There was a detailed dossier on each member of the 393rd. The information had been gathered from their families, friends, school reports, employment records, and medical files.

Many thousands of man-hours and dollars had been spent on tapping telephones, secretly opening letters, collecting details of extramarital affairs, homosexual tendencies, and political affiliations. The dossiers represented the most thorough secret investigation until then carried out in the name of the U.S. government.

Uanna produced the file on Eatherly. It showed the pilot was an obsessional gambler, with an “emotional problem.”

Tibbets studied Eatherly’s service record. He had logged 107 flying hours as a pilot ferrying Lockheed Hudsons to Canada; 103 hours flying LB-30s; a spell on antisubmarine patrol in the Panama Canal Zone; regular transfers from one squadron to another. A normal enough flying record. Eatherly’s fitness reports spoke of his “flamboyance” and of his being “an extrovert.” Tibbets knew the type. He had flown with “wild Texans” like Eatherly in Europe. They frequently got into trouble on the ground. But they were good pilots. Tibbets decided he would let Eatherly remain in the 393rd.

By late morning, the jokers in the 393rd were running out of steam. One of them had been sharply reprimanded by an MP for trying to post a slogan:

The first letters were being written to loved ones. A number contained the inevitable phrase: Wendover is a good place to be—from.

Uanna’s agents had infiltrated the squadron, carrying forged papers which allowed them to pose as clerks, cooks, even a garbage detail. They were not always successful. Captain James Strudwick found a man checking the wiring in his quarters who “didn’t know one end of a socket from another.” Mess officer Charles Perry discovered two men in the mess hall “who had trouble distinguishing a soup ladle from a carving knife.” Executive officer John King was astonished to see “a man dressed in a line chief’s overalls whose hands had never come near a wrench.”

But not all the newcomers were security men.

Technical Sergeant George Caron arrived dusty and thirsty from a trans-American journey, with his collar unbuttoned and wearing a flying jacket, a double breach of military regulations.

The MPs at the gate pounced on the diminutive air gunner. They marched him to the orderly room in the headquarters building. There, a policeman began to berate Caron.

Suddenly, from an adjoining office, Caron heard a familiar voice. “Is that you, Bob?”

“Sure is, Colonel.”

Tibbets was one of the few officers who called Caron by his nickname, “Bob.”

“Come on in.”

Smiling impishly at the stunned policemen, Caron strolled from the orderly room in to see Tibbets. They greeted each other like the old buddies they were.

Caron had been gunnery instructor on Tibbets’s B-29 training program. Feet up on his desk, Tibbets now explained to the gunner why he had sent for him. “Bob, I need a man who knows what he’s doing—and can teach others to do a similar job. And keep their mouths shut.”

“Colonel, I won’t even mention I’m here,” said Caron.

Tibbets smiled, reestablishing the easy contact which had marked their previous working relationship. He did not find it unusual to be imparting information to a noncom while senior officers in the 393rd still had no idea of what was happening. It was the way Tibbets preferred to do things, dealing first with the men who had already proved themselves to him. Tibbets believed that the privileges of rank were limited; men had to earn the right to his confidence.

On the B-29 program, onlookers had spoken scathingly of “Tibbets’s private air force.” He had shrugged such criticism aside. He meant to adopt the same policy at Wendover, sometimes confiding to enlisted men information he would not entrust to an officer.

The first time he saw his new outfit assembled, he was not overly impressed. They were trying too hard to look nonchalant, “the way they had seen Alan Ladd do it in the movies.” Tibbets thought they looked decidedly inexperienced. He guessed most of the officers were in their early twenties. The enlisted men seemed even younger. Ferebee and Caron know what it’s all about, thought Tibbets, the others are trying to pretend they do.

The smartly dressed officer standing ramrod stiff, cap squared off—that must be the executive officer, King. Tibbets had heard about him from Classen. King was a peacetime professional, Regular Army. Tough but fair, Classen had said. The unit needed such a man, judging by what Tibbets had read in Uanna’s dossiers.

The 393rd later agreed that, standing there, Tibbets looked tough, mean, and moody. One officer put it, “He looked as if one mistake from us, and he would happily fry us for breakfast and use our remains to stoke his lunchtime stove.”

Beser thought: This is the man I want to go to war with. Feeling Tibbets’s stare fall upon him, the radar officer visibly straightened; he wished now that he hadn’t worn his cap at such a rakish angle.

Command had taught Tibbets a trick: surprise people, shake them by the unexpected. “I’ve looked at you. You have looked at me. I’m not going to be stuck with all of you. But those of you who remain are going to be stuck with me.”

This was a new Tibbets to Caron. He shared in the ripple of expectancy around him.

Tibbets continued. “You have been brought here to work on a very special mission. Those of you who stay will be going overseas.”

A muted cheer came from the rear ranks. Tibbets froze it with one look. “This is not a football game. You are here to take part in an effort that could end the war.”

This time he allowed the murmur to rise and fall of its own accord. He had them now. “Don’t ask what the job is. That is a surefire way to be transferred out. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t answer any questions from anybody not directly involved in what we will be doing. Do exactly what you are told, when you are told, and you will get along fine.

“I know some of you are curious about all the security. Stop being curious. This is part of the preparation for what is to come. Nobody will be allowed into a fenced-off area without a pass. Lose that pass, and you face court-martial.

“Never mention this base to anybody. That means your wives, girls, sisters, family.”

There was dead silence when he paused. Years ago, when he first became an officer, his mother had given him a piece of advice: sometimes he would have to be tough, but he should always try to temper it by showing the other side of his character, gentleness.

“It’s not going to be easy for any of us. But we will succeed by working together. However, all work and no play is no fun. So, as of now, you can all go on two weeks’ furlough. Enjoy yourselves.”

Classen was about to dismiss the squadron when Tibbets spoke again. “If any of you wish to transfer out, that’s fine. Just say the word.”

He waited.

Nobody moved.

“I’m glad,” Tibbets said, “really glad.”

By midafternoon, the men were already leaving the base. Many had begun to wonder why, if their assignment was so important in ending the war, they had been given two weeks’ leave. Some believed Tibbets had tried too hard to impress them.

Second Lieutenant Eugene Grennan, the engineer on Eatherly’s crew, decided after strolling down the flight line that the talk about security was “hogwash.” A hangar door had been open. He peered inside, “and there was this German V-1 rocket.”

A triumphant Grennan decided that the squadron was going to Europe “to knock down Nazi rockets.”

The rocket was a plywood mockup, and the hangar door had been deliberately left ajar—a trap devised by Uanna. Within minutes, an agent reported that Grennan had swallowed the bait. But Uanna was in no hurry to catch the engineer. He had other snares to set.

Navigator Russell Gackenbach reached Salt Lake City and was stopped by an NCO asking if Wendover was the “headquarters of the Silverplate outfit.” Gackenbach had never heard of Silverplate, but he suspected a trap and sternly warned his questioner that “darn-fool questions could get us both in the pen.”

Gackenbach had survived Uanna’s obstacle course. Others found themselves enmeshed.

Two NCOs were accosted by an officer in a Salt Lake City hotel. He said he was joining the 393rd. What sort of outfit was it? The men obligingly told him. The officer thanked them. Two hours later, as the talkative NCOs boarded a train for home, MPs stopped them and drove them back to base. In Tibbets’s office they were confronted by the officer. He was a Manhattan Project agent. Within an hour both noncoms were on the way to Alaska.

Grennan reached Union Square, Chicago, before his trap sprung. There he ran into a friend from college days. Grennan told him about “the crazy setup at Wendover.” His friend listened attentively. They parted company. Grennan arrived home to find a telegram ordering his immediate return to Wendover. There, Uanna keelhauled the young flier for talking. His friend was a project agent. All that saved the crestfallen Grennan from transfer was his fine flying record. From then on, he became one of the most security-conscious men in the squadron.

Five more members of the 393rd were netted by Uanna’s agents. They were also swiftly shipped to Alaska. Their records were not good enough to save them.

In the late afternoon, Groves telephoned Tibbets, wanting to know why the squadron had gone on furlough. He was told about the security operation now in progress.

The two men had met briefly in Washington. Then, Tibbets had been uncomfortably aware of the immense pressures the project chief was under. Now, Groves appeared to have ample time to talk. He promised new B-29s would be available soon, and reminded Tibbets that “the world is yours.”

This was Groves at his most cajoling. Now he switched moods. He talked about the scientists who would soon be descending on Wendover. They were “brilliant men,” but they had little understanding of “the military side of things.” Therefore, it would be best if Tibbets did not “inform them unduly” about the training program.

Groves wanted to restrict news of the Army Air Force’s involvement to a few scientists—and then only to those he knew supported his view that the bomb must be produced as soon as possible. He saw those who questioned the validity of what they were doing as befuddled meddlers who were straying out of the scientific and into the political arena. He sensed that if these “longhairs” were aware that a strike force now existed to drop the bomb, their protests would become shriller.

He put it differently to Tibbets.

“Colonel, what people don’t know about they can’t talk about. And that is good for security.”

Beser was ordered to remain on base. Tibbets had told him to expect important visitors soon.

When the radar officer attempted to question Tibbets, he “received the coldest stare any man could give. I just shut up, went to my quarters, and waited.”

Tibbets was being hard-nosed “because I wanted to impress on Beser, and everybody else in the outfit, that I didn’t fool around.”

Now, late in the evening of September 12, Tibbets and Ferebee finally settled down for their eagerly awaited reunion.

Ferebee was taller than Tibbets, and rakishly elegant. He could have played the hero in a war movie. He sported a neat RAF-style moustache which made him look older than his twenty-four years.

He had survived sixty-three combat missions, twenty more than Tibbets. They shared the same philosophy about war: it was a rotten business, but it was either kill or be killed.

They had flown together in Europe, been shot up, known the meaning of fear, and become firm friends. It was almost a year since they had last met, but Tibbets was pleased to see the old bonds were still there.

They rambled through the past, remembering English airfields they had flown from, German-occupied French towns they had attacked. They talked excitedly about that summer’s day in 1942 when they had tangled with Göring’s personal squadron of yellow-nosed Messerschmitts. On that occasion one of the gunners on their bomber had had his foot shot off, the copilot had lost a hand, and Tibbets himself had been wounded in the arm. But Ferebee had successfully bombed the Germans’ Abbeville air base, and in daylight. That evening the BBC had mentioned the raid on its nine-o’clock news. They remembered other fliers, men who had died, men who had vanished into German prison camps, men whose fate was uncertain.

Finally Tibbets turned to the present. “Tom, we are going to need good men for this job. If it works, we’ll flatten everything within eight miles of the aiming point.”

Ferebee considered what he should say. “That’s quite a bang, Paul.”

The bombardier made no other comment. Restraint was one of Ferebee’s qualities. He was always prepared to wait and to listen. His friends said the only time he really asserted himself was in combat, at the poker table, or when a pretty girl passed.

Tibbets asked him if he could recommend anybody they should bring in for “the job.”

“What about ‘Dutch’?”

Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk had been their navigator in Europe. Quietly professional in the air, he and Ferebee had caroused and gambled off-duty. Occasionally Tibbets had joined them in their whoopee making, smiling indulgently as his younger companions staged their own blitzkrieg on London’s nightlife. Ferebee explained that van Kirk was back in America, had married, and was now based in Louisiana. Tibbets said he would have the navigator transferred to Wendover. Van Kirk could raise the standards of the 393rd’s navigators to that required for an atomic strike mission.

“Tom, I want every one of these crews to be lead crews, capable of finding their way to a target without having pathfinders up front leading the way and dropping marker bombs.”

Ferebee had two further suggestions for men who could meet Tibbets’s requirements. One was a bombardier, Kermit Beahan; the other was a navigator, James van Pelt. Both had previously impressed Ferebee.

Tibbets said they would be recruited. He announced his own choices. They were all men who had served with him on the B-29 testing program. Three of them were pilots: Robert Lewis, Charles Sweeney, and Don Albury.

Lewis, Tibbets explained, was a little wild, but a natural pilot; Sweeney was Boston Irish “and would fly a B-29 through the Grand Canyon if you asked him”; Albury “was about the most competent twenty-five-year-old I have ever known.”

He had one other selection, Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenbury, his former flight engineer. “Tom, Dooz can coax magic out of airplane engines, and he’s a helluva guy when you’re in a corner. Give him an engine fire and he becomes steady as a rock. Give him two and he becomes even steadier.”

By the end of the evening, Tibbets and Ferebee had virtually decided on the men who would fly the first atomic strike.

6

Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy had ordered a trim dive for 1700 hours on September 17. Submarine I.58 was to dive three hundred feet below the waves of Hiroshima Bay to test the watertightness of all hull valves and openings.

I.58 had been commissioned at Kure four days earlier; this was the first time she would be submerged. From the day he had first seen her, back in May, Hashimoto had been impressed by the boat; she was one of the I-class submarines, larger and faster and better equipped than almost any boat of a comparable class anywhere in the world. Two diesel engines gave I.58 a cruising speed of 14 knots; submerged, her motors drove the submarine at 7 knots. With a range of 15,000 miles, she could remain at sea for three months. For her six torpedo tubes, all forward, she carried nineteen torpedoes, the most advanced in the world. Oxygen-fueled, leaving no wake, they had a speed of 58 knots and a range of 5,500 meters. Each 2-foot-diameter torpedo carried a 1,210-pound explosive charge.

Today, for the hull tests, the torpedo room was empty, except for the rats that infested the submarine. Every effort to exterminate the rodents had been unsuccessful. But they were the only problem that Lieutenant Commander Hashimoto had failed to overcome. His endless battles with the Kure Naval Dockyard, the Naval Technical Department, and the Naval Research Bureau had paid off. I.58 was equipped exactly the way he wished.

Standing on the boat’s bridge, as it moved through the water a little over a mile south of Hiroshima, Hashimoto looked through his binoculars at the naval academy on the island of Etajima. Nothing seemed to have changed since he had been a cadet there from 1927 to 1931. Three years later, in 1934, he had been assigned to submarines; he had loved the life. But a spell of duty in destroyers and subchasers, operating in the waters off China, had intervened. It was not until 1938 that he was selected to be a full-time member of the submarine service. By then he was married, and in 1940 his wife gave birth to their first child, a son.

Professionally, Hashimoto had found himself caught up in events which stirred him deeply. He was assigned to the naval task force supporting the air attack on Pearl Harbor, a torpedo officer on one of the five submarines which had each launched a two-man midget submarine against the American fleet. The midget subs had failed in their mission; all were sunk. But Hashimoto’s own craft had made good its escape. Since then, he had enjoyed an unspectacular war.

He liked it that way. The first time he had assembled the crew of I.58, he told them he was expecting competence, not “senseless heroics.”

Hashimoto had personally selected many of his 105 officers and men. Some of them had been with him on his previous submarine. They thought their thirty-five-year-old captain firm but fair. He was widely experienced and had a reputation for surviving.

A few of the newcomers were young; Hashimoto looked upon this as another sign that the war was demanding a supreme effort. But, like the others, his youngsters were eager and shaping up well.

I.58 reached its diving station.

Hashimoto climbed down from the bridge to the control room. He watched and listened to the final preparations for diving; the air was filled with quiet orders, reports, the sounds of bell signals.

The main engines were clutched out; the electric motors began to run at full whine. The outboard exhaust and air-induction valves were closed off.

The engine room informed the control room that it was ready to dive. The lookouts came below. The officer of the watch spun the handwheel which clamped the flanged lid leading to the conning tower against its seating. The seamen at the ballast tank vent levers reported that all the main vents were clear. The chief turned to Hashimoto and reported that the boat was ready to dive.

Hashimoto gave the order. “Dive! Dive! Dive! Thirty feet.”

He watched as the sailors opened the main vent levers. A roar of air escaped from the main ballast tanks. I.58 was no longer buoyant. The depth gauge began to move, slowly at first, then with gathering speed. Outside, the sea could be heard slapping against the conning tower. Then the sound died. The bridge was beneath the waves. The electric motors took over.

The chief reported that the boat was properly trimmed.

Hashimoto ordered the main vents shut. I.58 continued to drop through the water. Suddenly, a vibration ran through the boat. The chief ordered the submarine to be retrimmed. At one hundred feet, I.58 was suspended on an even keel, held in place by the careful balance of water in the compensating and trimming tanks.

Leakage points and discharge-pump capacities were once more tested. There were no defects.

Hashimoto ordered I.58 to be taken deeper. The trouble came suddenly, and with a gush of water at two hundred feet.

A leak had developed in the torpedo room. The area was at once sealed off.

Hashimoto gave his orders quickly, with no sign of concern, aware now of the anxious faces around him.

I.58 steadied and then began to climb rapidly toward the surface. There, the diesel motors took over.

Hashimoto quietly cursed the dockyard fitters whose carelessness had nearly caused a disaster. Hiroshima Bay was deep; there was little chance grappling crews could have recovered the submarine. The fear that was always at the back of his mind—the dread of being entombed forever on the seabed—made Hashimoto almost physically sick. If he had to die, he wanted the end to come in battle. All but five of his classmates from the naval academy were dead, victims of American destroyers. Nowadays the life expectancy of a submarine crew was measured in weeks, not months, without the slipshod Kure dockyard workers shortening the odds still further.

Hashimoto was not a superstitious man. But he liked to believe that “anything which begins so badly must only improve.”

It was a comforting and very necessary philosophy for a commander who knew that every day the odds of his surviving were lessening. His great hope was that before he succumbed, he would have a chance to sink an enemy ship.

7

The drab, olive-green sedan stopped on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lansdale told Tibbets and Beser to remove their air force insignia. He handed them corps of engineers’ emblems. In explanation, although it was hardly necessary, he said, “Security.”

The security chief was glad to be dealing with Tibbets and Beser. They were used to military discipline—not like the scientists who tormented his agents with their childish games. Lansdale was still smarting from the latest prank. A physicist had somehow opened the secret steel safe in the Los Alamos records office and placed a piece of paper on top of the priceless atomic secrets it contained. Printed on the paper were the words “Guess who?”

Beser was too overwhelmed by events to play any games. Yesterday he had been called to Tibbets’s office. The radar officer had immediately recognized by name the “important visitors”; Norman Ramsey and Robert Brode were physicists whose papers he had read as a student. They had questioned him for an hour on his academic background and radar qualifications. Finally Brode had told Beser he could do the job—on the understanding that his life was expendable.

Nobody had yet told Beser what the job was, but Beser knew better than to ask.

Early this morning, September 19, he and Tibbets had flown south from Wendover to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lansdale was driving them on to Santa Fe. He cautioned them again. “You have nothing to do with the air force. You have never heard of Wendover. Don’t volunteer anything you know.”

They drove into town, stopping before a wrought-iron gate, centuries old, through which they entered a small, Spanish-style courtyard.

For two years this patio had been the receiving point for some of the world’s most distinguished scientists. Here, those men and women were given coffee, doughnuts, and comforting words from motherly Dorothy McKibben, who acted as “front-office receptionist” for the Manhattan Project’s most secret center—Site Y, Los Alamos.

Norman Ramsey was waiting on the patio to escort Tibbets and Beser there. He enjoined them never to address anybody they would meet as “doctor” or “professor.”

“Security,” Beser said solemnly.

Two considerations had influenced the choice of Los Alamos as an atomic laboratory. It was remote enough for security purposes; if one of the experiments conducted there resulted in a premature explosion, there was no sizable civilian population nearby to be imperiled by the release of radioactivity.

Tibbets’s first impression was disappointing. He felt “the birthplace of the actual bomb should look more factorylike.”

What he saw were clusters of buildings set out on a flat tableland, part of the plateau of the Jemez Mountains. Six thousand scientists, technicians, their wives and children now lived within the high wire fences. Beser thought the place looked like a concentration camp. Inside, this unhappy image persisted. Many of the buildings were of rough construction; speed, not comfort, had been the rule. As at Wendover, there were areas marked RESTRICTED and MOST RESTRICTED.

Waiting for Tibbets and Beser in his office was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the shy, frail theoretical physicist who was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. He greeted them warmly but was less effusive toward Lansdale.

For months now, the security chief had been playing cat-and-mouse with Oppenheimer because of the scientist’s former association with various Communist organizations, his financial contributions to left-wing groups, his friendship with “fellow travelers.” He had beer under surveillance since March 15, 1943. He was followed, his mail opened, his telephone tapped, and, in Lansdale’s later admission, “All sorts of nasty things were done to keep a watch on him.”

Groves himself had questioned Oppenheimer and was satisfied that his “closest, most indispensable collaborator” had severed all connections with his offending past. He had ordered the watch lifted on his scientific director.

Lansdale had ignored the order. His agents continued to harass Oppenheimer.

They were watching the wrong man.

This morning, after Beser and Lansdale had left for Ramsey’s laboratory, Oppenheimer said to Tibbets, “You had better know everything.”

Pandora’s box was finally opening for the flier.

Here at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer began, men were delving into the unknown world, asking such questions as “What is matter?” and “How short can a ‘short time’ be?” Here they spoke of thousands of tons of energy as if energy could be weighed. They talked of a thousandth and then a millionth of a second as they devised ways to reduce time itself almost to nothing. They argued over the relative merits of the gaseous-diffusion and electromagnetic processes for separating uranium 235 from uranium 238; the uranium 235 produced could be measured in thimblefuls.

These men were also discovering the special nature of a chain reaction and studying the unique problem of critical mass: how to bring together two lumps of uranium 235 of the right potency to cause an atomic explosion at the right time.

Oppenheimer reduced the problem to a few words. “Time. That’s the problem, Colonel. Getting the timing right. If we are successful in solving that, then your problems will begin.”

The scientist looked benignly at Tibbets. “There will probably be problems right up until the moment when the bomb explodes.”

Oppenheimer explained how they intended to build the uranium bomb. A suitable mechanism had to be devised to bring two hemispheres of uranium 235 into contact quickly so that their combined mass reached the critical point and detonated. The amount of uranium 235 to be used, the size of the two spheres, the speed with which they must collide, the scattering angle, the range of the neutrons projected by the chain reaction—those, Oppenheimer said, were just some of the questions to be answered.

He rose to his feet and told Tibbets to follow him. They went into a nearby building, unmarked except for a sign:

This was where Captain Parsons and his team were dealing with how to ensure that the bomb would explode at a predetermined height above the target.

Oppenheimer said that Parsons would probably be going along on the first mission.

“Good. Then if anything goes wrong, Captain, I can blame you,” Tibbets said.

“If anything goes wrong, Colonel, neither of us will be around to be blamed,” Parsons replied.

He described to Tibbets one of the experimental machines they had built to test the theory of critical mass. It had been nicknamed “The Guillotine.” A piece of doughnut-shaped uranium was placed in the machine. Then another piece of uranium was dropped through the hole in the doughnut. For a split second, the extra uranium plunging through the gap brought both pieces close to critical mass. It was a dangerous game to play. They called it “twisting the dragon’s tail.”

Parsons explained more about the bomb’s mechanism to Tibbets. “It is designed to ensure that the bringing together of the two ‘subcritical’ pieces occurs for the first time at the moment of planned detonation over the target. The pieces will then combine in a critical mass, causing the chain-reaction explosion. That’s the theory. Until that moment, we cannot know for sure whether the bomb will work.”

Parsons described how the heart of the bomb was really just “a good old gun, a five-inch cannon with a six-foot-long barrel. After the bomb has left the plane and is on its way, a piece of uranium two-three-five about the size of a soup can will be fired down the barrel into a second piece of uranium fixed to the muzzle.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” persisted Tibbets.

“We will just make a nice big dent in the target area and go back to the drawing board,” said Parsons.

To avoid that dismal prospect, explained Oppenheimer, in the coming months Tibbets’s unit would drop test bombs. These would help the scientists develop the final shape of the atomic-bomb casing as well as prove the proximity fuzes, which governed the height at which the bomb would explode.

So far, the proximity fuzes were proving troublesome.

Tibbets continued to be astonished by Oppenheimer during his conducted tour of Los Alamos. Late in the afternoon, they were walking down another corridor, past identical rooms whose inner walls were lined with blackboards covered with formulas and whose occupants pored over slide rules and logarithm tables.

Suddenly, Oppenheimer halted in midstride. His head was cocked like a dog scenting game. He turned and stalked back to an office.

Inside, a man sat slumped on a straight-backed wooden chair, staring fixedly at a blackboard. He was unshaven and disheveled.

Tibbets wondered if he “might be the building janitor taking an unauthorized rest after a night out.”

Oppenheimer stood silently behind the man. Together they stared at the blackboard with its jumble of equations.

Oppenheimer moved to the blackboard and rubbed out part of an equation. Still, the man on the chair did not move.

Oppenheimer quickly wrote a new set of symbols in the space he had erased.

The man remained transfixed.

Oppenheimer added a final symbol.

The man rose from his chair, galvanized, shouting, “I’ve been looking for that mistake for two days!”

Oppenheimer smiled and walked out of Enrico Fermi’s office, leaving one of the founders and greatest geniuses of nuclear physics happily restarting work.

Beser was enjoying “the most fantastic day in my life.” He had met and talked to a dozen renowned scientists who were his teenage heroes.

Hans Bethe and Ernest O. Lawrence were among those who gave Beser a glimpse of their work. The scientists told him about the strange kinds of guns they had devised that used atomic bullets. When fired at each other, on impact the bullets devoured one another. They described how they hoped this phenomenon would be used to produce an atomic explosion. They spoke of temperatures they hoped to create which would make a light “brighter than a thousand suns.”

Ramsey outlined the role the radar officer would play on the mission. Beser would be taught how to monitor enemy radar to see if it was trying to jam or detonate the intricate mechanism of the bomb. To understand how this could happen, Beser must learn what few of the scientists involved knew—the minute details of the bomb’s firing mechanism, including its built-in mini-radar system.

On this first day, nobody seemed concerned about how much they should tell Beser. They poured information over him, “leaving me sinking in a scientific whirlpool.”

Late in the evening, Beser was introduced to a dour young technician, David Greenglass. Nobody yet suspected Greenglass had just stolen the first of many blueprints. His haul would eventually include schematic drawings of a special lens crucial to detonating the plutonium bomb which was being developed in parallel with the uranium bomb. The drawings would be spirited to Russia through the highly professional espionage ring the Soviets had been able to set up from inside Los Alamos. Greenglass would receive a few hundred dollars for his treachery.

Later, Beser would believe that, on this very evening, he had interrupted Greenglass in his espionage activities.

When the radar officer left Greenglass, it was dark. With difficulty, he reached the small guesthouse assigned to visitors. He opened the front door and stopped dead in his tracks. Sprawled on a couch, sipping a drink, was an attractive brunette, stark naked. She carefully lowered her glass and rose to her feet.

“Can I help you?” The voice had just a trace of a German accent.

It was Katherine Oppenheimer, wife of the scientific director. She had left Germany when fourteen; her relatives included Nazi Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry….”

Blushing furiously, Beser stammered into silence. He had never seen a naked woman before.

“Are you looking for someone?”

“Yes, ma’am… No, ma’am… My… bed… I mean, the guest quarters, ma’am.”

“They are in the back of the house. You have come in the wrong door, but you can go through here.” Mrs. Oppenheimer sat down and resumed sipping her cocktail.

Averting his eyes, the bashful Beser stumbled past the languid first lady of Los Alamos.

Her husband was startling Paul Tibbets. The two men were alone in Oppenheimer’s office, reviewing what Tibbets had been shown. The flier felt that in a few hours he had received “a better scientific education than all my years in school.”

Now Oppenheimer began to question him. Apart from enemy interference, the scientist wanted to know what other risks were involved in a bombing mission. Tibbets explained there was always the chance of bombs jamming in their bays, or a faulty mechanism detonating them prematurely. Oppenheimer was confident such risks could be eliminated in the atomic bomb.

Then he stared intently at Tibbets. “Colonel, your biggest problem may be after the bomb has left your aircraft. The shock waves from the detonation could crush your plane. I am afraid that I can give you no guarantee that you will survive.”

8

The scraping against the stone floor of his geta, the Japanese wooden clogs he favored, was the only sound in the Osaka University laboratory of Dr. Tsunesaburo Asada, possibly Japan’s most imaginative scientist. His staff had come to recognize that this habit of shuffling his feet was a signal that Asada was content.

Putting his weight first on one foot, and then on the other, the white-coated scientist studied his latest creation, a proximity fuze. It was similar in design and purpose to those being perfected at Los Alamos.

Months of work had gone into the fuze’s development in Asada’s well-equipped laboratory. He rarely left the campus now, working well into the night, catnapping on a couch in a corner of the laboratory, impatient of any interruptions.

He was still, as he had been when the war began, chairman of the physics department. But since late 1941, he had done no teaching. His brilliance made him one of the scientists crucial to Japan’s war effort.

Since 1937, Asada had regularly lectured at the Naval Technical Research Institute in Tokyo and at the Naval Aeronautical Research Institute in Yokosuka. Besides lecturing, Asada had worked closely with the military authorities before Japan entered the war. And on December 17, 1941, he was one of the scientists selected to work on Project A.

This was the code name for Japan’s atomic research. Eleven days after President Roosevelt had authorized the go-ahead for the Manhattan Project, the Japanese had entered the field, determined to develop an atomic bomb.

Asada would always remember the mood of blind patriotism which had gripped the first meeting after Pearl Harbor at the Naval Club in Tokyo. There had been promises of generous funding for the atomic research. His caution about the vast technical problems to be overcome had been brushed aside. Those were the days when the Japanese appeared invincible. A naval officer had said that perhaps their new allies, the Germans, could help. Asada had pointed out that many of Germany’s leading atomic scientists were Jewish, and if they had not been expelled from the country, they were probably dead. Some, he added, might be in the United States. He had expressed the opinion that it was likely America had the potential to develop atomic weapons.

The naval officer had reprimanded him. “America—and Japan.”

For a year he and the other scientists involved had studied the question. In December 1942, they had presented their conclusions.

It would take them ten years to produce “some atomic weapons.” Even that was optimistic, as Japan did not have the essential raw uranium.

Project A was quietly shelved by the navy, although development work by the army on Japan’s atomic bomb would continue in a desultory fashion until well into 1945.

Project B was then initiated by the navy. Asada immediately recognized its potential. It was concerned with developing radar, navigation techniques, and the proximity fuze.

In the past eighteen months, astonishing progress had been made on all three. Two famous British warships—the Prince of Wales and the Repulse—had been of great help in the development of Japan’s radar. The ships had been sunk off Singapore in the high days of 1941. Japanese divers had located them on the seabed and performed the herculean feat of dismantling the radar apparatus from both ships. It had been shipped to Japan, reassembled, and provided invaluable information to research workers.

Asada himself had developed the proximity fuze. Soon it would go into full-scale production. His contribution on that aspect of Project B completed, he had joined a small and select band of scientists working on the most staggering of all weapons.

They were building a death ray.

It was a machine from the pages of science fiction. It was designed to project an invisible beam that would pluck an aircraft out of the sky either by shattering its propellers or killing its crew.

With such a weapon, Asada knew that Japan could snatch a stunning victory. No plane would be safe against the deadly ray. Carefully placed batteries of death rays could guarantee all Japanese cities immunity from air attack. Other batteries could be deployed against hostile craft approaching by sea. Later, the navy could have death rays mounted on its ships to destroy the enemy far away from the home islands.

The potential was heady and limitless. So far, a prototype had killed a laboratory rat. This modest success gave Asada hope. The next step Asada planned was to direct the death ray at a larger mammal.

9

Surprising the enemy was the abiding concern of Major General Seizo Arisue. Surprises were his business. He created them, spread them, anticipated them, and defused them.

He was head of Imperial Army Intelligence, Japan’s acknowledged spy master.

This bantam-sized man with a formidable intellect and a fearful temper to match his harsh, rasping voice kept a file on every important Japanese politician and officer. He knew more secrets than any man in the army, and often used them to maintain his own position.

In turn, the file on Arisue kept by his rivals in naval intelligence described him as “arrogant, supremely confident in his own abilities, and dangerously ambitious.”

The relationship between the two intelligence branches was icy. They were locked in a power struggle over which could provide the most valuable information.

Arisue was coming to believe that at last he might have the opportunity to resolve that issue with a striking espionage coup. He had been in his cramped office in a wing of the monolithic General Army Headquarters in Tokyo since early morning, trying to verify an intriguing report sent by his contact in Lisbon. Ordinarily, the report would not have reached Arisue personally. But he had given an explicit order that he must see “everything relating to America.”

Some of it came from the Abwehr in Berlin; there were outdated snippets from Madrid and Mexico City. The weekly summaries of the American press were more helpful. Army intelligence subscribed to 140 American newspapers and magazines. Very often The New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Time, and Newsweek contained clues of troop movements and battle casualties that helped Arisue piece together a surprisingly accurate mosaic of the United States at war. At first he had been suspicious of the material gleaned from the American press. He thought it might be a trap laid by enemy intelligence. But repeatedly he had been able to confirm independently the newspaper reports. He grew astonished at the American censors for allowing such important material to be published.

Now, as he studied the Lisbon report, he wondered what the Portuguese censors had made of it. No doubt they had passed copies on to British and American intelligence; in the past six months he had suspected this was happening regularly.

Arisue’s man in Lisbon had picked up a whisper that the United States had embarked on a huge new war project.

After hours of pondering, Arisue knew there was only one way to verify the truth of this claim. He must slip an agent into the United States.

That would be the most difficult operation he had yet mounted. No native Japanese could hope to remain undetected for long in North America. Arisue could call upon the flourishing German spy network in South America to provide an operative, but it might take months to clear matters through Berlin, especially as the tide was turning against Hitler. The Italians were already in disarray.

Arisue ruled out any help from the Axis.

He considered his own resources. His Lisbon contact was not qualified for such a dangerous mission. His men in Madrid and Mexico City were local recruits, capable of little more than acting as intelligence “post boxes.”

Brazil—he put a question mark next to the name of his agent there. He was a good man. But where would he begin?

The message from Lisbon had given no clue as to where the new American war project was being carried out, or what it was.

The problems were immense. But if he could discover what this new American war project was, it might be enough to stiffen the government’s resolve to fight on to the end.

Arisue sent for Lieutenant Colonel Kakuzo Oya, chief of the American Intelligence Section at Arisue’s headquarters. The two officers spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the prospects of infiltrating a spy into the United States.

10

Orders crackled over the B-29’s intercom. “We’ll do it by the book. They’re all gonna be watching. Nobody’s gonna screw it up. Right?”

The crew of the huge bomber didn’t respond to the pilot, Captain Robert Lewis. For the past hour they had been “doing it by the book,” strictly following the procedures laid down in the buff-colored manual. They had checked the outside of the bomber, clambered aboard, stowed their parachutes, and begun the pre-flight countdown.

Duzenbury, the engineer, and Caron, the tail gunner, who had flown with Lewis many times before, were surprised at how serious he was this crisp fall morning at Wendover. They knew Lewis as a joking twenty-six-year-old who wore a battered peaked cap and a stained flying jacket. He looked like a combat veteran, even though he had never seen action.

Lewis was treating this flight, in the words of Caron, “as if he had on board the president and the Cabinet.”

Squashed in the tiny tail turret, the gunner was tempted to snap on the intercom and tell the pilot to relax.

The impulse passed. The checking continued.

“Equipment secure, Navigator?” The intercom emphasized Lewis’s Brooklyn accent.

“Secure.”

Captain Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk, the navigator, settled himself more comfortably in the padded seat with its fitted armrests. He wondered who Lewis was trying to impress. In the week he had been at Wendover, van Kirk had noticed that Lewis enjoyed an audience.

Tibbets had tried to reassure the navigator. He told van Kirk that Lewis was “just letting off tension. In the air, he’s a natural.” Van Kirk had his own ideas about “naturals.” Too often he had found them “daredevils trying to prove things to other people.” He hoped Lewis was not like that.

Lewis had always thought all navigators a strange breed, with their blind belief that any pilot could steer a course to an absolute degree. Today, though, the pilot intended to follow explicitly any course change van Kirk indicated. In that way, Lewis could not be blamed for any foul-up.

Seated in the cockpit watching the winking lights on the instrument panel, Lewis experienced a familiar feeling of well-being; he had come a long way.

In his boyhood days on the streets of Brooklyn, a swift pair of fists had been better than a classy accent; in flying school, he knew, his abrasive manner had worked against him. But in the end, even his most demanding instructor had conceded that Lewis was a highly gifted pilot. He’d never forgotten the pride his mom and pop had shown when they first saw him in an officer’s uniform, and his own satisfaction while walking through his Brooklyn neighborhood and being “greeted as somebody.” Then there had been the day he had taken the legendary Charles Lindbergh up in a B-29. After the flight, Lindbergh had said he would have been happy to have had Lewis fly with him on his epoch-making flights.

It was Tibbets who had developed Lewis into one of the most experienced B-29 pilots in the air force. The summons to Wendover had not surprised Lewis. He had written to his father: “Paul needs me because I am so good at my job.”

Modesty, as Lewis would admit, was not one of his endearing qualities. But he had others: generosity and a fierce loyalty to his crew, especially the enlisted men. Down on the flight line, mechanics hero-worshiped Lewis because he bent regulations to get them better working conditions.

He had joined his flight crew a few days earlier when the B-29 arrived, the first one to be delivered to Wendover. There had been keen competition among the pilots to fly it, and Lewis had been almost schoolboyishly excited when he was chosen to do so. He immediately began to talk of “my crew” and “my ship.”

But for this flight van Kirk and Ferebee had taken the places of his usual navigator and bombardier. Tibbets explained to Lewis that van Kirk and Ferebee would take turns flying with all the crews. Tibbets added a promise. “It will be just like the old days, Bob.”

That cheered Lewis. The “old days” were when he had “a one-to-one relationship with Paul without other people getting in the way.”

In his ten days at Wendover, it had not been like that. Lewis felt that Tibbets never had time to sit down with him and reminisce about those old days. Worse, “He didn’t laugh at my jokes, he wasn’t so tolerant if I made a small mistake. I put it down to nerves over a new command.”

The last flight checks were ending. Lewis asked van Kirk the estimated flying time to the initial point, or IP, the map reference from which the bomber would commence its bombing run. From the IP to the AP, the aiming point, would be a matter of a few miles. Over that distance, Lewis would work with the bombardier, Ferebee. He had disliked Ferebee from the day they met. He thought the bombardier acted “superior,” talked like “a playboy in the movies.”

One night, Lewis and Ferebee had played poker. Lewis had lost half his month’s salary. He could ill afford to do so; a broken marriage had left him short of cash. Half-jokingly, Tibbets had told Lewis to stay in his “own league.”

Tibbets knew Ferebee was one of the best poker players in uniform. He also felt Lewis was a “poor loser”—an accusation the pilot would always hotly deny—and Tibbets did not “want card games creating unnecessary problems.”

In his mind, Lewis ran through the main points of the briefing Tibbets had given. He was to climb to thirty thousand feet and fly south to the bombing range, the man-made lake, Salton Sea, in Southern California. There, Ferebee would try to drop a single blockbuster, filled with ballast, into a seven-hundred-foot circle on the northern edge of the lake. Tibbets had told Lewis that once the bomb was dropped he was to execute a 155-degree diving turn, which would take him back in the direction from which he had just come. Tibbets had emphasized, “Keep your nose down, and get the hell out of the area as fast as you can.”

Tibbets hoped the maneuver would provide the answer to how an aircrew could survive the expected shock wave from an atomic bomb. He had calculated that Lewis should be some seven miles away when the test blockbuster hit the ground. He did not explain to Lewis the reason for this action, “because that would have meant telling him too much too soon.”

Shortly before boarding the B-29, Lewis had received another surprise. Beser had arrived on the apron saying he was bringing along on the trip some three hundred pounds of special equipment.

“Can’t tell you why,” said Beser cheerfully. “It’s a matter of security.”

That didn’t endear Beser to Lewis. Waiting for takeoff, the radar officer was squatting on the floor of the B-29, aft of the toilet in the rear section of the plane, with his spectrum analyzers, direction finder, search receivers, and antennas.

Beser was about to make the first flight in which he would practice coping with enemy attempts to interfere electronically with an atomic bomb. Some of his instruments had been specially modified at Los Alamos. During the flight, they would receive signals from the ground simulating enemy radar beams. It would be Beser’s task to recognize, anticipate, and deflect the beams.

“Ready to start engines?”

Duzenbury studied the engineer’s panel before answering Lewis. He was, at thirty-one, the oldest man in the crew. Duzenbury hadn’t questioned why Tibbets had brought him to Wendover. It was enough for him “to work for the finest gentleman in the air force.”

He also liked Lewis; next to the colonel, Lewis was the best pilot Duzenbury knew.

“Start engines, Captain.”

One by one, each of the four Wright Cyclone turbine engines roared into life, and the tower cleared Lewis for takeoff. At the end of the runway he boosted the engines to 2,300 rpm while Duzenbury checked the magnetos and generators. Then, Lewis advanced the throttles to their full power position and slowly released the brakes. At 95 mph, just as the manual said, Lewis lifted the largest bomber in the world into the air.

Exactly on time, he reached the IP. Minutes later, Ferebee announced he had the AP in his Norden bombsight. “Bombs away. Correction. Bomb away.”

Lewis banked the bomber violently to the right, dropping its nose to give him more speed. A surprised Caron far back in the tail shouted into the intercom. “Cap’n, it’s like a roller coaster back here!”

Lewis shouted back. “I’ll charge you for the ride when we get home.”

Beser was too involved to notice the maneuver; two of his instruments had lost power, and he had no idea how effective his electronic countermeasures had been against the invisible beams. Disgusted, he gave up monitoring.

The blockbuster fell within the circle. Cameramen from the Manhattan Project reported they had managed to record its fall. Their films were flown to Los Alamos, where they were studied by scientists still trying to determine the best final shape for the atomic bomb.

Measuring instruments around the AP calculated that Lewis was over seven miles away when the bomb hit.

Tibbets was relieved. The maneuver meant that an aircraft should be able to avoid the atomic bomb’s shock wave. He expressed his relief to one of the scientists who was with him on the bombing range.

The man gave Tibbets a chilling response. “Seven miles, twenty miles, fifty miles. There is no way of telling what the safe distance is until we drop a real atomic bomb.”

It was evening when Tibbets returned to Wendover. In his office he continued to review the tactical requirements for delivering an atomic bomb.

Though by October 21 he knew a great deal more than he had a month earlier, he was far from reassured. The uncertain nature of the explosion—nobody could be positive how big it would be—and the predicted shock wave—another imponderable—had helped to rule out the use of a fighter escort. To be sure of surviving the shock wave, fighters would have to be so far away from the explosion just when the bomber was at its most vulnerable that it was unlikely they could provide proper protection. Further, a fighter escort might succeed only in drawing attention to the bomber. Tibbets made up his mind.

The bomber would go in alone.

That, too, raised problems: flak and enemy fighters. It was likely that the final approach would be made over enemy-held territory, at least part of which would undoubtedly have fighter protection. The more Tibbets thought about it, the less the chance of success seemed. The bomber could be destroyed long before it reached its objective.

Then Tibbets recalled his experience in New Mexico.

Months before, he had been there carrying out tests to assess a B-29’s susceptibility to fighter attack. He had been irritated to find that his usual B-29, the one he used for all his tests, was out of commission. He was offered another one—stripped of its guns.

He decided to fly it to give the fighter pilots a chance to practice. Tibbets quickly discovered the stripped B-29 could operate some four thousand feet higher than his usual bomber. It was faster and more maneuverable. He was able to outpace the P-47 fighters making mock attacks on him. Finally, at thirty-four thousand feet, the fighters had to give up; the strain on their engines was too great.

As he recalled the experience, Tibbets began to feel excited. Flak was largely ineffective at over thirty-two thousand feet, and Tibbets knew that a P-47 fighter was similar in performance to a Japanese Zero.

With Japan likely to provide a target city, Tibbets reasoned his best possible chance of survival would be to use a stripped-down B-29 for the mission. He would take out all the armor plating and all the guns, apart from the two in the tail.

He telephoned the flight line and told the ground crews to begin work at once on stripping down the two bombers already at Wendover.

“Tonight?” asked an incredulous line chief.

“Now,” said Tibbets firmly.

The mechanics thought the idea “plumb crazy.” Later, they would christen the emasculated bombers Sitting Target One and Sitting Target Two.

11

In tight formation, five aircraft flew east over the Pacific. All their pilots hoped to die soon.

The fliers wore white scarfs loosely knotted around their necks. Under their leather flying helmets, concealed by their goggles, each man also wore a hachimaki, a replica of the headband that samurai warriors had traditionally worn in battle in ancient Japan. This morning the band was the symbol of the Special Attack Corps of suicide pilots, the shimpu, or “divine wind.” Later these pilots, and many others like them, would be called kamikazes, a Western transliteration of the characters that in Sino-Japanese are pronounced shimpu. The first shimpu were the momentous typhoons of 1241 and 1281 which, according to legend, rescued Japan from the fury of the Mongols.

The men chosen to launch this new shimpu had been told just before taking off a few hours earlier that they were “gods without earthly desires.” Their Zeros contained 250-kilogram bombs. The pilots planned to crash-dive onto the ships of the American fleet now just beyond the horizon.

This plan had been devised only six days previously by Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi. To all the adjectives applied to the moon-faced commander—arrogant, brilliant, condescending, and uncompromising—another could be added in these last days of October: desperate.

Onishi was no longer the confident leader who had helped devise the attack on Pearl Harbor; who had launched the crippling assault on Clark Field, Manila, which had wiped out America’s air force in the Far East; who had sent his pilots marauding through the Pacific.

Those days were over. Retaliation was on the way. A huge American fleet had been spotted heading toward the Philippines. If those islands fell, Japan’s supply lines would be fatally ruptured. Onishi was given command of the First Air Fleet, operating from Manila. This once-impressive force consisted now of less than a hundred aircraft. But they were enough for Onishi. On October 19, he had presented his plan for shimpu.

There had been an enthusiastic response from his pilots. The men now over the Pacific were about to deliver the first blow.

They had, of course, written their final letters and farewell poems. Some had left brief wills. Each, in accord with the tradition of samurai leaving for their final battle, had enclosed locks of hair and nail parings, all that was to remain of their bodies on earth.

Before takeoff, Onishi himself had poured every man a ceremonial cup of sake and offered him a dish of dried cuttlefish. As each pilot took his cup, he had bowed and lifted the sake in both hands to his lips. Onishi had then handed every pilot a small lunch box, bento, to provide them with the comfort of a last-minute snack.

At 10:45 A.M., the suicide squadron sighted their enemy, an American carrier force with destroyer escorts.

The pilots bored in, scattering tinfoil to jam the American radar. Each pilot pulled a toggle which prepared the bomb in his plane for detonation.

At 10:53 A.M., the first Zero crashed-dived onto the flight deck of the aircraft carrier St. Lo. Plane and pilot disintegrated in a huge explosion. This was the “splendid death,” rippa na saigo, which Onishi had promised.

The St. Lo began to sink.

By 10:59 A.M., October 25, 1944, all five planes had hit their targets. The mission had been a total success.

More would follow.

12

The 393rd received its fifteenth stripped-down B-29 on November 24. The squadron was now at full strength. The removal of armor plating and all guns except those in the tail turrets no longer caused comment. Pilots found it gave them extra height and speed, although they were not totally convinced by Tibbets’s contention that in combat they would be out of range of flak and enemy fighters.

“Today,” Lewis wrote to his parents, “was typical for its routine. Morning briefing followed by bombing practice; back for lunch (good), then more practice. I don’t ask why. Nobody does.”

The letter would be read by Manhattan Project agents attached to the base post office. They would decide it did not contravene security and allow it to be mailed. The many letters that failed to pass ended up on Uanna’s desk. The watchful major made sure the writers were sufficiently scared by the time they left his office to be more careful in the future about what they wrote home.

Three hundred blockbuster casings were available for the crews to use on their practice missions to the Salton Sea. Cameramen continued to film the bombs dropping and the aircraft making their jolting 155-degree turns.

The maneuver, practiced both left and right, was the subject of much speculation. Pilots soon discovered that failing to execute a proper turn meant being temporarily grounded. Such punishments were an integral part of Tibbets’s method. He also encouraged excellence by example. He himself had flown several runs, with Lewis as his copilot, and performed the turn perfectly.

The bombing circle was being steadily reduced. Now it was no more than four hundred feet in diameter. Ferebee had demonstrated it possible to drop a casing into the circle from thirty thousand feet. Van Kirk proved that on long training flights, and over water, it was feasible to navigate the distance with no more of an error than half a mile. The workshops remained open twenty-four hours. The flight line worked around the clock keeping the bombers aloft.

Mess officer Charles Perry was told by Tibbets that if he had any problems, “just use the word Silverplate.” Perry was skeptical. But one day, tired of arguing with a food-supply depot, he had used the code word. His goods had arrived within hours. Every air force depot in America had special orders to give priority to Silverplate.

The 393rd became the best-fed unit in the service. Tibbets had been known to send a transport plane a thousand miles to collect a cargo of tropical fruit. Fresh fish from New Orleans, Miami, and San Francisco were regular items on Perry’s menus. On one occasion, Tibbets himself flew an eighteen-hundred-mile round trip to Portland, Oregon, to pick up a load of coffee cups.

He took care of his men in other ways. When they tangled with police in Salt Lake City over traffic violations or rowdy behavior, or got involved with the local married women, he intervened—if a man’s work record justified it.

Executive officer John King struggled to maintain the standards of discipline he thought essential. But Tibbets made it clear he was not overly concerned with smart salutes, knife-edged creases in khakis, or gleaming toecaps. All that concerned him was a man’s capacity to work well. Gradually, the 393rd became one of the most casually attired units in the air force. Earlier in November Tibbets had introduced a new pilot with the most unusual appearance of all: bobbed hair, rouged cheeks, and bright red lipstick. Baggy flying coveralls could not disguise a shapely figure.

“Sure, she’s a lady,” grinned Tibbets as he presented the newcomer. “And they don’t fly any finer than Dora Dougherty.”

Dora was a veteran pilot who had worked for Tibbets on the B-29 testing program. She had handled the bomber with great skill and assurance at a time when many men pilots were doubtful of its capability. Dora once deliberately cut an engine on takeoff and yet became airborne. On another occasion, she landed a B-29 with an engine on fire. At Wendover, Dora flew a transport. Sometimes Tibbets wished he could send her up with a B-29. But Dora never complained about any assignment.

Many crewmen were complaining about the training schedules, the long hours, the continual security checks. And, above all, why didn’t somebody explain what this was for?

In the words of Captain King, the feeling was growing “that there were ‘them’ and ‘us.’ ”

Or: Tibbets, Ferebee, and van Kirk; and the rest of the 393rd.

The trio worked and relaxed together. Occasionally, Lewis joined the group. But the once-close relationship between Tibbets and Lewis was cooling. Tibbets felt Lewis was increasingly trying to take advantage of their past association. He was no longer amused by Lewis’s determined forays after women, his partying, the aggressive way he approached everything: cards, volleyball, even conversation.

But in the air Lewis continued to excel. In the end, that was what Tibbets cared about.

Beser did not like flying with Lewis “because we had nothing in common.” As for the pilot, he had not discovered why the radar officer “brought along a bunch of boxes and tried to look important.”

Beser enjoyed the mystery surrounding his function. He was regularly—and unsuccessfully—pumped about his visits to the restricted Tech Area, and the flights he and Tibbets made together to Albuquerque. No flight plans were filed for these journeys.

At Los Alamos, Beser received further instruction in the intricacies of electronic countermeasures. He would return to Wendover with Los Alamos technicians. They would spend days in the Tech Area helping Beser practice analyzing the intensity variation of successive return waves, or identifying the location, speed, and course of a reflecting object.

After Beser had become familiar with some of the bomb’s secret radar system, a security agent was assigned to guard him day and night whenever he left the base. The man took his job so seriously that he even stood guard outside a public toilet in a Salt Lake City restaurant while Beser relieved himself. The radar officer reacted characteristically.

“Listen, Mac. People will think there’s something funny about me, with you standing there.”

“You listen, Lieutenant. I’m supposed to be in the john with you—not outside!”

Beser gave up. From now on, he must share every social occasion—a date, a drink with friends, a visit home to his family. In time, he came to accept his shadow.

Only at Wendover did he feel really free. His bodyguard’s duties ended when Beser set foot on the base.

Grim winter came early in 1944. The November wind whistled across the salt flats, numbing everything in its path.

Perry and his cooks tried hard to make Thanksgiving dinner memorable, offering pumpkin pie and an exotic fruit punch to accompany the roast turkey. The mess officer then produced an abundant supply of Cuban cigars to complete the repast.

Cuba was, in fact, very much on everyone’s mind. The latest rumor said that crews would soon fly south to sunny Havana to continue some form of special training.

Tibbets, as usual, remained tight-lipped. Groves was in regular telephone contact with him, wanting to be briefed on progress, chivvying and demanding. Tibbets would mention some of the difficulties he faced in bringing all the bomber crews to readiness. Groves would listen, grunt, and reply, “Work them hard. That’s what you are there for.”

Scientists flew in and out of Wendover daily, making new demands involving frequent changes. They asked for the bomb bays to be modified. Conventional bombs were held in place by shackles, but it was decided that for a plane carrying just one large, long atomic bomb, what was required was a single, safe, reliable hook from which the nine-thousand-pound bomb could be suspended. No such hook could be found. Bombardier Kermit Beahan was sent to Britain, and brought back the specifications for the one used by the RAF in their Lancaster bombers. It was adapted and fitted to the 393rd’s B-29s.

There were constant changes, too, in the bomb’s shape and weight. After each change, the scientists flew back to Los Alamos, telling Tibbets before they left that they were satisfied, that no more changes were contemplated, and that he could plan his training program with confidence. A few days later they would return, asking for new modifications as they discovered further aerodynamic-flow or other problems necessitating another alteration in the shape.

Tibbets often found himself in sympathy with the exasperation felt in the base machine shops where the changes had to be made by service personnel. At times they became almost openly hostile to these unknown civilians who descended on them and scrapped a long night’s work with the briefest of apologies. Matters were not helped by security’s insisting that the scientists pass themselves off as sanitary engineers—a piece of flummery which led to some very ribald comments. Prohibited from answering some of the questions his own engineering officers and men asked, Tibbets knew that to many of them he seemed cold, aloof, and hard-nosed. The loneliness of leadership which his mother had once warned him about was becoming increasingly clear.

His command had assumed impressive proportions. Besides the 393rd, he now had the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron, the 390th Air Service Group, the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron, and the 1027th Air Matériel Squadron.

Between them they fetched, carried for, and served the 393rd. To police them was the 1395th Military Police Company; supporting them were now some fifty agents from the Manhattan Project. Under Uanna’s instructions, they continued to try to get the airmen to talk about their work, but they rarely succeeded. The word was out: if Wendover was bad, Alaska was worse.

But that did not solve the problems associated with the daily management of some twelve hundred servicemen. There was an outbreak of venereal disease. The security men were concerned that a number of men had shacked up with local married women whose husbands were away in the service. There was a renewed spate of fistfights and drunken brawls in Salt Lake City involving base personnel.

On one memorable night in the city’s Chi Chi Club, a tipsy Captain Eatherly knocked out an infantry major who had ordered him to leave. Eatherly escaped through the club’s back door as MPs arrived at the front.

This time Eatherly avoided arrest. But he was being regularly summoned to Tibbets’s office to explain his misdemeanors. There was a wad of speeding tickets he had collected. Tibbets made him pay. Another incident concerned liquor permits. In Utah a state permit was needed to buy liquor. The permits were good for a bottle a week. Police found Eatherly with fifteen permits. Tibbets blasted his pilot and squared the law.

Eatherly continued to spend many of his nights shooting dice at a hundred dollars a throw at the State Line Hotel in Wendover. Sometimes he lost—and won back—his month’s salary in a few hours. Security agents reported his gambling to Uanna, who complained to Tibbets, “The guy’s a psycho.”

Tibbets said, “Maybe. But he’s a hell of a pilot. That is all that matters.”

Eatherly had demonstrated his flying skill strikingly in mid-November. While he was making a final approach to the field, one of the activating switches in his B-29 went into reverse, a serious mechanical failure. The B-29 began to roll “until it was standing straight up on a wing tip.” Eatherly calmly righted the plane and made a perfect landing.

That night, he lost a sizable sum in a poker game. Eatherly shrugged aside such losses, hinting of a huge ranch back in Texas whose income could meet any of his debts. He claimed he had left the ranch at seventeen to become a pilot, and that he later fought the Japanese in the Pacific. He told the stories well.

Nobody suspected they were pipe dreams, the first signs of the instability which would eventually have Claude Eatherly committed to mental hospitals. His fellow fliers recognized only that he seemed to have a yearning to be famous.

13

Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama had allowed a full hour for the walk from his gun battery on Mount Futaba to Hiroshima Castle. There he was due to attend the monthly review of the city’s defenses. He would not be expected to speak, merely to listen as the local commanders discussed the situation. He doubted if any of them even knew his name. That did not upset him; it would be enough if—like last month—the minutes of the meeting were to note again “the alertness of the Mount Futaba battery during practice.”

The days were over when he would arrive at the meeting in a motor-pool car shared with other junior officers. Only the most senior officers were now entitled to use precious gasoline, and then strictly on military business.

Yokoyama did not mind the walk. It was his way of keeping in touch with the changing situation in the city.

The tangle of black-lettered signs directing military traffic to the port were now faded. It was almost three years to the day since the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had boarded his flagship, anchored in Hiroshima Bay along with other Japanese battleships, to hear the first radioed reports from his forces attacking Pearl Harbor and British Malaya. A few days later, he was given the news of the sinking off Singapore of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. But now the revered Yamamoto was dead, killed in 1943 when the plane in which he was traveling was shot down by American fighters, and Hiroshima Harbor contained not one battleship.

Nor were there truckloads of troops winding their way through the streets of Hiroshima to the gaisenkan, the “Hall of Triumphant Return.” Almost every soldier fighting in the Pacific had embarked through Hiroshima’s gaisenkan; now it was empty, waiting for the triumphant return of the troops.

Three years ago, the jetties had been lined with thousands of civilians chanting exhortations to those departing troops; now the only civilians in the area who were not directly employed by the port authority were those tending the vegetable patches that sprouted amidst the cranes and sheds.

Everywhere in the city there were slogans urging people to grow more vegetables, even to cultivate weeds. There were also posted warnings of severe penalties for black-marketeering, profiteering, and spreading irresponsible rumors.

Hiroshima’s narrow streets had undergone changes in this past year. There were fewer trucks, and no taxis; apart from streetcars, bicycling or walking was the only way to get around.

Cafés offered a tasteless green tea, often served lukewarm because of increasing fuel shortages. Coke balls for the hibachi stoves were regularly dampened in water to make them burn longer. Some restaurateurs had devised a method of balling up pages of the city’s newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, dipping the wads in water, and burning them with the coke. Four wadded pages were sufficient to boil a pint of water in ten minutes.

There were thousands of improvised gardens. Flat roofs were coated with layers of soil to raise beans, carrots, squash, spinach, and Chinese cabbages. Wooden barrels, drums, even worn-out pots and pans were used for growing leeks and radishes.

Neighborhood associations had been formed to handle bulk rations, issued only to ticket holders; there were also tickets for free medicine and dental treatment. During the first week of December, the associations would distribute to each family in their care a cake of bean curd, one sardine or small horse mackerel, two Chinese cabbages, five carrots, four eggplants, and half a pumpkin. The stalk end of the pumpkin was highly prized. Usually an inch or two long, it would be thinly sliced and stewed as an extra vegetable.

Bramble shoots were peeled and sucked as a starter; sorrel was soaked in brine and used with a rice substitute for a main course. Reeds from the Ota River were cut and parboiled. Grubs found in fruit bushes and fig trees were boiled and served with imitation soy sauce. Beetles and worms of all kinds were roasted on slivers of wood.

Kindergartens and elementary schools were now being closed, their pupils and teachers evacuated to the countryside to avoid air raids and to ease the city’s rationing problems.

The women of Hiroshima had never looked so drab. Most of them dressed like the men: both sexes favored a badly cut, high-buttoning jacket and trousers. The government encouraged this apparel.

Only the girls in the red-light district continued to wear kimonos. There were thousands of prostitutes in the rat-infested houses of joy. But the nights were gone when ten thousand soldiers en route to the Pacific would swarm through the area.

For those who remained in Hiroshima, even the task of washing was an unpleasant business. The only soap available was made from rice bran and caustic soda. It created a rash. Tooth powder was now a black-market commodity; the accepted substitute was a vile-tasting salty paste.

Movie houses and theaters were popular. The films and plays were often inferior, but the collective heat generated from several hundred people squashed together was a pleasant experience.

Many people solved the problem of keeping warm by baking flat stones or tiles in their stoves, wrapping them in layers of old newspapers, and placing the bundles next to their skin. As the stones cooled, the newspapers were removed layer by layer. Then, when the heat was finally dissipated, the stones were reheated.

Yokoyama had no doubt: the city was coping. And to anybody challenging him, he would have had a ready answer: Hiroshima was intact.

Yokoyama continued walking toward the castle. From ahead came a loud, concerted shout. Yokoyama broke into a run. Rounding a corner, he saw a house collapse into the street. Instinctively, he looked skyward. There were no airplanes.

Through the dust, he saw a group of youths belonging to the Patriotic Volunteer Corps, boys and girls brought in from the country to work as laborers. The group gathered around the house adjoining the collapsed building. Some of them began to saw through the pillars supporting the house; others attached a stout rope to its ridgepole. One of the boys told Yokoyama they were creating a firebreak in case of air attack.

In many parts of Hiroshima, this demolition work had begun to cut swathes through the city. There had not been such an upheaval since the catastrophic floods of August 6, 1653. On that day in the seventeenth century, hundreds of houses had been ripped from their foundations by nature. Now, enthusiastic youths were achieving what subsequent typhoons had been unable to accomplish.

For Senkichi Awaya, the mayor of Hiroshima, the order to create firebreaks was the hardest he had implemented since taking office in July 1943. If it had been issued by the army, the fifty-one-year-old civil servant would have vigorously challenged the command.

But it had come from the Department of the Interior in Tokyo.

A few days ago, Awaya had telephoned Hiroshima Castle and informed the duty officer of the order. Almost immediately, the regional army headquarters there had issued instructions as to which sections of the city were to be demolished; soldiers would be available to supervise and help with the work.

Throughout the morning of December 6, Mayor Awaya’s frequent meetings were punctuated by the crash of falling buildings. Finally, hardly able to hear himself speak, he had stood at his second-floor office window and gazed down the street at the clouds of dust rising near the Aioi Bridge. He wondered whether the bridge itself, the most striking in Hiroshima, might also eventually be demolished on the army’s orders.

He was reassured by his chief assistant, the diminutive, immaculately dressed Kazumasa Maruyama. Without the bridges, the army’s movements within the city would be drastically curtailed; in an emergency it would be necessary to be able to move troops quickly.

Together the two men watched the destruction. Outside the Town Hall, householders seeking compensation and new accommodations were already forming a line. Maruyama reminded the mayor how limited was the help the city could offer. “We can give them only a few yen.”

“Just three years—now this. And all because of the army.”

For Mayor Awaya to have uttered such words in public would have invited imprisonment, even execution. But in the comfortably furnished mayor’s parlor, he and Maruyama now talked openly about such matters. In the sixteen months they had worked together, each man had revealed himself to the other as a devout pacifist and fierce antimilitarist.

Vastly different in their backgrounds—Awaya was from upper-middle-class stock, while Maruyama was proudly working-class—the men were bound by strong personal ties.

Awaya had acted as go-between for Maruyama during his assistant’s delicate negotiations with his future wife’s parents. As a devout Christian, one of many in Hiroshima, Mayor Awaya had found it difficult to feel his way through the complicated byplay of such discussions, an integral part of Japanese marriage. But the mayor had completed the marriage contract to everyone’s satisfaction.

Awaya wished his wife and the four children still at home in Tokyo could be with him; when he had moved to Hiroshima, they had remained behind so that the children’s education would not be disturbed.

Awaya was one of the most popular mayors the city had known: free from any taint of corruption, easily accessible, and energetic in handling cases of civil injustice. But he knew he was under suspicion because he was a Christian, and that attempts had been made to subvert his staff. Only here, in his office, with Maruyama, could he dare to express himself freely.

This morning, a familiar topic was again raised, what Awaya called the “terrible decline in our city which can be traced to the folly of the militarists in showa fifteen,” a reference to the events of 1941.

In just twenty days’ time, December 28, the Hirohito reign of showa would enter its nineteenth year. Both men agreed that showa was now an ironically inept name. (The word means “enlightened peace.”)

Awaya raised a theme he increasingly brooded over. “We may have to pay dearly for the mistakes that have been made.”

Both men knew how inadequately prepared the city was for an air raid. There were insufficient shelters; the water pressure to the fire hydrants was low; the few evacuation routes out of the city could easily become clogged.

Nor did Awaya feel the fire lanes would provide adequate protection. “Whole areas within the lanes could simply burn themselves out. The lanes can hope only to stop the city being destroyed all at once.”

There was one aspect, however, that Awaya believed they should be grateful for. “The rivers dividing our city provide excellent natural firebreaks. And if necessary, the citizens could take refuge in those rivers from the heat generated by fires.”

Four hundred years old, built on a mound surrounded by a moat, Hiroshima Castle was the centerpiece of a vast military complex. Within its keep were the divisional and regional army headquarters, along with some forty thousand men. The area also contained an infantry training school, a hospital, and ammunition and supply depots. Under the castle was the civilian defense headquarters, the unit responsible for alerting the city to air attack, and the central fire control for the antiaircraft batteries.

The perimeter of this multipurpose installation was adjoined by dozens of small factories producing armaments. The larger factories were located on the banks of the rivers.

Yokoyama’s visits to the castle provided him with visible reaffirmation of the power of the army; there were always rows of fieldpieces and armored vehicles on display. Within the grounds that the army had garrisoned for nearly a hundred years, the mood was optimistic. Officers and men talked only of great victories to come. Nobody drew attention to shell casings made from inferior metals, or the near-empty fuel tanks of the half-tracks and armored cars.

The mood of senior officers at the defense review meeting was buoyant. One followed another to expound a similar theme. Hiroshima, like all other Japanese cities, was ready to meet the enemy. There was loud agreement with the words of the elderly officer who spoke last. “Let the American bombers come—and soon. They will fall from the skies under our guns!”

His eyes swept the room, lighting on the coterie of young antiaircraft officers that included Yokoyama. “The honor will fall to you to strike the first blows. The enemy is arrogant. He believes he can enter our skies with safety, to bomb our women and children. He will be shown otherwise. Do not fail. We will repeat the success of Pearl Harbor.”

14

In Tokyo, Major General Arisue was showing signs of strain; his face was a shade grayer, the pouches under his eyes darker. He was suffering from lack of sleep, proper meals, and fresh air. These past two months had made severe inroads into his considerable stamina.

His Lisbon contact was unable to provide further details about the mysterious American war project. And without hard information, Arisue could not brief his agent in Brazil, who was packed and ready to slip into the United States.

Increasingly, his department was under pressure from the high command. Data were urgently requested on the B-29s that had started to raid Tokyo and other cities. The arrival of the huge bombers had astonished the Japanese. They had never seen aircraft so big, so fast, so well armed. Information was requested about their bases. Arisue had pinpointed the Marianas, and cursed the lack of spies he had on the islands. He was unable to answer specific questions on the number of American bomber squadrons based there, the supply backup they possessed, the sort of intelligence which would help produce an accurate profile of American strength.

His special listening posts were monitoring nothing of importance in the brief air-to-air conversations between enemy pilots over Japan; ground defenses had been largely unsuccessful in shooting down B-29s. Arisue’s tough interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Oya, was finding it difficult to get even the few American airmen who had been captured to talk.

The latest, Colonel Brian Brugge, Oya had seen soon after he was shot down nine days before, on December 3. Brugge was an important catch; he was deputy chief of staff of the Seventy-third Bomb Wing, based on Saipan.

According to Oya, the stubborn West Pointer refused to cooperate. “We interrogated him thoroughly. He kept a tight lip. He wouldn’t crack. Later, he began to suffer from malnutrition. He disliked Japanese food. He died.”

Arisue was unhappy that his enthusiastic interrogator had not been able to extract any useful information from this senior American officer. Then, at his lowest ebb, knowing his reputation was being seriously challenged in certain quarters, Arisue received a further piece of unsettling news.

For some days he had been sure that his archrival, naval intelligence, was in contact with a Swedish banker, Per Jacobsson, in Bern, Switzerland. He knew that the purpose of this move was to make contact through Jacobsson with the Americans, leading, hopefully, to a negotiated peace.

In Japanese eyes, there was a fundamental difference between a negotiated peace and surrender. Even so, Arisue’s first reaction had been to expose the plotters. Caution stayed him. They undoubtedly included some of the highest-ranking naval officers. If he failed to prove a case against them, he would be in serious trouble. However, he could not help but wonder. Supposing Japan could not win the war? Supposing a negotiated peace was the only answer?

Even two months ago, such thoughts would have been unthinkable for Arisue. But throughout this day they gnawed at him. He sent for situation reports; he questioned staff officers; he studied projections of enemy intentions. Whichever way he turned, the one inescapable truth faced him: the war was going badly. Japan, in his later words, “was short of everything except courage.”

By evening, he had come to the conclusion that there was no way Japan could achieve victory. Equally, he knew that so long as the country kept fighting, it was not defeated.

With these thoughts in mind, without consulting anyone, General Arisue decided he would prepare the groundwork for a negotiated peace. He knew that if he were discovered, he would be branded a traitor and executed. But by nightfall he was making his first moves to establish a link in Bern with Allen Dulles, European director of the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency.

15

Seated at a writing desk in his suite in the Carlton Hotel, a few convenient blocks away from the White House, financier Alexander Sachs had little time to study the newspapers or listen to the radio programs marking the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

Sachs, the man who had been instrumental in alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of atomic weapons, was about to reenter the scene.

Yet, for Sachs and millions of Americans, December 7 was a day when the media were particularly compelling. Commentators continued to return to a single theme in recalling Pearl Harbor: the country could neither forgive nor forget Japan’s treachery; the “Day of Infamy” would have to be avenged.

Vastly better equipped on land, sea, and in the air, American forces were about to pull a drawstring around the enemy. The Japanese air force was spent; if the kamikaze planes still struck terror in those who were facing them in increasing numbers, newspapers played down the suicide planes as a passing phenomenon, a last, reckless throw by a desperate enemy.

Tokyo Rose’s taunt of “Come and get us” was now receiving a confident rejoinder on Stateside radio stations. “We’re coming, Rose, we’re coming!”

Nobody doubted that America’s youth was paying a high price for the long journey to Rose’s Tokyo lair. An average of five thousand Americans were dying each week in the relentless push across the Pacific. But as the newspapers pointed out, the numbers were grimmer for the enemy. The decisive aircraft carrier engagement off Guam had become known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” while the loss of the islands had cost the Japanese fifty thousand dead.

The mood this morning throughout America was uncompromising. The enemy, in the words of one commentator, “must be hit with everything we’ve got.”

Alexander Sachs knew that “everything we’ve got” was likely soon to include an atomic bomb. Five years after first calling on Roosevelt to authorize its construction, Sachs now wanted the president to put a curb on when and how the bomb would be used.

The financier had been successfully lobbied by the group of scientists beginning to have second thoughts about the weapon. Among them were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who had been so vocal in 1939 about the need for America to equip itself with an atomic arsenal. They now argued that the world situation had changed. The Nazi capability to produce atomic bombs could be discounted. They believed Japan could be beaten by conventional weapons. Any brief military advantage that nuclear bombs would bring America could be outweighed by political and psychological losses. The damage to American prestige, argued Szilard, could be immense if the United States were the first to drop the bomb. If America did so, then Einstein foresaw a worldwide atomic armaments race.

Roosevelt had rejected these arguments. Perhaps he felt the scientists underestimated the enemy’s ability to keep fighting under almost any circumstances.

Sachs had agonized for days over his draft for a startling proposal. But now, in his neat handwriting, he had outlined the conditions he believed Roosevelt should insist upon before ordering the bomb to be dropped.

Sachs spent over an hour alone with the president. No record was made of their conversation.

A few months later, when Roosevelt was dead, Sachs would claim that the president had accepted his proposals. His implication was clear: those in favor of using the bomb had later persuaded the president to change his mind. It is more likely that Roosevelt, a skilled exponent of the tactic, had led Sachs to believe he had heard what he wanted to hear.

Groves thought Sachs’s suggestion that Hitler and the Japanese militarists could be swayed by a memo about an explosion in some distant place naive in the extreme. Further, the financier’s proposal totally removed the surprise element that Groves believed essential. The project chief had always maintained that, forewarned, the enemy would mount an effective counterattack, destroying the plane carrying the atomic bomb either in aerial combat or by ground fire.

However, on December 7, scientists working on the Manhattan Project were satisfied that the Japanese were not far enough advanced in theoretical physics or technology to manufacture an atomic bomb. Therefore, some argued, it would be “unthinkable” to use the weapon against Japan.

The battle lines had been drawn. Even now, the more radical among the scientists were planning fresh strategies to halt the project.

16

On December 17, the five squadrons at Wendover became formally unified under Tibbets as the 509th Composite Group, attached to the 315th Bombardment Wing of the Second Air Force. The group’s strength was 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men.

Ferebee and van Kirk joined the 509th’s headquarters staff as group bombardier and group navigator. They rarely flew now, spending their time preparing and analyzing training programs. When they did fly, they usually went with Lewis, taking the place of his regular bombardier and navigator.

Lewis’s crew continued to return one of the best flying records. Their main competition came from Eatherly’s crew and crew No. 15, commanded by the effervescent Major Charles Sweeney.

Beser liked to fly with Sweeney “because of the way he kidded everyone along.” He was forming lasting judgments on many of the fliers, for “the day was coming when I’d have to trust my life to them.”

The radar officer had warmed toward Tibbets; he saw, correctly, a shy man behind the aloof commander. He had become aware that Tibbets had a marriage problem, and decided that Tibbets was “only truly happy in the air, but there he was magnificent.”

Beser thought Lewis, on the ground, sometimes acted “like Peck’s bad boy; in the air he occasionally got overexcited.”

Van Kirk and Ferebee were tagged by Beser as “professionals who never have any problems.”

This December morning, at thirty thousand feet over the Salton Sea bombing range, Tibbets and Ferebee were trying to solve a problem that had worried them for a week.

The bombardier had failed to drop dummy practice bombs consistently into the aiming circle, now reduced to three hundred feet. There seemed no reason why some bombs fell into the circle while others landed outside it.

Tibbets was concerned, and he reminded Ferebee why precision was so important. “Tom, when the time comes, we have to be as near on target as we can get. Radar is out because it’s still too uncertain. So it’s got to be visual. You’ve got to be able to see the target and then hit it on the nose. And that means we’ve got to drop within that circle every time.”

Tibbets had come on the practice flight to see why the aim was erratic. The weather was perfect: clear skies, easily computed wind drift. With Lewis holding the B-29 steady on the run up to the aiming point, Tibbets watched Ferebee crouching over the Norden bombsight.

The sight had been totally stripped and reassembled, a mechanically perfect instrument.

Ferebee called out that he had the AP in his cross hairs. He lifted himself a few inches off his seat to bring his face closer over the viewfinder. Below, through the optical sight, he could see the bombing circle clearly. Satisfied, he eased himself back on his seat, his head still glued to the viewfinder.

“Bomb away.”

Lewis put the aircraft into the mandatory 155-degree turn. By the time ground control reported on the drop, the B-29 was nearly eight miles away.

The bomb had fallen outside the circle.

Tibbets ordered Lewis to fly back toward the AP. He told Ferebee to repeat his actions. He watched intently as the bombardier began to line up the circle in his sights. At the last moment, he rose off his buttocks again.

Tibbets shouted, “That’s it!”

He had solved the problem. At the crucial moment, Ferebee, like any other bombardier, lifted himself off his seat to bring his eyes to the sight. The movement was no more than an inch or two. But it was enough. Each time he lowered his eyes to the sight, his head was at a slightly different angle against the viewfinder. If he had been bombing from a few thousand feet, this small movement would have had little effect. But from thirty thousand feet, nearly six miles up, with his head at a slightly different angle each time, it meant the error could ultimately work out to be several hundred feet by the time the bomb hit the ground.

Within hours, Tibbets had ground crews construct and fit a padded headrest to the bombsight. Using it, Ferebee’s head was forced into exactly the same position each time. From then on, he bombed with consistent accuracy.

17

In the cold dawn light, mess officer Charles Perry surveyed his resources: rows of plump farm turkeys and cured hams, mounds of vegetables, trays of mince pies, and, dominating the kitchen tables, scores of huge Christmas puddings. Silverplate had ensured that this first Christmas of the fledgling 509th would be a memorable one.

The elements had also contributed to the festive mood. Overnight, heavy snow had fallen, covering the ground inches high. At the main gate, shivering MPs fashioned a couple of snowmen, complete with hats and tree branches for carbines.

Beyond the gate, in their home, the Tibbets family were unwrapping their Christmas presents. Tibbets had given Lucie a gift he had purchased at the last moment in the base commissary. He was always at a loss about what to buy his vivacious wife; it was one of the many small reasons that their marriage was foundering. Lucie felt that her husband was unromantic; a warmhearted Southern belle from Georgia, she found the practical and pragmatic Tibbets often cool and distant. She knew there was no other woman in his life, but she could not understand why he seemed to place his work ahead of herself and the children. Once she had complained to Beser, who often used to baby-sit for the Tibbetses, that “Paul never seems to have time to sit down and talk or play with the children. And when he does talk, it’s only about work.”

Tibbets had tried to explain that he was by nature “a loner”; he had not added what many of his officers knew: that he really was happy only when he was flying.

His preoccupation with work carried over to his choice of Christmas presents for his small sons. Paul, Jr., and baby Gene both received models of B-17s. There had been a run on the toy bombers at the PX.

This morning the children found several B-17s in their stockings—presents from Lewis, van Kirk, Ferebee, and Beser.

Breakfast over, the Tibbets family went to the morning service at the base church.

Chaplain William Downey greeted his commander warmly. He could not remember when Tibbets had last attended church. Once, shortly after he had arrived on the base, Tibbets had told him that “when I pray I go directly to God without a middleman.”

Downey had not been offended; he knew many men like that. He respected their views. And in doing so, the chaplain had earned respect for himself. Articulate and refreshingly earthy, Captain Downey was the ideal spiritual adviser for the high-living 509th. He wasn’t shocked by their escapades. Though he wasn’t much older than many of the men he cared for, he somehow gave the impression of being a tolerant, worldly-wise man, ready to have a drink, crack a joke, be a “regular guy,” without ever losing his dignity.

Even Beser, normally critical of all organized religion, thought Downey was a “helluva sky pilot. If he hadn’t been a Lutheran, he would have been a fine rabbi.”

By noon on Christmas, the officers’ club was full of officers and their wives.

Paul and Lucie Tibbets held gracious court; for the moment, their private tensions and troubles were put aside. Tibbets reminisced with Ferebee and van Kirk about Europe, and wondered how London was shaping up to the “Bob Hopes”—the nickname of the flying bombs raining down on the British capital—“You bob out of the way and hope they miss you.”

Before long, a number of the officers were happily crocked and gathered around the club radio singing carols along with Bing Crosby in Hollywood.

The singing was followed by a newscast which brought them sharply back to reality. American troops in Europe were trying desperately to repel a surprise German counterattack that was to become the overture to the Battle of the Bulge. German troops in GI uniforms were creating confusion in the American lines. The news from the Pacific was encouraging: the Japanese homeland was beginning to feel the weight of American bombs.

Lucie Tibbets whispered the hope of any wife. “Honey, maybe you won’t have to go after all.”

18

The end of the year was hectic for Groves. His days stretched well beyond their regular fifteen hours; the box of candy he kept in his office safe with the atom secrets needed frequent replenishing. Steadily munching his way through chocolates, Groves issued orders that would eventually change warfare.

He sent for Tibbets on December 28. From a beginning of wariness on both sides, their relationship had passed through several phases to the present state of acceptance by Groves of Tibbets. The project chief found the flier could be as flinty as he was; he learned not to tamper with Tibbets’s judgments on flying matters.

The top-secret notes of their conversation show how far he now trusted the 509th’s commander.

Tibbets gave June 15, 1945, as the date he would be ready to deliver an atomic strike.

Groves accepted this without demur; the question was then raised “as to what the weather conditions would be over Tokyo between June 15th and 15 July.”

It was the first time the Japanese capital had been openly spoken of as a target for atomic attack.

But there might be a weather problem. The notes recorded that “rain could be expected rather frequently [over Tokyo] up to August 15 [1945]. It is not desirable that missions be made in rain.”

Apart from weather considerations, Groves set out the governing factors in target selection:

Groves doubted if Tokyo would meet all these requirements. The likelihood was that the city would be heavily bombed in the coming months with conventional weapons.

Personally, he favored Kyoto as a target. Kyoto was the ancient capital of Japan, a “historical city and one that was of great religious significance to the Japanese.” With an estimated population of a million, Kyoto, Grove reasoned, “like any city of that size in Japan must be involved in a tremendous amount of war work.” Therefore, it would be a legitimate target.

Further, he found Kyoto was “large enough to ensure that the damage from the bomb would run out within the city, which would give us a firm understanding of its destructive power.”

At a meeting in Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos on December 19, Groves had decided the gun-type firing mechanism of the uranium bomb was so reliable it need not be tested before it was used on the enemy. However, the more complicated mechanism in the plutonium bomb would need proving. That was to be done at the Alamogordo firing range in the New Mexico desert on a date still to be decided.

Alone in his office on December 30, Groves decided to take a momentous step. He wrote a memo to General George C. Marshall, chief of staff.

Groves had committed the Manhattan Project to a date.

19

A sailor carefully erased the legend I.58 from the conning tower of the submarine and painted the flag of the kikusui immediately above the Rising Sun emblem. The kikusui was the battle standard of the ancient warrior Masashige, who had fought against overwhelming odds, knowing he had no chance to survive.

With the kikusui flag gleaming wetly in the winter sunlight, Commander Hashimoto completed the transformation of his submarine by ordering a seaman to raise the boat’s new war banner, Masashige’s hiriho kenten, meaning “God’s will.”

Banner and flag signified that the submarine was now a human torpedo carrier, the latest weapon devised by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The human torpedoes, or kaitens, were the underwater counterpart of the kamikaze.

Since January 1943 at the top-secret Base P, an island in Hiroshima Bay just south of Kure, the navy had been experimenting with the use of human torpedoes, projectiles which could be launched from a mother craft and steered by volunteers toward an enemy ship. The navy hoped these weapons would offset the increasing losses they were experiencing, and help halt the American advance on Japan.

Hashimoto’s submarine had been chosen to be one of the flag carriers for Operation Kaiten. To accommodate the weapons, workmen had removed the housing for the reconnaissance plane the submarine sometimes carried, its catapult, and its deck gun. That made room on the boat’s deck for six kaitens.

The torpedoes, shaped like miniature submarines and weighing eight tons each, had explosive warheads. They had a range of thirty miles and a top speed of twenty knots. They were not recoverable. Once a kaiten pilot squirmed through a narrow tunnel from the parent submarine into his torpedo and was cast off, there was no returning. Either he exploded against his target or he was blown up by the enemy before reaching it.

It took several hours to winch the kaitens onto the submarine’s deck, where they were shackled securely.

Late in the morning, the pilots for these craft came aboard and were greeted by Hashimoto. He was struck by the youthfulness of the kaiten crewmen; there was also an air of fanaticism about them that chilled him. He, too, believed in the emperor and the traditional concept of dying. But these youths were intoxicated with their patriotism; they told him proudly how they had literally fought for the privilege of making this kaiten mission, and how they longed for death. Kaiten means “the turn toward Heaven.”

As the moment of departure approached, the pilots sat astride their craft, white towels wrapped around their heads and brandishing their ceremonial swords. To Hashimoto, it seemed they were “trying hard to be strong men.”

Fenders and berthing wires were detached from the submarine’s long, narrow casing. Water on the starboard quarter began to boil. Foam surged around the boat as the ballast tanks were blown to full buoyancy. The freeboard began to increase.

Farewell shouts came from the groups of dockyard workers on the wharf. The pilots raised their swords higher.

Hashimoto watched approvingly as the last ropes were released by the shore crew and hauled in by the seamen on the deck. Weeks of hard practice had paid off; the men moved today with dexterity and skill.

The electric motors silently drew the submarine from the shore, her bow now pointing away from Hiroshima toward the sea. A flotilla of motorboats accompanied the submarine, their occupants chanting in unison the names of the pilots. The submarine increased speed, the escorts fell away, the chanting faded. The boat trembled as the diesel motors started their rhythmic pounding.

In his log, Hashimoto noted on December 29: “Passed through Bungo Channel and turned south, proceeding on surface. Through evening haze took farewell look at the homeland.”

Two and a half weeks later, the cry rang out: “Smoke on the port beam!”

The lookout’s shout brought the men on the conning-tower bridge scrambling down the ladder into the control room.

“Dive! Dive! Dive!”

Moments after Commander Hashimoto’s order, the submarine was sealed, the main vents opened, and the needle of the depth gauge turned steadily as the boat’s bow tilted toward the seabed.

Regularly, ever since reaching the area of the Marianas two weeks earlier, Hashimoto had been dodging antisubmarine aircraft patrols flying from Guam. Now, two hundred feet below the waves, undisturbed by the Pacific swell, he and his crew listened for the throb of ships’ propellers.

Somewhere above them, approaching, were two enemy ships, probably destroyers.

Hashimoto wondered whether their presence was connected with the daring attack he had launched three days ago. Then, under cover of darkness, he had surfaced eleven miles off Guam and fired four of his human torpedoes against the mass of shipping in Apra Harbor.

It was I.58’s first strike and Hashimoto’s first use of kaitens. Just before entering his suicide craft, one of the kaiten pilots had pressed into the captain’s hands a farewell note Hashimoto would treasure all his life.

With the four human torpedoes launched, Hashimoto had submerged to periscope depth. As daylight came, he saw great clouds of smoke rising from the harbor. He stole away to safer waters. Later, he had led the crew in prayer for the souls of the four warriors.

Now, the presence of the subchasers above them reminded the crew that they, too, could be swiftly dispatched to join their dead companions.

Hashimoto ordered the submarine rigged for silent running so that nothing could give away their presence. Orders were relayed in sign language or in whispers; nobody moved unnecessarily. All equipment not essential to survival underwater was switched off.

The crew strained their ears for the sound of propellers. It came closer: constant, on course, the high-pitched note of steel blades turning steadily through water. The ships were moving slowly, and it sounded as if each blade was striking the water separately. The screws passed overhead and began to fade.

A look of relief crossed the faces of the men around Hashimoto.

He shook his head, warning.

The sound increased again. Hashimoto drew a circle with his finger in the air: the ships were circling. He guessed that the hunters were hoping their echo sounders could get a fix and give cross bearings. It would be easy then to calculate the settings for their depth charges.

The propeller noise grew fainter, almost disappeared, then returned as a new circle began.

Somebody scuffed the deck plates with his boots. Hashimoto glared fiercely.

The propellers passed overhead, faded—and this time did not return. The ships had either given up the search or extended it elsewhere.

For two more hours, the submarine remained silent in its position. Then Hashimoto ordered it to resume course for Kure.

There it would arrive safely on January 20, having passed on the way other kaiten-carrying submarines heading for the waters around Guam.

20

Tibbets knew he was facing a clear choice. He could either have Lewis court-martialed—or hope the pilot had learned a lasting lesson. Even now, days later, the details of Lewis’s adventure made Tibbets shudder.

On December 17, the day Tibbets had solved Ferebee’s problem with the bombsight, Lewis had “illegally borrowed” a C-45 twin-engine transport plane. With no copilot or proper maps, and a faulty radio, he had set off on a twenty-five-hundred-mile flight to New York because he “wanted to be home for Christmas.” His traveling companion was the 509th’s senior flight engineer, hitching a ride to his wedding. Over Columbus, Ohio, the plane’s radio, altimeter, and compass had all failed within minutes of each other. Lewis had nosed the transport groundward, “trying to navigate by street lights.” A blizzard had blocked out that hope. For two hours in zero visibility, Lewis had searched for Newark Airport, New Jersey. He had eventually landed there with practically no fuel left in his tank.

Christmas over, Lewis had met the new bride and groom at Newark. He had lent the girl his flying jacket and cap as a disguise and ignored the regulations forbidding civilians to fly in military aircraft. Over Buffalo, another snowstorm had forced Lewis to land. Finally, on December 29, he and the newly married couple had landed at Wendover.

Tibbets was staggered that Lewis did not realize he “had broken every rule in the book.” The nearest Lewis came to contrition was a sheepish “Gee, I wouldn’t want to do that flight again!”

Eight days later, the time had come for Tibbets to make a decision about Lewis. He had taken soundings from a number of sources. The consensus was that Lewis was “a goddam fool, but also a goddam fine pilot.”

Tibbets admitted that only an exceptional flier could have flown the trip Lewis did: it had required icy nerves and courage to handle the crippled transport in such atrocious conditions.

He decided not to court-martial Lewis, but “any past favors I owed him were repaid. He had used my name to get that plane. From now on, I was going to treat him like a flunky; he would do exactly what I wanted, when I wanted—or God help him.”

This meant that Lewis would draw many of the disagreeable assignments: early-morning flights, night duties, and weekend work. Lewis did not mind. He thought it “a tribute. Paul was giving me all the stuff that nobody else would tackle.”

Having made his decision about Lewis, Tibbets now resolved another matter that could not be further delayed: which men he would choose to send to Cuba for “special training.”

For days, rumors about the long-awaited trip had prevailed. In subzero Wendover, the vision of the Caribbean was almost unbearable. Plane commanders spent hours hanging around headquarters trying to pick up a whisper; gamblers like Eatherly had offered to make book on the departure date, but there were no takers; even overseas veterans like Classen began to reminisce about tropical life. Amid all the speculation, they did discover one fact: in two days’ time, Tibbets would be promoted to full colonel. But that did not make their commander more forthcoming.

Rumors reached fever pitch when the fliers learned that Tibbets was spending this morning studying the flying reports on all fifteen bomber crews. In Cuba, those chosen would carry out long-distance navigational training exercises over water at night, and continue their high-level bombing practice.

Tibbets summoned the group’s mess officer, Lieutenant Charles Perry. His orders from Tibbets were clear: arrange a round-the-clock chow line serving the best food in Cuba.

Beser was told he was going. He saw one drawback to the trip: his bodyguard would be traveling with him. He began to lay plans to shake off the man in Havana.

Finally, ten plane commanders were informed they would be flying out later in the day. The Cuba-bound echelon was assembled for a pep talk from Tibbets. “The same rules apply in Havana as here. Don’t ask questions. Don’t answer questions. Do your job. The final selection for a historic mission could be made from you men.”

Before leaving, Eatherly was consulted on the legends about hot-blooded Latin ladies. He said they were all true. The flight surgeon was reported to have packed extra cartons of condoms; the studs in the group boasted they would use them up on their very first night in Havana.

At noon on January 6, Eatherly took off. Nine other B-29s followed him into the air on the long journey south. Late in the afternoon, they landed at Batista Field, twelve miles from Havana.

Tibbets flew down in a transport, bringing Ferebee, van Kirk, and a small headquarters staff. Another transport brought a detachment of MPs, Uanna, and his agents.

All outsiders were barred from the 509th’s compound, but many got close enough to peer inquisitively at the planes. The crews reveled in the curiosity they attracted. Eatherly solemnly told a bystander that the 509th was there to protect the island against an expected coup by “unfriendly powers” planning to seize the lucrative gambling concessions. Eatherly was in high spirits. For most of the flight, he had played cards with some of his crew and had won several hundred dollars.

The fliers and ground crew all tried hard to impress the other American servicemen on the base that they were no ordinary outfit. They were coming to think of themselves as special, a feeling that Tibbets had encouraged; the foundation was being laid of the spirit which was to sustain them in the trying time ahead.

Tibbets astonished everybody by refusing even a cup of coffee until every man had been assigned quarters and been fed by Perry’s cooks. Only then did Tibbets accept a meal tray.

He had little appetite. He had learned this evening that General Curtis LeMay was on his way to Guam.

A year earlier, Tibbets, Lewis, and Sweeney had taken turns teaching LeMay how to pilot a B-29. LeMay was a difficult pupil, a flying general who found it hard to accept that because an aircraft was 99 feet long, 29 feet 9 inches high, with a wingspan of 101 feet, it was different from any other bomber he had flown. But he finally learned to listen, respect, and obey his instructors. At the end of the course, LeMay had predicted, “We can win the war with this plane.”

Now he was going to Guam intending to do just that. If LeMay succeeded, Tibbets knew he would not be needed to drop an atomic bomb.

21

General Curtis LeMay spent his first three days on Guam trying to find the answer to a paradox in his new charge, the Twenty-first Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force.

Why was the B-29—the world’s most superior bomber, available for the first time in sufficient numbers to strike terror into the enemy—not realizing its potential?

Here in the Marianas everybody had a different answer. The training manuals said the B-29s could operate at 38,000 feet and cruise at 350 miles an hour for 3,500 miles.

The manuals were wrong.

In the Pacific, the bombers showed signs of severe strain in prolonged flights at over thirty thousand feet. Bombers frequently failed to complete missions because of mechanical difficulties.

Then there was the weather. It was impossible for the air force meteorologists to provide accurate forecasts for the thirteen hundred miles of sky between the Marianas and Japan. Fierce jet streams crisscrossed the void, buffeting the bombers and using up their precious fuel. Over Japan, the targets might be visible one minute, then obscured the next as high winds drove in heavy clouds. Bombs dropped from thirty thousand feet were blown far from their aiming points, and results using even the latest radar equipment were proving unsatisfactory. Eleven targets selected for bombing in January remained almost undamaged. Intelligence monitoring of Japan Radio showed that morale was high and war work so far virtually unimpaired by the air attacks.

LeMay accepted the complaints about the weather, engine strain, and other malfunctions. But solving them would not answer the basic problem. The tactics being used were the ones he had developed in Europe to pierce the German defenses. Later his high-flying methods were used by B-29s operating out of China, raiding Japan from airfields around Chengtu.

China had been a costly and hazardous venture, but LeMay had made contact with a fanatical guerrilla leader. In return for medical supplies and materials, LeMay had persuaded him to radio regular weather forecasts from that area of northern China where the partisans were fighting the Japanese. The reports were invaluable for LeMay’s pilots. They often drank a toast to this man.

His name was Mao Tse-tung.

LeMay had already contacted Mao from the Marianas and arranged for him to radio weather reports to Guam. The man who would soon become the leader of one of the most powerful nations on earth was, on this late January day, proud and willing to act as a barometer for the American general he persisted in calling “Culltse Lee May.”

But Mao’s weather reports were only a partial answer to LeMay’s problem with the B-29s, and the solution LeMay proposed was revolutionary. If it succeeded, he believed he could break Japan. If it failed, his career would be in ruins.

First, LeMay intended to strip his B-29s of their arsenal of machine guns and cannons. Then he proposed to strike in darkness—having his bombers over their targets between midnight and 4:00 A.M. If necessary, they would bomb by radar, in preparation for which LeMay decided to initiate a series of intensive retraining courses. These would ensure that even the least apt radar operator was brought up to the standard he required.

Most important of all, the bombers would go in at between five thousand and nine thousand feet. LeMay was going to gamble that intelligence was right, that the Japanese had not developed a night fighter or converted their antiaircraft guns to radar control. He hoped that, manually operated, the weapons would react too slowly to his low-level assault.

Removing the guns because of the hoped-for absence of night fighters would also increase each bomber’s payload. That, too, was crucial, for LeMay intended the B-29s to carry only incendiaries, and thus put the torch to Japan’s vulnerable wooden buildings.

While formulating his plans about the new tactics he meant to employ, LeMay went on listening, something he was very good at. This very lunch hour on January 20, while listening to a weather officer explaining his problems, LeMay had overheard a naval officer from CINCPAC saying that Admiral Chester Nimitz was raising hell over some flying unit in the States that was trying to get itself shipped to the Marianas.

It sounded an unlikely story to LeMay. The unit was something called a “composite group.” And LeMay knew there was no such designation in the air force.

22

Groves had decided that it was not yet necessary to inform General Douglas MacArthur about the atomic bomb. He approved of the letter Fleet Admiral King had prepared on January 27 for Admiral Chester Nimitz. It was short and to the point, and should end the irritating queries emanating from CINCPAC. Written on King’s official stationery, the letter read:

Ashworth was an Annapolis graduate and combat veteran whom Parsons had personally engaged for the Manhattan Project. Groves respected both naval officers for their professionalism. They spent much of their time shuttling between Wendover and Los Alamos helping to solve the last problems associated with fuzing and detonating the atomic bomb.

Groves doubted that Ashworth would welcome the trip to the Pacific which would take him away from his test work, but the project chief planned to use Ashworth as more than just a courier. He wanted Ashworth to choose the overseas base for the 509th.

Groves favored Guam. It had sophisticated military workshops for any last-minute modifications to the weapon, and a deep-sea harbor. Tibbets preferred Tinian. It was said to have the best runways in the Pacific.

Ashworth was to look at both islands.

23

Beser had spent an hour getting his bodyguard drunk, urging him to relax and enjoy their last few hours in Cuba. The man was sitting glassy-eyed in the base’s officers’ mess, staring stupidly into a fresh daiquiri—the eighth he had consumed in an hour. He was too drunk to notice that Beser had gone.

Beser had hurried to the base motor pool to collect a truck. A Silverplate authorization had overcome the initial objection of the transport officer to part with the vehicle. Then Beser had driven into the old quarter of Havana and supervised a gang of Cubans loading crates into the truck.

Now, the whole secret operation, which so far had gone “like a dream,” was being threatened by an MP at the gate to Batista Field. “Lieutenant, I want to see inside this truck.”

Beser eyed the policeman: he couldn’t be bribed; he would have to be threatened. Crooking his finger—he had borrowed the gesture from a university professor—Beser told the MP to come closer. “What’s your security rating, son?”

Beser was barely twenty-three. He sounded like a middle-aged general.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Then you had better find out—quick! Move, soldier!”

The MP backed off.

Beser slammed the truck into gear, and it bounded forward into the air base. He drove several times around the administrative blocks to make sure he was not being followed. Satisfied, he then drove to the part of the apron where the 509th was located.

A group of fliers was waiting for him. Beser jumped down from the driver’s cabin, and a human chain formed between truck and bombers. The unmarked boxes were stacked in the cavernous bomb bays of the B-29s.

It took almost an hour to transfer the cargo. Each box contained twelve bottles of the best-quality whiskey.

Beser had discovered a Havana wholesaler offering the liquor at a quarter of the price it cost in the United States. The 509th had needed no persuasion to lay out the money for this bonanza.

The escapade was typical. In the past three weeks, the 509th had established a reputation as hell-raisers. Havana, used to the carousing of servicemen, was astonished by the group. They lived and loved at a frenetic pace, fought those who challenged them, and led charmed lives when authority intervened.

An MP patrol picked up drunken 509th mechanics in a street brawl and took them to the military lockup. Their arrest was reported to the 509th’s duty officer. He checked his rosters; the men were scheduled to service a bomber in the morning. He demanded their release. When the MPs refused, the officer used “Silverplate” to rouse the local commander. He checked his records, found the code rated the highest priority, and ordered the mechanics set free. The legend grew that the 509th were “The Untouchables.”

Tibbets had surprised the rest of the 509th at Wendover by flying back early from Havana to supervise personally the training of the crews he had not sent to the Caribbean. He was determined that when the day came, every one of his fliers would be capable of carrying out an atomic strike.

He worked the five crews still at Wendover hard, sending them back and forth to the Salton Sea bombing range. Without actually saying so, he conveyed to the fliers the impression that although they had not been sent to Cuba, they might still be chosen for the big upcoming mission.

Tibbets received regular reports from Cuba. He was particularly pleased to see that his engineering crews were already showing their mettle: the 509th’s planes were losing less than half the number of engines through malfunction that other air force squadrons based on the island were losing. It was what Tibbets had come to expect from his men.

But he was not willing to do what executive officer John King wanted: “turn the squadron into a spit-and-polish outfit.”

Tibbets knew that King meant well, but he also realized that the officer did not understand his methods: the easy familiarity he had with the enlisted men, the way he invariably called all his officers by their first names. King was “Regular Army; he had never experienced the unique camaraderie of flying as a team, where lives depend on each other.”

Tibbets would never allow anyone to stifle what he believed was a requisite for any fighting air squadron: spirit. To maintain that spirit, Tibbets was spending more time than ever with his men. His wife and small sons rarely saw him. When he did see the children, he was usually too tired or preoccupied to play with them. The shiny new model bombers the boys had received at Christmas were broken, and he never found time to fix them. His wife looked accusingly at him. Their marriage continued its downhill progress.

Tibbets could see what was happening—and hated himself for making no move to stem the destruction of his family life. The truth was, as he would later admit, that he did not know what to say to mend matters.

He was also not prepared to give up watching over his fliers to be with his family. When he had first married Lucie, he had warned her that “I was a different kind of cat from the ordinary man,” and that nothing would stand between him and his work.

In the first flush of marriage, she had accepted that. But now, isolated, reduced to listening to long technical conversations her husband had with the officers he occasionally brought home, Lucie Tibbets knew there could be no future for them together.

Even though he was aware of her feelings, Paul Tibbets was “only able to cry inside myself. She never knew, nobody knew, what I was feeling.”

Tibbets and Beser, who had returned with the others from Cuba on February 3, felt they were passing their lives on an endless treadmill between Wendover and Los Alamos.

This morning in early March, they found the sentries at the compound gate more nervous than ever. Both men’s ID cards were checked more thoroughly than usual, even though Tibbets and Beser were now familiar faces.

When they eventually entered the site and were greeted by Ramsey, they found the usually unruffled scientist, in Beser’s opinion, “hot and bothered.”

It was Oppenheimer who told Tibbets the reason for the increased tension. Groves had just ordered that the first plutonium bomb must be ready for testing at Alamogordo by the middle of July, and the first uranium bomb must be available for war purposes by early August.

The deadline placed an additional burden on men and women who had been working under great strain for two years. Tempers flared. There were angry exchanges between the scientists and security men.

The weather did not help. The spring rains were late in coming, and an arid wind blew from the desert over the settlement, withering the grass and drying up the pond in the center of the compound.

Water shortages had always been a problem. Now, water for personal use was rationed. Workers and their families were advised to brush their teeth with Coca-Cola.

Of late on his visits to Los Alamos, Beser had tended to avoid any scientist who raised a doubt about the validity of his work. In Beser’s opinion, such men were misguided. He preferred the views of Dr. Louis Slotin, a young researcher who had worked on the “crit” experiments. “Whether you die by a bullet or a bomb, you are still dead.”

The words exactly matched his own views at a time when thousands of Americans were dying from Japanese bullets on Iwo Jima.

Beser was at Los Alamos to learn more about the fuzing mechanism of the bomb, and how the Japanese might interfere with it electronically, causing a premature explosion.

Tibbets had come to see Oppenheimer to finish up the details for the arrival at Wendover of a new special unit—the First Ordnance Squadron—which would have technical responsibility for the atomic bomb when the 509th was overseas.

After settling on March 6 as the date when the squadron would come to Wendover, Tibbets and Oppenheimer were joined by Ashworth. The navy commander had recently returned to Los Alamos after a thirteen-day visit to the Marianas, where he had delivered Fleet Admiral King’s letter to Admiral Nimitz and explained to the Pacific commander the role of the 509th. Nimitz had made one comment: he wished the bomb were available now to be used on Okinawa, the last major island to be invaded before mainland Japan.

Ashworth told Tibbets that Guam was unsuitable as a base for the 509th. Instead, he agreed the group should use North Field, Tinian; the field had four eighty-five-hundred-foot-long runways.

“I’ll only need one,” responded Tibbets.

24

From the upper floor of his small private hospital, Dr. Kaoru Shima had a good view of Hiroshima. It was one which was beginning to depress him. A slash of wasteland stretched away on each side of the Aioi Bridge, marking one of the fire lanes crossing the city.

Dozens of houses, shops, tearooms, and bars had been demolished in the vicinity of the Shima Surgical Hospital, leaving its medical director and nursing staff with the feeling they worked “on the brink of destruction.”

The morning newscast had reinforced this feeling. For the first time, Japan Radio had given a hint that the fighting on Iwo Jima was going badly.

Iwo’s eight square miles were just seven hundred miles from Tokyo, close enough for the Americans to covet the Japanese island as a fighter-and-bomber base.

For days, the radio and newspapers in Japan had dwelt on the impregnability of the island’s defenses. They had pointed out that the enemy’s seventy-four days of preinvasion bombardment had done little to destroy those defenses; the Imperial Japanese Army was sheltering in caves and deep tunnels, often protected by as much as thirty-five feet of concrete. And when the Americans had landed on Iwo, they had been led into a trap. Lured ashore by light opposition, the invading forces had gained a foothold on the island, only to have that hold nearly crushed by murderous cross fire from the entrenched army. Japan Radio had talked of slaughter on an unparalleled scale. But now, in early March, the latest bulletins were speaking of a “strategic withdrawal.” Dr. Shima, an old hand at assessing the truth of such claims, knew that Iwo Jima was doomed.

Hiroshima’s fire lanes were a constant reminder to him that, as a prelude to invasion, air raids must be expected, and that he would then have to deal with casualties. Only he knew how meager were his resources; in practical terms, he would be able to offer little more than comfort to victims of a major attack. His dispensary was in need of replenishment. He suspected that many of the city’s twenty-two other hospitals and clinics, and also its thirty-two first-aid centers, were in a similar position.

The materials now pouring into Hiroshima contained few medical supplies, and most of those would go to the large Ujina Army Hospital, the Red Cross Hospital, and the Mitsubishi Shipyard Hospital. Dr. Shima’s private clinic was low down on the army’s list of priorities.

The clinic survived solely because of the driving force of its owner. He was also frequently called upon to perform operations in country hospitals. The sight of the doctor pedaling his bicycle, with his bag of instruments strapped to his back, was a familiar one in the area.

The construction of the fire lanes often added time to his journeys, as demolished buildings blocked streets and he was forced to make long detours. But Dr. Shima never complained. To those who did, he had an unfailing answer. “Be glad you are alive.”

25

Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, was not impressed with what he had heard of the Manhattan Project. The idea of a single bomb destroying a large city—and ending the war—was farfetched to him. Speaking as “an expert on explosives,” he planned to inform the president that the project was a dud, that the bomb would never explode.

Roosevelt had no lack of people prepared to offer him the benefit of their advice. Leo Szilard was one of those asking for an appointment. Szilard now believed it was no longer the Germans who threatened the world; “our worry [is] about what the Government of the United States might do to other countries.”

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson advised Roosevelt not to see the Hungarian scientist. Others were not so easy to avoid. Over a year earlier, Harry S. Truman, then a senator from Missouri, had begun asking awkward questions. Stimson had silenced him at that time, but now he had to be more tactful. Any day, Truman could be president. Stimson knew that the ailing Roosevelt was hanging on to life by sheer willpower.

Stimson had told Truman almost nothing. There had been no mention of an atomic bomb. The secretary of war knew that Truman was not satisfied, but he was buying time for the project.

Recently, Roosevelt had asked him to conduct a review of the current situation.

Late in the afternoon of March 2, the two men met in Roosevelt’s office. Stimson saw that the president, only days back from the taxing Yalta Conference, looked more gaunt than ever. He was one of the few men who knew about the small box of green tablets Roosevelt kept in a desk drawer for treatment of his hypertension and failing cardiovascular system.

Anxious not to tire Roosevelt with a detailed summary, Stimson put the situation simply. Production of the weapon was on schedule. The bomb would be ready by August, as Groves had promised. The weapon could save the million American lives Stimson believed would be lost before Japan would surrender.

Roosevelt seemed pleased. But Stimson wondered whether the president would live to see those million soldiers return home safely.

The Deficiency Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations—congressional watchdog on how public money is spent—was not placated by the prepared statement Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson had given them.

In secret hearings, the subcommittee had tried to obtain further details of how almost two billion dollars had been spent on a project they could discover nothing about. Patterson had doggedly refused to say. He pleaded security considerations.

Committee chairman Clarence Cannon of Missouri warned that “as soon as the war is over Congress will conduct a most thorough inquiry into the project.”

Patterson was himself unaware of most of the Manhattan Project’s ramifications. But his political instincts sensed trouble. He knew that an essential rule for survival in Washington was to write a memo. He returned to his office and dictated one to an aide, General W. D. Styer. It was remarkable for its political expediency:

Patterson had covered himself.

He knew more about the weapon than almost anyone else. His performance had been herculean. Factories he controlled were among the largest in the United States. He had authorized the patenting of many thousands of new inventions which accrued from the atomic research. Yet the entire project was being threatened by some of the very scientists whose pioneering work had been invaluable. Groves could not understand them.

Now, another voice had joined the dissidents. On his desk as he talked on the scrambler phone with General George C. Marshall in early March was a memo written the day before to Roosevelt by James F. Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization. Byrnes had an office in the White House and virtually ran the nation’s economic affairs while Roosevelt and Stimson concentrated on foreign and military policy. Byrnes was known as “the assistant president.”

A copy of Byrnes’s memo had been sent over from the White House to Groves for comment. That alone should have reassured him of the strength of his position. The memo was a sensible reminder to the president that there would be a momentous political row if the project failed.

For a man used totally to having his own way, the memorandum’s words were chilling.

In Groves’s mind, the suggestion of an outside review placed Byrnes firmly in the opposition camp. Groves did not believe there was anybody competent enough to carry out such an investigation. It looked like another attempt to stop the project.

Groves finished briefing Marshall without mentioning the Byrnes memo. He was about to hang up when the army chief of staff asked if he had given any thought to how the bomb could be used to best advantage.

Groves had, but he kept his ideas to himself. He told Marshall he thought it was time for the planners to prepare preliminary studies of suitable targets.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Marshall spoke. “I don’t like to bring too many people into this matter. Is there any reason why you can’t take over this and do it yourself?”

Groves eagerly accepted the offer. In his most optimistic moment he had never expected he would have the opportunity to choose atomic objectives.

He could consult, he could heed advice, but in the end he would have the responsibility for recommending which Japanese city would serve as the first target for the atomic bomb.

Secretary Stimson’s advice to Groves was clear; Groves should advise Roosevelt to reject Byrnes’s proposal for an independent inquiry. Maintaining secrecy was all-important. Congress and the Senate should be given the minimum information needed to secure appropriations. In the past two days, members of both houses had begun asking further questions about the Manhattan Project, following leakages about Under Secretary of War Patterson’s appearance before the Deficiency Subcommittee.

Groves was delighted with Stimson’s support; it enabled him to dismiss, almost defiantly, Byrnes’s mild suggestion of a review.

Next, Groves dealt with Congress and the Senate. He set about the task in cavalier fashion. He was prepared, he wrote Stimson, to allow two senators and two representatives to take a peep at the project.

To qualify even for this strictly limited inspection—in reality, a reluctant bit of public relations to raise more money—Groves laid down conditions more appropriate for an inspection of the bomb itself than a mere glimpse of dormitories and kitchens.

There was no possibility of anybody’s being allowed near Los Alamos. The visits would be to some of the less-secret atomic sites whose usefulness to the project was already diminishing. And even then:

26

Tibbets remained impassive as Major William Uanna spoke without interruption for many minutes, reading from one file after another. His summary was brutal and to the point. “Colonel, you’ve got one convicted murderer, three men who are convicted manslaughter cases, and several felons. They are all on the lam from the pen. Now, what are you going to do?”

Tibbets restated the question. “I know what I want to do. The question is, what are you going to recommend I do?”

Uanna was prepared. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Even break the law?”

“Even that.”

Tibbets began to explore other areas. “How did these guys get into such a secret outfit as the First Ordnance?”

Uanna suggested that sheer chance had brought the criminals into the ordnance squadron that had just joined the 509th at Wendover. After escaping from various prisons, the convicts had presumably decided the safest place for them to remain undetected was the army. They would have had little difficulty enlisting under false names.

“This is wartime, Colonel. The army doesn’t ask too many questions. It’s just glad for the manpower.”

Uanna’s inquiries showed that the special technical talents of the men had been spotted by “scouts” for the Manhattan Project. The seven technicians—mainly tool- and diemakers—had been transferred to the First Ordnance Squadron.

The squadron would “baby-sit” for the atomic bomb when the group went to Tinian. Each of its members was a specialist. Together, they were capable of carrying out, under scientific supervision, any last-minute modifications to the bomb that might be required. It had taken months to find the right personnel. The majority were skilled in metallurgy and allied disciplines. Twenty-seven of them held science degrees. They had been warned that from the moment they joined the squadron they might not see their family or friends until the war was over. Each was allowed to write a daily letter; the mail was sent through a special post-office box in San Francisco.

The squadron had arrived at Wendover on a heavily guarded train. Its men were directed to a special fenced-off compound on the field, watched over by a detachment of Uanna’s agents.

Uanna explained to Tibbets how he had spotted the criminals in the squadron. “They were happy about all this security. Only years in prison makes men like that. We started digging.”

Tibbets looked thoughtful. “We have them locked up here just as securely as if they were back in the pen?”

Uanna agreed that was the case.

“I want to see them.”

Uanna raised no objection.

The escaped murderer was sent for. Tibbets studied him. “Do you know why you are here?”

“No, Colonel, I don’t.”

Tibbets picked up a file. “Listen, fella. I know your real name, your federal penitentiary number, the number of years you were serving, the day you broke out.”

Tibbets tapped the file. “It’s all here. Who you murdered, the police statements, your trial, your sentence, how you came to us. Everything.”

The convict was too stunned to speak.

Tibbets thrust the file toward him. “Here. See for yourself.”

Tibbets saw the man tremble. He withdrew the file and closed it, then looked carefully at the technician. “This is the only record which exists of your past. The major and I are the only people who know that you are an escaped murderer. Now, it seems to me that you are real good at your present job. And we need good men. So look here. We’re going to give you a chance. Go back to your job. Do your work exactly as you have been doing it. If we have no trouble with you, you will have no trouble from us. When the war is over, we will give you this dossier and a match to burn it.”

The dazed convict left the office, too overwhelmed to speak.

One by one, the other criminals were marched in, confronted with their crimes, and made similar offers.

When the last man left, Tibbets turned to Uanna. “Major, I’m not a police department. I’m not interested in bringing people to justice. I’m interested in ending this war. All I want to do is get the proper work out of these men.”

The arrival of the First Ordnance caused considerable excitement. Lewis put it succinctly. “If we think we’re something special—these guys are something else!”

Even the slaphappy 509th had never seen such an untidy-looking outfit. Some of its members were middle-aged; one or two spoke with a distinct foreign accent. Some were Jewish technicians who until a few years ago had worked in workshops in Berlin and Munich.

The squadron seemed capable of anything and was totally self-contained. They brought and erected their own workshops, connected their own electric power, installed their own special tools. The line crews of the 509th, themselves expert at most things, realized that their peers had arrived.

The squadron’s members emerged from their compound only at mealtimes. Then they were accompanied by several burly agents. They all sat in a corner of the mess hall, and when strangers approached, they fell silent. The curious were firmly rebuffed.

The evening of March 7, some of the men from the First Ordnance Squadron went down to the flight line to meet the regular shuttle service from Albuquerque which Dora Dougherty was now running. If they noticed a woman was flying the transport, they made no comment.

There was only one passenger. He led the First Ordnance men over to a B-29.

The regular flight crew had been told to answer any questions the man put to them. He seemed to be interested in the technical performance of the bomber, and spent some time examining the bomb-bay doors.

At the end of his inspection, the man turned to the ordnance men. “These ships are not good enough for the job. They will have to be replaced.”

With that, he walked past the gaping flight crew, boarded Dora’s transport, and was on his way back to Los Alamos.

By lights-out, the whisper had spread. Beser would remember a fellow officer telling the story. “Hear about this nut who flew in, said scrap our aircraft, and flew out again? Just like he was a five-star general, not a guy in a naval captain’s uniform. Doesn’t he know there’s a war on—nobody can scrap aircraft just like that!”

“We’ll get those planes.” Beser knew how much power Captain William Parsons wielded.

Parsons had initially been considered as an alternate to Groves to head the Manhattan Project. He had come to Wendover to check out the planes that would fly the atomic strike. He found that constant test-flying and training had almost worn out the bombers. They were to be exchanged for the very latest models. These planes would have fuel-injection engines, electronically controlled reversible propellers, and generally would be much better than their predecessors.

Tibbets would soon have the best fleet of bombers that America could provide.

27

In the early evening of March 9, the first of 325 B-29 bombers took off from Guam. This B-29 was a pathfinder, a torchbearer for LeMay’s gamble.

Eleven other bombers followed it into the air. Between them, they would pinpoint the northeastern sector of Tokyo. LeMay code-named the operation “Meetinghouse.” In China, a meetinghouse was a place where important decisions were made.

The pathfinders were to sow their incendiaries carefully in a giant “X” whose arms would cross several square miles of one of the most congested cities in the world.

Chomping on a cigar, the chunky LeMay watched the main bomber force take off. In a few hours, either his bold plan would be vindicated or he would be in disgrace.

None of the 325 bombers climbing into the dusk was armed. Their bomb bays were filled with a total of two thousand tons of incendiary bombs.

LeMay had ended his briefing of the crews with: “You’re going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen!”

Few fliers had reacted with enthusiasm. Doubtless many of them recalled the first American air attack on Tokyo, in 1942; three of General James Doolittle’s fliers whose planes had been forced down by the Japanese had been tried for murder, found guilty, and executed.

LeMay’s crews were also concerned about their orders to attack at such low levels without armaments. Intelligence was not comforting. Around Tokyo the Japanese were reported to have 331 heavy-caliber guns, 307 automatic-firing weapons, 322 single-engine fighters, and 105 twin-engine interceptors.

LeMay had confidently predicted that this defensive arsenal would be outwitted by his surprise tactics. Now he must wait for confirmation from General Tom Power, his chief of staff, flying in a lead bomber with orders to radio back news of the attack.

The pathfinders arrived over Tokyo at midnight. The city was in darkness. The weather forecast was correct: skies were clear; a chill, twenty-eight-mile-an-hour wind had sent most people to bed early.

Flying downwind, the pathfinders marked the target area with magnesium, napalm, and phosphorus, sowing their canisters in straight lines across wooden buildings and narrow streets.

At 12:30 A.M., the main task force arrived over Meetinghouse. No fighters scrambled to meet them; ground fire was minimal. As LeMay had predicted, Tokyo’s defenses were caught totally unawares by his low-level assault.

The B-29s began to bomb systematically along the spreading arms created by the pathfinders. They dropped loads of pipelike canisters to fuel the growing inferno.

Fifteen thousand feet above the flames, Power’s plane circled the target. The chief of staff radioed a commentary back to Guam. “It’s spreading like a prairie fire… the blaze must be out of control… ground fire sporadic… no fighter opposition….”

The conflagration spread and intensified, sending great whirls of superheated air high into the sky. The bomber pilots felt they were flying, one reported, “in Dante’s Inferno.” Turbulence from the firestorm raised the huge bombers hundreds of feet higher into the air, then sucked them down again. Fliers were sick from the bouncing. Then a new sensation made them vomit afresh: it was the sickly-sweet stench of thousands of bodies burning.

Finally, as planned, at 3:30 A.M. the last B-29 dropped its seven tons into the furnace and fled southward.

Power radioed his final report. “Target completely alight. Flames spreading well beyond Meetinghouse. All Tokyo visible in the glare. Total success.”

The fires were a funeral pyre for some one hundred thousand souls. Almost half a million more were injured. Two hundred and fifty thousand buildings were destroyed in an area of about sixteen square miles.

Of the 325 bombers that created this holocaust, 14 were lost.

LeMay’s gamble had worked. He immediately ordered further low-level sorties against Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Okayama.

During the past two months, all LeMay’s efforts had been devoted to developing these tactics. There had been no time for anything else—certainly not to listen to the recurring rumor that some crack new outfit was coming to the Marianas.

But now, in his moment of triumph, the rumors took on substance. LeMay was told that part of North Field, Tinian, was being annexed on direct orders from Washington to house a “special bombing group.”

LeMay reckoned that unless it arrived soon, there might be little left for this new outfit to bomb except ruins and paddy fields.

28

In Tokyo, General Army Headquarters was in turmoil. Following the incendiary raid, the high command was evacuating to the more protected, tree-shaded grounds of the military academy at Ichigaya Heights, in the west-central area of the city.

The journey across Tokyo was unusually difficult, for LeMay’s raiders had created universal panic.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, with air temperatures in the blitzed area reaching two thousand degrees, the frenzy to escape had turned ordinary citizens into savages. Thousands jumped into the Sumida River, to die either from drowning or when the fires sucked out the oxygen from their lungs. Police and firemen were trampled in the panic. Great mounds of dead were piled in the streets of northeast Tokyo.

In the past twenty-four hours, thousands had trudged out of Tokyo with nothing but the clothes they wore. Behind them, they left charred families and friends. This exodus posed a serious problem. The refugees could spread panic, cause confusion, and lower morale.

Major General Seizo Arisue was glad it was not his concern to deal with such matters. His immediate interest focused on the reaction of naval intelligence to the raid.

They had withdrawn their peace feelers to Allen Dulles. It did not take Arisue long to discover why. Far from being demoralized by the attack of LeMay’s bombers, the admirals had stiffened their will to resist.

Naval chief of staff Admiral Soemu Toyoda announced that the only way Japan could survive “with dignity” in the face of such terror was to fight on, to launch determined counterattacks, to make America realize the Japanese nation would never surrender. The navy, he let it be known, was considering means of carrying the war to American shores.

The talk at army headquarters was even fiercer. Staff officers, thirsting for revenge, devised a plan to saturate the Marianas with shimpu attacks, but the problems of getting the kamikazes to within striking distance proved insurmountable.

Gauging the strength of this bellicose mood, Arisue decided this was not the time to talk peace with the enemy. He also decided to suspend his own efforts to reach Dulles.

Word of the destruction in Tokyo had not officially reached Hiroshima. The censor’s office had so far refused to clear reports on the raid for the nation’s press and radio.

The news reached Hiroshima unofficially on March 12 by one of the few trains civilians could still use. Within an hour after the refugees from Tokyo had arrived in Hiroshima, Mayor Senkichi Awaya knew what had happened in the capital. Using his official position, Awaya managed after several hours of anxious waiting to reach his wife by telephone. She and the children were unharmed. He told his wife to bring the children with her and join him as soon as possible in Hiroshima, where they would be safe.

Sachiyo Awaya hesitated. She and the children had all survived the raid; the refugees were probably exaggerating; anyway, the army in Tokyo said it was unlikely the bombers would return, and if they did, next time they would receive a hot reception.

Awaya was aware that at any moment the connection might be interrupted; telephone operators had the authority to terminate any call which was not of a military nature. The mayor spoke urgently. “The enemy will return. That is the nature of war. You and the children must come here.”

Still, his wife expressed her reluctance to leave Tokyo. He then advanced an argument that he knew she would find difficult to reject. “It is possible that we will all die in the battles to come. If that is to happen, I wish us to die together as one family.”

His wife promised that as a start she would bring their eldest son. The fourteen-year-old boy could continue his education at a school in Hiroshima.

One week later, between 7:30 and 8:00 A.M. on March 19, Hiroshima experienced its first air raid. Four carrier-based fighter-bombers flew across the city. Only two bombs were dropped; one fell harmlessly in a river, the other killed two people and destroyed their homes.

The planes escaped before antiaircraft fire could be brought to bear on them. The incident caused widespread excitement and speculation in the city. Fierce arguments broke out between skeptics and the proponents of the view that Roosevelt had agreed to spare Hiroshima. In the end, the supporters of this theory triumphantly pointed to the fact that the bombers had not made a second pass over the city. The two bombs they had released were dropped in error—that is why they had sheered away. And, to clinch their case, the proponents pointed to an inescapable truth: while there were a number of air-raid warnings in the two weeks that followed, no bombers had come anywhere near the city.

These recent warnings delayed mayoral assistant Kazumasa Maruyama’s regular weekly trip into the countryside to barter for food for his wife and Mayor Awaya.

This morning Maruyama had risen at five and left his wife still sleeping in their tiny bedroom. He listened to the radio before leaving the apartment. The radio was important. Air-raid warnings were broadcast over it. It was the radio, with its first hint of a “strategic withdrawal,” that had prepared listeners for the loss of Iwo Jima.

The newscaster this morning was as confident as ever. The Special Attack Corps, the kamikazes, had yesterday struck another mortal blow against the enemy off the shores of Okinawa. Among their many targets was “the pride of the enemy fleet, the warship Indianapolis.” The name of the ship did not register with Maruyama, but he deduced that behind the blaring words, the radio was starting to prepare its audience for an unpalatable fact: the enemy had reached the shores of Okinawa.

If Okinawa should fall, Maruyama had no doubt, the enemy would then invade Japan itself.

The thought of what that would mean was too horrible to contemplate. The newspapers and radio spoke of American soldiers as “bloodthirsty devils”; perhaps, after all, he had been wrong to support the mayor’s idea of bringing his family to Hiroshima. Perhaps they would be better off near Tokyo, protected by the largest concentration of defending troops.

Still dwelling on the dilemma the broadcast had created in his mind, the mayor’s assistant headed out of the city on foot.

Commodities were more useful than money for obtaining a few vegetables and fruit to augment the legal rations. From today, those rations were to be cut further, the rice portion reduced to three bowls a day for twenty days in any month. No food would be issued for the remaining calendar days. The quality of the rice was so poor that Maruyama would never have eaten it before the war. Fish, the other staple of the Japanese diet, was also becoming scarce. American bombers were systematically destroying the fishing fleet.

Maruyama was warmly greeted at the farm. He was the most important customer among all those who came to offer goods in exchange for food. Soon, Maruyama was sitting cross-legged in his stockinged feet in the farmhouse living room, sipping tea.

Normally the farmer plied him with questions about life in the city. This morning it was the farmer who had information to impart, and he was determined to make the most of it.

Maruyama provided the opening by mentioning that the air raid had made many people nervous in Hiroshima.

“The city will not be bombed again.”

Maruyama smiled wanly, but he knew he must not offend the farmer; he was a touchy man and could sell his produce to whomever he liked. Maruyama said he hoped his host was right and that the city would be spared.

“It will. You see, when the war is over, Americans will build their villas here! It is such a beautiful city.”

Maruyama complimented the farmer on being privy to such interesting information.

“I cannot tell you how I learned it. But I can tell you this, Mr. Secretary, that a client almost as important as you told me.”

Nodding gravely, Maruyama stood up. It was time for business. He opened the bundle of old clothes he had brought. As each item was displayed, the farmer reached into his own sacks and laid out his purchasing price in produce.

Maruyama estimated that, with the clothes, he had purchased enough food for the mayor as well as for his wife and himself for three days—perhaps five if his wife was extra careful. He exchanged deep bows with the farmer, carefully bundled up the produce, bowed a last time, and retraced his steps to Hiroshima.

He had traveled less than a mile when a peasant rushed out of his cottage and shouted that the radio had just announced another air-raid alert.

Unable to resist, Maruyama did his own bit of rumormongering. “Don’t worry. Hiroshima won’t be bombed again. Haven’t you heard? The Americans want to build their villas here! Maybe even Roosevelt will come!”

He walked briskly on toward the city.

29

Group bombardier Tom Ferebee was relaxed as he announced laconically, as he always did at the initial point, that straight ahead and thirty-two thousand feet below he could see the small desert town of Calipatria in Southern California.

Beyond the town lay the Salton Sea and the 509th’s bombing range.

There were now three minutes to go before the brand-new bomber reached the aiming point. It was the first of the replacement aircraft that Parsons had deemed necessary. It had arrived at Wendover on March 9 and had been closely examined by Tibbets, van Kirk, and Ferebee.

The new bomber was different. Though a lot of the armor plating as well as the guns had been left out, it was built more ruggedly. Tibbets admired the reversible propellers. Ferebee liked the quick-action bomb doors; they were designed to close in two seconds after a bomb was released. This would allow the plane to carry out its 155-degree turn even faster. Van Kirk appreciated his navigator’s seat; it was more comfortable than the one he was used to.

A team of engineers and mechanics had flown in with the aircraft. At Tibbets’s request, they had made a number of minor adjustments. But one of the engineers was not satisfied with the way the bombsight gears were working. Ferebee said he could adjust matters after a test drop or two. The engineer fussily explained that was not the way he did things. He put in a monitoring set and was given special clearance to make this one flight to observe the operation of the Norden sight.

Tibbets assigned Lewis to try out the new bomber on what was by now a regular milk run from Wendover to the Salton Sea. Ferebee was on board partly because this time they were to drop one of the precious “fuzed units.” These were dummy bombs the exact shape of the atomic bomb and containing the proximity-fuze firing mechanism. Each of these mechanisms cost the equivalent of a Cadillac.

In addition to the engineer, there was another new face on board, Second Lieutenant Morris R. Jeppson of the First Ordnance Squadron. In the roomy cabin he shared with the navigator and radioman, Jeppson had rigged up a control panel to monitor the bomb’s complex internal electronics before it was dropped from the plane.

A religious and reserved young man, Jeppson quietly went about his work, oblivious of all the banter around him. He knew the fliers were curious about his presence, and he sensed they were eager to pump him about the First Ordnance. But he admired the way they restrained themselves. He liked that sort of discipline.

Jeppson was a physics graduate who while in the service had studied at Yale and Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His talents were noticed, and he was assigned to the First Ordnance.

He took an immediate liking to Lewis. The pilot was friendly, suggesting where he could store his equipment and telling him what he should expect on the flight. So far, it had been uneventful. The feedback from the cables running from his control panel to the bomb revealed that the weapon was “acting normally.”

“Two minutes to AP.”

Lewis acknowledged Ferebee’s words. He prepared to slam shut the bomb-bay doors the moment the bombardier announced the blockbuster was on its way down.

The engineer had a duplicate of the bombsight Ferebee crouched over. If the bombardier’s instrument malfunctioned, the bomb could still be dropped by Ferebee’s ordering the engineer to pull a lever.

For his own purposes, the engineer synchronized his movements with every adjustment Ferebee was making.

“One and a half minutes to AP.”

Suddenly the B-29 leaped higher into the air.

“Je—sus!”

Ferebee’s strangled cry was followed closely by another from Lewis. “You’ve dropped the bomb too soon!”

Ferebee corrected him. “I didn’t. That engineer must have done it.”

Lewis yelled at the engineer over the intercom. “Did you touch anything?”

“I thought we were at the drop point!”

Ferebee’s next words stopped Lewis’s flow of invective. “It’s falling straight into the town!”

He watched, transfixed, as the bomb plummeted earthward. Though it contained only a small amount of explosive, with its ballast and electronic equipment the blockbuster weighed over nine thousand pounds; it could do considerable damage.

“Bob, hold her steady.”

Lewis held his original heading.

Jeppson calculated that the bomb needed about a minute to reach the ground.

Thirty seconds passed.

Then Ferebee spoke. “It’s going to miss.”

The bomb fell half a mile beyond Calipatria.

Within hours, Manhattan Project agents had sealed off the area and were searching for the unit. It had buried itself ten feet underground. It was recovered, and bulldozers filled in the hole. No one in Calipatria knew how close the town had been to being hit.

The flight back to Wendover was a tense one. The wretched engineer’s attempts to apologize met with icy silence.

At Wendover he was bundled into a car and driven to Salt Lake City. There he was put on a train by project agents and told he would never again be allowed near the air base.

Tibbets glanced in angry disbelief at one of his most trusted officers, a short, trimly built lieutenant colonel. Uanna, seated beside Tibbets, continued to question the officer. “You admit you took a B-twenty-nine without authority to fly home on a weekend pass?”

The officer maintained his aggressive pose. “I have the authority to take a plane.”

Uanna’s reproof was mild. “Nobody in the entire air force has the authority to take our most top-secret bomber for pleasure purposes.”

Tibbets took over. “You took the plane and left it unguarded for two whole days on a civilian airfield?”

“Yes. But the plane was locked.”

“And then you gave your father a conducted tour of an airplane that few servicemen on this base are allowed to go near?”

“My father’s interested in flying. I didn’t think there was any harm.”

Tibbets exploded. “I don’t want to hear about your father’s interests! And it seems to me that you have never been able to think!”

“Colonel, I’m prepared to apologize—”

“Apologize! You think that settles matters? You’ve broken every goddam security rule. And you call yourself an officer! I’m going to make an example of you!”

The officer waited uneasily.

His decision made, Tibbets wasted no time in delivering sentence. “You’ve got just sixty minutes to pack. A plane will be waiting for you. Its destination is Alaska. You’re going to spend the rest of your war talking to penguins!”

“Colonel—”

“Another word and I’ll have you court-martialed. Now, get out!”

The disgraced officer left.

This was the third case of the week in which security regulations had been breached. Two days earlier, on March 20, a couple of lieutenants on duty at the telemetering station at the Salton Sea bombing range had left their highly secret ballistic-measuring equipment and driven across the border into Mexico “for a little fun.” They, too, had been swiftly sent to Alaska.

Privately, Tibbets sympathized with the three officers, but even if he had wanted to, he could not have shown them compassion. That might have opened a floodgate, and the carefully wrought security protection he and Uanna had built up could have been swept away.

Tibbets knew his actions did not make him popular. But as he had once told van Kirk, he wasn’t “trying to win a goddam beauty contest.”

Transferring a senior and two junior officers to the icy wilds of Alaska would be a deterrent. But it would not alleviate the tensions. For six months, Tibbets had driven his men at a relentless pace. And, until a few days ago, Tibbets himself had not been that familiar with “the object of all this slave driving,” the top-secret nuclear mechanism inside the bomb. Then, Parsons had flown to Wendover with schematic drawings of the uranium bomb in order to discuss with Tibbets a new series of fuzing tests. Tibbets already knew the bomb would be about ten feet long, twenty-eight inches in diameter, and weigh something over nine thousand pounds, but what he learned from Parsons caused him to be “amazed by the sweet simplicity of the thing.”

The bomb’s uranium core would weigh only about twenty-two pounds, split into two unequal segments kept six feet apart inside the barrel of a cannon, which was itself inside the bomb’s casing. Between the two pieces of uranium 235 was a “tamper,” a neutron-resistant shield made from a high-density alloy. The tamper was to stop the two pieces of uranium from reacting with each other—to help prevent premature “crit”—which would cause an unscheduled nuclear explosion.

The smaller piece of uranium 235 would weigh five pounds. This was the atomic “bullet” which, when the gun was activated by the proximity-fuzing system, would be fired down the gun barrel at the “target,” the larger piece of uranium 235 fixed to the muzzle of the cannon just a few feet away. The “target” would weigh about seventeen pounds.

When fired, the force of the uranium “bullet” would make it sever the pins previously holding it in place, break through the tamper, and ram it into the “target”—causing the nuclear explosion.

After the description, Tibbets was jolted when Parsons told him that despite all the planning and testing, the scientists at Los Alamos still did not know if the uranium bomb would actually work. Tibbets remembered how “Parsons just sat there and said there was no way of being certain the weapon would go off—until it was used. He didn’t think the risk of failure was high. But it was there.”

Ever since, Tibbets had been mulling over what Parsons had told him. That, coupled with the security breaches by the three officers, made him edgy. Then, in the evening, he was called from dinner to interview a man who had checked into Wendover’s State Line Hotel. Security agents had discovered he was using a false name. For thirty minutes the man resisted Tibbets’s questions. Then one of the agents spoke. “We’re going to turn you in as a spy. Spies in this country go to the electric chair.”

The man talked. He admitted he was using an alias, in the hope of selling phony magazine subscriptions on the base. He was escorted to Salt Lake City and warned to stay out of Utah.

The episode further worried Tibbets. Inside the base, it was now an open secret that the group was going to drop “a big bomb” on Japan. Tibbets thought it was only a matter of time before there was a serious security leak.

30

Even here in Warm Springs, Georgia, President Roosevelt could not shake off the cares of war. At noon, a messenger appeared in his study with a leather pouch. The mail from Washington had arrived to intrude upon the rest that his doctors had ordered for the chief executive.

In some ways, he had reason to be cheerful. The Allies were winning. Germany was on the verge of collapse. In the Pacific, landings had been made on Okinawa by 183,000 soldiers and marines.

But already the death toll was high. This morning, as usual, the president had the latest casualty figures—6,481 Americans had died in battle during the past week, bringing the total to 196,669 American lives lost in the fight against the Axis.

He was still studying these figures when Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the portrait painter, arrived.

Roosevelt was dressed, as she had requested, in a Harvard tie and a vest, neither of which he liked. He allowed her to slip his cloak over his shoulders. Its dark cloth contrasted with the curious luminosity of the president’s features. His skin had become parchmentlike, and this morning was aglow with an intense brightness that seemed to come from deep within.

Suddenly, he raised his left hand to his forehead and pressed hard against the skin. His hand fell back on his lap, and his fingers began to twitch. He dropped his cigarette and raised his right hand to massage the back of his neck. He closed his eyes and began to moan softly. Then his head slumped forward, and he slid down in his seat, limp as a puppet.

The president’s doctor arrived in moments.

At 3:35 P.M., April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was pronounced clinically dead.

The free world had lost a statesman, America a leader, and the Manhattan Project, at this most crucial stage, its benefactor.

Oblivious of what had just happened in Georgia, Harry S. Truman, thirty-fourth vice-president of the United States, this afternoon acting in his capacity as president of the Senate, appeared to the assembled senators to be taking copious notes of the debate in progress. Many thought it was typical of the way Truman did things: he was a meticulous fact-gatherer.

In reality, he was writing a letter to his mother, full of chatty news. He ended with a reminder.

At 4:56, the Senate recessed, and Truman dropped into Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office for a bourbon and water. He was still there when Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, telephoned and asked Truman to “please come over and come in through the main Pennsylvania Avenue entrance.”

Truman did not ask why. He assumed Roosevelt was back from Warm Springs and wanted to raise some minor point with him.

Truman was shown up to Eleanor Roosevelt’s second-floor study. She walked toward him and grasped his arm. Her voice was calm and measured. “Harry, the president is dead.”

Dumbfounded, Truman instinctively looked at his watch to remember the moment he had heard the unbelievable news. It was 5:25 P.M.

Mrs. Roosevelt spoke again. “Harry, is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now.”

She invited him to use the study telephone, and left to attend to the funeral arrangements.

At 7:00, Truman went to the Cabinet Room in the White House to be sworn in. The Cabinet watched in silence as Chief Justice Harlan Stone explained the brief ceremony to Truman.

Stone consulted a piece of paper and asked Truman to confirm that the “S” in his name stood for “Shippe.”

Truman’s twangy drawl cut through the doom-laden atmosphere. “The ‘S’ stands for nothing. It’s just an initial.”

The chief justice erased “Shippe” from the oath. An aide whispered to Stone that they still could not begin, as they did not have a Bible. They all waited in strained silence until a frantic search of the White House produced one.

At 7:09 P.M., the Bible was handed to Truman, who repeated after Stone the presidential oath of office. “I, Harry S. Truman, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Truman impulsively kissed the Bible. Then he motioned for the Cabinet to join him at the long table. He made them a promise. “It will be my effort to carry on as I believe the president would have done.”

For Truman, the new president, for all the men in the room, Franklin D. Roosevelt was still “The President.”

Truman asked Roosevelt’s Cabinet to stay on in office. But he gave a hint of things to come when he closed the meeting with another promise: “I will assume full responsibility for such decisions as have to be made.”

The Cabinet filed out. At the door, Stimson lingered. When he spoke to Truman, his voice was unsteady. “Mr. President, I must talk to you on a most urgent matter.”

Truman nodded.

“I wish to inform you about an immense project that is under way—a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.”

Stimson paused.

Truman waited, but the secretary of war did not elaborate.

On the first morning of his presidency, Truman awoke at his customary hour of 6:30. This Friday the thirteenth was going to be a hot, sticky day. Then it struck him that a president of the United States did not concern himself with forecasts unless they affected important issues. Whatever the weather, he now had to run the country.

At the White House, Truman showed himself a swift decision maker. That morning he dealt quickly and surely with certain domestic issues and was briefed by members of the Cabinet.

At 2:30, James Byrnes arrived. Truman had two questions he wanted Byrnes to answer. First, would Byrnes give him a written report on the Yalta Conference? Byrnes had taken copious notes there for Roosevelt, and he immediately agreed to provide a memorandum.

The second question was more surprising. Truman began by reminding Byrnes that because of the way he had become president, there now was no vice-president. According to the Constitution, if Truman died or became seriously incapacitated and unable to remain president, the secretary of state would succeed him.

Truman asked if Byrnes would like that post. It was a surprising offer in view of their previously cool relationship. As the unofficial “assistant president,” Byrnes had been far closer to Roosevelt than Truman, and at times had used his power to snub the vice-president. But in asking Byrnes to become first in line of succession to the presidency, Truman was displaying the political skill that made him so formidable. He wanted Byrnes on his side; he was prepared to buy him.

Byrnes accepted.

Then, speaking in a voice Truman felt was one of “great solemnity,” Byrnes made an announcement more startling and mysterious than Stimson’s had been on the previous evening. “Mr. President, we are perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world. It might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”

31

Beser, like most of the 509th, had heard the news of Roosevelt’s death over the radio. Some of the men had been listening to NBC’s “Front Page Ferrell”; others had been tuned to CBS’s “Wilderness Road”; by far the majority had been following the adventures of ABC’s highly popular “Captain Midnight.”

At 5:49, the first flash interrupted all three programs. By 6:30, local radio stations in Utah were broadcasting details of the poignant cable Eleanor Roosevelt had sent to her four sons: two of them were in the navy, sailing off the coast of Okinawa.

Beser turned off the radio. His reason for doing so was understandable. “By switching it off, I believed I could deny the truth. President Roosevelt had been leading us for so long that his death was impossible to immediately accept.”

That evening, members of the officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs on the base made their gesture: there would be no gambling or drinking until Roosevelt was buried. Eatherly surprised many by being one of the most vociferous supporters of this pledge.

Bob Lewis touched a popular emotional chord with his words. “I never met the guy. But I felt that I had lost a great buddy.”

For many of these young men, who could hardly remember when he had not been president, the thought of an America without FDR in the White House was impossible to comprehend. Gradually, though, the talk at Wendover, as elsewhere, turned to the new president. Of most immediate concern to the 509th was his attitude toward the prosecution of the war. Everybody at Wendover knew where Roosevelt had stood. Many of them could quote from his speeches with their recurring theme that the enemy must be pursued to its lair. Roosevelt had almost lived to see the pursuit reach Berlin.

But would Truman be so keen to conquer Tokyo?

A well-rehearsed team, pilot Charles Sweeney and bombardier Kermit Beahan brought the B-29 toward the aiming point. For this test, they were using the makeshift range that had been laid out on the salt flats a few miles from Wendover.

Thirty-two thousand feet below, grouped near the AP, scientists and technicians from the First Ordnance Squadron waited to see if the latest adjustments they had made to the bomb’s proximity-fuzing system would work.

Today’s bomb was filled with ballast and a pound of explosive, enough to cause a small aerial explosion so that the scientists could see whether the fuzing mechanism worked at its preset height of two thousand feet.

Sweeney’s crew, No. 15, had been briefed by Tibbets on the test flight. He had reminded them of the importance and value of each fuzed unit, particularly as the system was still proving troublesome.

Though Tibbets had not said so, he was paying the chubby-cheeked Sweeney and his fliers a rare compliment. In selecting them for a flight of considerable consequence for the scientists, he was openly acknowledging what almost all the other crews now accepted: crew 15 was probably the best in the 509th.

The only challenge to this claim came from the vociferous Lewis and his crew.

The relationship between Lewis and Sweeney had been cool from the days both men had worked on the original B-29 test program. Lewis suspected that the Boston Irish Sweeney had “kissed the Blarney Stone”; certainly, Sweeney had a great deal of charm, which he used to get the very best from all those he worked with. It didn’t work with Lewis, a failure that Sweeney philosophically accepted. Professionally, he felt that Lewis was “lucky” to be in the 509th, and even luckier to act, on occasion, as copilot to Tibbets.

This sort of personal tension had increased the competitive spirit between the two crews.

Tibbets watched the situation carefully. He never appeared to favor any crew unduly. After Sweeney had been assigned the test flight, Lewis had been asked to perform a series of takeoffs and landings with a nine-thousand-pound bomb filled with high explosive in his bomb bay. The exercise was not so pointless as it sounded to the crew. Tibbets wanted Lewis, and later the others, to become “psychologically prepared” for the possibility that one day they might be forced to land carrying an actual atomic bomb.

Tibbets was aware of the view prevailing within the higher echelons of the Manhattan Project: unlike conventional bombs, the atomic bomb was far more valuable than the aircraft carrying it, or the crew. He conveyed this thought to Lewis. The pilot performed his exercises with the gentle care of a veteran Red Cross transport pilot.

Approaching the aiming point, Sweeney watched Lewis circling far below. Then Beahan called out, in a Texas accent even Eatherly agreed was “broad,” that the AP was almost in the center of his bombsight’s cross hairs. Beahan, an overseas veteran like Ferebee, was a highly efficient technician, known to his fellow fliers as “The Great Artiste.” Crew 15 held him in such reverence that they boasted he could “hit a nickel from six miles up.”

Beahan asked for a minute course change. Copilot Fred Olivi, a bulky twenty-three-year-old Italian from Chicago, watched Sweeney respond. Olivi thought it was “almost magic” the way Sweeney and Beahan worked together.

The crew braced themselves for the familiar upward thrust following the bomb’s release.

This flight would make another entry in the strictly illegal diary Sergeant Abe Spitzer was keeping of his time with the 509th. He was the radio operator and, at the age of thirty-five, looked upon by the rest of the crew as an old man. They would have been surprised at the gentle-voiced Spitzer’s acid observations on some of the men he worked with. But even Spitzer had to admit that, in the air, crew 15 was a closely coordinated unit.

“Bomb away!”

Beahan’s words were followed by a leap upward from the B-29, cut short when Sweeney went into the usual 155-degree turn. Simultaneously, an explosion rocked the bomber.

Sergeant “Pappy” Dehart, the tail gunner and another Texan, shouted, “It’s blown up!”

The bomb’s fuzing mechanism had detonated prematurely, less than a hundred feet below the B-29. The spent unit continued toward the ground.

Sweeney brought the aircraft under control and landed. Tibbets was waiting for him. He put into words the unspoken fear of them all. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen when we’ve got a real one on board.”

Over the weekend of April 21, the 509th had made their usual journey into Salt Lake City, and already the complaints were being received in the duty office.

Eatherly had set the pace, racing his roadster hub-to-hub against that of his flight engineer. They passed a whiskey bottle back and forth, from one car to the other, as they traveled at close to ninety miles an hour. The bottle was empty when they reached Salt Lake City.

A number of fliers took rooms in the Hotel Utah, and soon noisy parties were under way. A redhead was seen running naked down a hotel corridor, pursued by several pilots in their shorts.

On Monday morning, the Salt Lake City police department was phoning Wendover with a mounting list of breakages, assaults, and traffic violations.

Tibbets managed to placate the civilian authorities. But the symptoms were clear: the 509th had reached breaking point.

The time had come to leave Wendover.

In Tibbets’s mind, there was another good reason for their departure. He had come to the conclusion that the scientists were “tinkering” with the atomic bomb; they seemed “more concerned with producing a perfect weapon instead of being satisfied with the one they had and using it to end the war. They wanted to improve the design, run more tests, make endless changes before they would let the bomb be used in combat.”

This troubled Tibbets; he could imagine the physicists “still tinkering” when the war was over, “and the whole damn thing would have been a waste of time.”

The 509th’s base was reserved on Tinian. Weeks ago, orders had been given that a ship be standing by at Seattle to carry the ground echelon to the Pacific. All Tibbets had to do was telephone Washington, use the Silverplate code, “and we could be in the war.”

The thought of seeing action again was exhilarating. But the prospect of what would happen to him if he actually ordered the 509th to be mobilized worried Tibbets. “Groves might have me stripped of my command, posted to Alaska, even sign court-martial papers.”

Nevertheless, Tibbets asked the base telephone exchange to connect him with Air Force Command Headquarters in Washington. Once plugged through to his liaison officer, his message was brief. “This is Silverplate. We are ready to move.”

The matter was soon arranged. The group’s main ground-echelon force would leave Wendover for embarkation at Seattle on May 6. The bomber crews would fly out to the Pacific later.

Soon afterward, Tibbets received a priority call from Washington, ordering him to fly there at once. His caller offered a gratuitous piece of news. “Colonel, you’re in big trouble with Gee-Gee.”

Gee-Gee was one of Groves’s nicknames.

Tibbets arrived in Groves’s office early in the evening.

“As I came through the door, he erupted. Who the hell did I think I was, ordering my outfit overseas? For ten solid minutes he raked me over the coals, up one side and down the other, never repeating himself. I never had such a flaying. I had never seen him so mad. Then, suddenly, he stopped and gave me a big smile and said, ‘Goddammit, you’ve got us moving! Now they can’t stop us!’ He was tickled to death I had done it. Without my planes, there was no way the scientists could keep tinkering with their toy.”

32

The invitation to dinner with his commanding officer, Colonel Hiroshi Abe, came as a pleasant surprise to Tatsuo Yokoyama. The antiaircraft gunnery officer’s relationship with Abe had until now been distant and formal.

Then, a week ago, Abe had invited Yokoyama to dine at his home near Hiroshima Castle this Saturday night. There was one condition: an air raid would cancel the invitation. In the past weeks there had been a number of alerts. And once, a stream of bombers had passed high over the city.

But since the two bombs had been dropped over a month ago, on March 19, Hiroshima had remained free of attack.

After evening gunnery practice, Yokoyama dressed in his best uniform and told his sergeant where he could be reached.

The sergeant, the gun post’s gossip, smiled broadly and said he was sure Yokoyama’s evening would be undisturbed, “because Truman’s mother is a prisoner in Hiroshima!”

Yokoyama was astonished.

The sergeant was insistent. “She was on a visit to the city when the war started. She has been here ever since!”

“Who told you this?”

The sergeant said he knew “somebody” on Lieutenant General Shoji Fujii’s staff. Fujii, the district commander, was keeping Truman’s mother in Hiroshima Castle as a hostage against air attacks.

Common sense told Yokoyama to dismiss the story. But increasingly, the most outlandish tales turned out to be true. There had been the yarn about fifteen-year-old boys being taught to fly as kamikaze pilots in the Special Attack Corps. He had not believed what he had heard until he had actually seen some of them at Hiroshima Airport. He had also discounted the tale that old women were being shown how to sharpen bamboo poles and use them like spears, until he saw women practicing on the grounds of East Training Field.

He decided to check the Truman story with Colonel Abe.

Abe’s house was a small, compact dwelling near the castle. He was a widower and lived there with his daughter. Yokoyama was surprised to see he was the only guest.

Abe was a good host, with a plentiful supply of sake. Mellowed and relaxed, Yokoyama asked about President Truman’s mother.

Abe laughed uproariously. He said he wished the story were true; then she could answer some questions about her son.

Lowering his voice, Abe told his guest still another story. “Truman’s mother is from Hiroshima! That is why we have not been bombed. She has told her son to spare this one city in all Japan.”

Yokoyama asked why, then, was Hiroshima being prepared for attack? What was the purpose of the fire lanes?

Abe told him, “It helps create a mood of militancy. People who lose their homes will be ready to fight even harder for their lives, Japan, and the emperor!”

Yokoyama asked if this meant that after all these months of practice he and his men would have no chance to fight. If this were so, he would respectfully request a posting to Tokyo or one of the other cities where air attacks were now frequent.

Abe calmed his guest and invited him to eat. Dinner was served by Abe’s daughter, a plumpish, moon-faced girl in her late teens. After dishing up bowls of rice and slivers of meat and fish, she left the men to eat and talk.

Yokoyama again brought up the question of a transfer.

His host looked at him carefully. “I have not invited you here to discuss such matters, but rather something that is important to me.”

Yokoyama became respectful and silent as his host explained that he had long been impressed by the younger man’s qualities. Abe revealed he had even made inquiries about Yokoyama’s family background. “It is very satisfactory. You have honorable parents.”

Knowing what was coming, for such inquiries could mean only one thing, Yokoyama waited.

Abe’s next words were harsh and matter-of-fact; a businessman making an offer. “Marry my daughter, and your future will be assured. I will see to that.”

Bowing gravely, Yokoyama promised his host to discuss the matter with his family. Such talks were essential before the proposed marriage could be formally contracted.

It would mean a trip home to Tokyo. Yokoyama found that prospect almost as exciting as the reason for making the journey.

When Yokoyama reached Hiroshima Airport on April 28, he found the army transport he planned to take to Tokyo had left early. It worried Yokoyama that he had missed the flight. He knew how much trouble Colonel Abe had taken to get him a seat on the plane.

Yokoyama tried to hitch a lift on the next transport to the capital. He was told to wait. He sat on the ground outside the operations room and waited for his name to be called.

Hiroshima’s airport was being extended. It was too small for the growing demands of the military. It was crammed with their aircraft. Yokoyama watched a transport taxi by. From a nearby hut a group of youngsters filed out to the plane in their cut-down overalls. Waiting to greet them was a handsome young flying officer, Second Lieutenant Matsuo Yasuzawa, one of the air force’s most experienced instructors. Every pilot Yasuzawa trained now was meant to be a kamikaze. These youngsters were his latest intake. Their average age was sixteen years.

Yasuzawa was flying them to an airfield about a hundred miles from Hiroshima, on Kyushu, where they would receive their final training. Afterward, they would leave for Okinawa, where this first month since the Americans had invaded, nearly a thousand kamikaze pilots had died. They had sunk or damaged over a hundred American ships.

Yasuzawa realized how important holding Okinawa was to Japan. He hated having to remain behind as an instructor. He had recently been stopped by a senior officer just as he was about to take off in a training plane with the intention of ramming into a B-29 that was bombing his airfield. Yasuzawa was considered too valuable to lose; apart from instructing experienced pilots how to fly more advanced aircraft, Yasuzawa had the ability to take a raw recruit and teach him the rudiments of flying in ten days. The kamikaze pilots were being given only ten hours’ tuition. They barely knew how to fly. To make sure they did not lose their nerve at the last moment, the cockpits of their suicide craft were sometimes screwed down shortly before takeoff. Once they were airborne, the young pilots had no alternative but to die.

Today, as he settled himself at the controls of his well-used transport, Yasuzawa felt he would end the war preparing school-boys for combat while never experiencing it himself.

Soon after Yasuzawa’s transport trundled into the air, Yokoyama watched a navy fighter-bomber land and taxi toward the communications room. Officers ran to meet it. Out of the cockpit climbed an immaculate figure in a spotless white naval uniform. It was Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who had led the raid on Pearl Harbor and was now the Imperial Japanese Navy’s operations officer.

Listening to the respectful greetings of the other officers, Yokoyama gathered that Fuchida was in Hiroshima to attend one of the regular army-navy liaison conferences. Yokoyama bowed deeply as Fuchida walked briskly past him. The flying ace did not return the greeting. Yokoyama doubted whether Fuchida even noticed him.

Shortly afterward, an officer told Yokoyama there would be no seat available for him that day to Tokyo. He left the airport, his mind still filled with the image of Fuchida. It would be something to cheer him on the long journey he now faced by train to the capital.

Across the city, in their Hiroshima home, Mayor Senkichi Awaya listened sympathetically as his wife and eldest boy told of the rigors of their nightlong train journey from Tokyo. Several times the blacked-out train had been forced to stop until American bombers passed.

Although Mrs. Awaya had agreed to bring their son to Hiroshima weeks ago, only recently had it become convenient to transfer him from his school in Tokyo to the one attached to Hiroshima University. They had decided the other three children would remain in the capital. Their eldest daughter was married and living in Kobe.

The mayor’s assistant, Maruyama, sought to reassure Mrs. Awaya. “They will all be safe as long as they stay out of the center of the cities. And here, you will be safe. Hiroshima is not a large city. They will bomb other places first. By the time it is our turn to be attacked, the war will be over.”

The train carrying Yokoyama to Tokyo left at 4:00 P.M. Six months had passed since he had last made the journey. Nothing had prepared him for the changes he now saw: city after city bore the marks of incendiary bombing. As he came closer to Tokyo, even the darkness could not conceal the destruction.

Leaving the Shimbashi railway station, Yokoyama set out to walk to the southern suburbs where his parents lived. His route took him past the Imperial Hotel. Designed by the brilliant American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the Imperial had survived the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, but now it was a gutted ruin. Farther on, the Ginza—the business and nightlife heart of Tokyo—was a scorched wasteland of ashes and craters.

Yokoyama realized that he had been misled: in Hiroshima the newspapers and radio had given no inkling of the scale of the destruction in Tokyo. For the first time he felt he had been betrayed by the army. He could now see clear evidence that Japan was incapable of winning the war.

Eventually, he reached his parents’ home. The house was intact, but Yokoyama wondered how long it would remain so. The American bombers seemed intent on working their way outward until all of Tokyo was destroyed. Wearily, he entered the house convinced that Japan must make peace or face extinction.

His parents were waiting for him. After they made him comfortable, he told them the purpose of his visit, explaining about Abe’s marriage proposal. Yokoyama described what little he knew of his commander and his daughter. His parents listened gravely. Finally, Yokoyama’s father spoke. Normally, a marriage joining two military families was a desirable thing, but these were not normal times; values were changing. Nobody could be sure what the future attitude of people would be toward members of the armed forces. To have been in the army might be a disadvantage. To be married to the daughter of a ranking officer could even be a liability.

Yokoyama’s parents would promise no more than to consider the matter further after they had made the necessary inquiries about Colonel Abe’s antecedents.

Professor Tsunesaburo Asada’s wife bowed gracefully to her husband as she boarded the train for Nara, bound, along with the families of other important Japanese scientists, for the comparative safety of the countryside. In the past fortnight, Osaka had been attacked three times by formations of B-29s; 20 percent of the city was destroyed.

Mrs. Asada turned and bowed again from the train. Then she was lost behind the press of people crowding the windows to wave to loved ones on the platform.

Asada did not wait for the train to leave. He had work to do. His long period of research had begun to pay off. One of Japan’s latest and most advanced long-range bombers, the Ginga, carrying a single seventeen-hundred-pound bomb, had flown to Saipan and attacked the main American air base on the island. The bomb was fitted with Asada’s proximity fuze, similar to the one that had exploded prematurely under Sweeney’s bomber.

Asada’s fuze had detonated its bomb exactly as planned, thirty-five feet above the Saipan airfield. It had caused considerable destruction. Scores of parked B-29s were destroyed or damaged. The pilot of the Ginga reported to Asada that a large part of the air base was “an ocean of fire.” The photo-reconnaissance pictures showing the wrecked American planes reminded the scientists of similar ones taken at Hickam Field, Pearl Harbor. But it was a short-lived moment of triumph.

The air force could not repeat the attack because its base on Iwo Jima was now in American hands, and the round trip to Saipan from Japan was outside the sixteen-hundred-mile range of the Ginga bomber.

Nevertheless, Asada’s proximity fuze had been proved a success. The navy had ordered twenty thousand of them to be manufactured. Eventually, twelve thousand would be produced, many of them fitted to bombs and stored secretly on Kyushu awaiting an American invasion. When that came, it was planned, the bombs would be exploded at mast-height above the warships and troop-carrying landing craft so as to cause maximum casualties.

Asada was praised by senior naval officers for his invention. He was pleased, though secretly he thought some of the approbation was an attempt to humor him. His death ray remained far from ready for use. But he was still optimistic and spending most of his time on the project.

Meanwhile, the navy now had another new weapon.

It was the brainchild of Dr. Sakyo Adachi, a scientific colleague of Asada’s attached to the naval meteorological department. Adachi had remembered what every Japanese high school pupil knew: although the great trade winds blow from east to west, from America to Japan, there is another wind, the Japan Current, which blows in the opposite direction.

Adachi filled a balloon with gas and attached to it a small canister containing high explosive. The trial balloon bomb was launched and tracked for some distance by a Zero fighter. It climbed steadily into the Japan Current and then headed eastward on a journey which would take it across the Pacific, passing north of Hawaii, and eventually to the coast of the United States.

Other balloon bombs followed.

Radar was not yet advanced enough to warn of their approach.

The Japanese, of course, did not know if the balloons had reached their target. But navy chief of staff Admiral Toyoda, mindful of his promise to carry the war to the American shore, ordered full-scale production of the balloon bombs.

Soon, all of America’s West Coast cities would be targets. Given favorable weather conditions, the balloons might even reach Salt Lake City and Chicago.

In the coming weeks, some six thousand balloon bombs would be launched. Of those that would arrive in the United States, most would fall in the deserts of California and Nevada and the forests of Oregon. It would never be officially revealed how many victims they had claimed. And nobody will ever know how many Japanese balloon bombs still lie unexploded in remote areas of North America.

The first wire-service flash of Roosevelt’s death had reached army intelligence chief Arisue in Tokyo before most people in Warm Springs were aware of the event.

Since then, he had been busily building up a psychological profile of Truman. Most of his information came from the Japanese military attaché in Bern, Lieutenant General Seigo Okamoto, who had been the link in Arisue’s abortive attempts to contact Allen Dulles.

Aided as well by wire-service copy and transcripts of monitored broadcasts, Arisue came to an unexpected conclusion: Truman was going to be even tougher than Roosevelt.

The new president would, in Arisue’s estimation, “overwhelm the old man” who had been prime minister of Japan for the past ten days.

On April 5, a serious political crisis, brewing for weeks, had finally erupted in Tokyo. On that day, General Kumaki Koiso, the compromise premier following Tojo’s forced resignation, had suggested to the military that they allow him a share in their decision making. The generals had refused. Koiso had resigned.

He was replaced by Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, a hero of the Russo-Japanese war, whose frail body bore three bullet marks—a legacy of the days he had fallen foul of right-wing extremists in the army.

Arisue was astounded that Suzuki had accepted a post where the risks of death were even greater. He would have been more astonished to know that the emperor himself had charged Suzuki with the task of finding a means of ending the war. Those means did not, of course, include outright surrender.

Within hours of accepting office, Suzuki had received alarming news. Japan’s ambassador in Moscow had cabled that the Soviet Union did not intend to renew its neutrality pact. It would be allowed to lapse automatically in one year. Finding an acceptable means of ending the conflict became even more urgent.

The prospect of Japan’s negotiating a peace was very much on Arisue’s mind. On the very day Roosevelt was being buried on the other side of the world, he had learned that naval intelligence was again trying to contact Allen Dulles in Switzerland.

Arisue understood the reasoning of his naval counterparts; it coincided with his own. Truman was a hard-liner; it would be better to settle with him now, while Japan still had some bargaining power left. The American bombing offensive, the sea blockade, the relentless ground-fire barrage which had now crept to within 350 miles of Tokyo—to Okinawa, where a fierce and bloody battle was raging for the last major island between the enemy and Japan’s westernmost mainland island, Kyushu—all these would ultimately weaken Japan to the point where the unacceptable unconditional surrender would be all that was left.

But Arisue and the other moderates did not believe Japan should surrender unconditionally. He believed that, by negotiation, Japan should attempt to hold some of the territory her forces had occupied in the war, and even if this proved impossible, there must at absolute minimum be a guarantee by the Allies of the emperor’s safety and continuing omnipotent rule.

Arisue did not trust the navy to achieve even this fundamental requirement in its maneuvering in Switzerland. He cabled military attaché Okamoto in Bern and told him to redouble his efforts to contact Dulles.

33

On Truman’s desk was a letter from Stimson. It had arrived the day before, April 24.

Truman had arranged an appointment for his secretary of war at midday. The president would be happy to have any information that might help him keep the Russians in their place. He had shown his mettle three days earlier when Molotov and Gromyko, en route to the opening session of the United Nations in San Francisco, had stopped by the White House. Truman had told them the Soviet Union was reneging on its Yalta agreements. His language was so blunt and without diplomatic euphemisms that Molotov had bridled. “I have never been talked to like this in my life.”

Truman’s reply was crisp. “Carry out your agreements, and you won’t get talked to like this.”

Promptly at noon, the secretary of war arrived. Stimson said he was expecting one other person. Five minutes later, Groves appeared. He had slipped in through the back door to avoid arousing speculation among the journalists stationed in and around the executive mansion.

Stimson said the meeting was to discuss details of a bomb equal in power to all the artillery used in both world wars.

Groves winced inwardly. He had earlier told Stimson not to lay too great an emphasis on the bomb’s power; he did not want the new president to become alarmed at the sheer magnitude of the weapon.

But Stimson was determined to lay out all the facts. He began to read from a prepared memorandum.

Stimson explained that the theory behind the making of an atomic bomb was widely known. He went on to conjure up a nightmare that could come to pass.

Truman paused, then posed a question: was Stimson at least as concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as with its capacity to shorten the war?

“I am, Mr. President.”

While they were speaking, the United Nations was about to hold its opening session in San Francisco. Stimson had anticipated Truman’s raising this matter. He continued to read from his memo.

Groves had never heard Stimson speak like this. For a moment he may have wondered whether the secretary had been contaminated by his contact with all those “longhairs” who had tried to make Groves’s life such a misery these past months. Then, with a sense of relief, Groves heard what Stimson went on to say.

The secretary stated that, in spite of all this, he still favored using the bomb against Japan; that if it worked, it would probably shorten the war.

The meeting ended with Truman’s agreeing to the formation of a specialist panel, to be known as the Interim Committee, to draft essential postwar legislation and to advise Truman on all aspects of atomic energy.

Stimson agreed to be its chairman.

34

At precisely 6:55 A.M. on April 30 in Hiroshima, Dr. Kaoru Shima was awakened by a five-hundred-pound bomb exploding two blocks from his clinic. It had fallen on the Nomura Life Insurance Building. By the time the doctor had leaped out of bed and rushed to the window, nine other bombs had fallen in a ragged line across the city, killing ten people, injuring another thirty, and damaging twenty-four buildings.

So swift and unexpected was the attack that no warning had been broadcast over the local radio, and no antiaircraft fire directed against the lone B-29 which had dropped the bombs.

Dr. Shima rushed to reassure his patients and staff. Next, he made several telephone calls to Hiroshima Castle. He then waited until the usual morning staff meeting before speaking about the matter further. Dr. Shima knew it was important not to disturb the normal routine of the clinic.

As he sat cross-legged on the floor sipping tea and discussing case histories and further treatment, his calmness soothed his staff. It was only at the end of the meeting that he mentioned the bombing.

Though the army had imposed a news blackout about the attack, Dr. Shima had discovered that the city’s military leaders believed the raid was a fluke.

He explained their view to the staff: the enemy would not have sent a solitary bomber halfway across the Pacific simply to drop a few bombs on Hiroshima. The B-29 had doubtless become separated from a larger force, missed its original target—probably Kure—and simply scattered its bombs on the nearest available city, which, unhappily for them, happened to be Hiroshima.

The staff was not altogether reassured by this explanation. One raised the perpetual fear that the bombers would return in force.

Dr. Shima knew that the city’s good fortune in thus far escaping mass air attack had increased the expectation among many of its people of such a calamity’s occurring. Dr. Shima knew that by “imagining the worst,” people felt they could actually ward off disaster.

He himself was a fatalist, believing that whatever lay ahead, nothing he could do would alter matters. He now offered his staff a simple reaffirmation of his beliefs. “If we are attacked tonight or sometime in the future, we can do nothing to prevent it. What we can do is to remain calm and cheerful and set an example to our patients.”

Alone in his office that night, Dr. Shima did something that an increasing number of Japanese were doing. He tuned his radio to receive the shortwave transmission relayed directly from Guam, bringing, in impeccable Japanese, news of the war that Japan Radio could never broadcast.

The penalty for listening to such enemy broadcasts was death. But for men like Dr. Shima who had come increasingly to distrust the claims of continuing victories made by Japan Radio, the risks were worthwhile.

Radio Guam had been first with the news that Iwo Jima had fallen; this morning, the modulated voice of the unknown Japanese-American speaking from fifteen hundred miles away spoke of the terrible losses the Japanese were experiencing on Okinawa. Then the broadcaster dealt with the latest raids on Tokyo and other cities. He warned that Japan would be razed to the ground unless it surrendered.

The broadcast left Dr. Shima with a feeling of acute despair. He returned the radio dial to the local station, switched it off, and left his office to go home to bed.

Shortly after dawn that same day, in Kure, the wife of submarine commander Mochitsura Hashimoto tried to awaken her husband. An air-raid alert had just sounded, and it was time for the family to go to the shelter.

Cradling her three small sons in her arms, Hashimoto’s wife called with increasing urgency for her husband to wake up.

Hashimoto continued to sleep. Nothing short of an earthquake would awaken him after his last, traumatic voyage.

On April 2, the day after the Americans first landed on Okinawa, Hashimoto was ordered to attack enemy shipping in the area. The outward journey had been a foretaste of what lay ahead. American bombers had mined the coastal waters of the Inland Sea, making it hazardous even before reaching the waters of the Pacific. And when Hashimoto finally arrived off Okinawa, he was promptly bombed by American planes. During the seven days he remained near the island, he was attacked at least fifty times. The longest period he could allow on the surface was a scant four hours in the middle of the night, barely enough time to ventilate the boat and recharge its batteries.

Hashimoto had just missed seeing the American cruiser Indianapolis limping from the scene of battle. It was returning to San Francisco for repairs after having been badly mauled by a kamikaze.

At Okinawa, submarine I.58, like the Indianapolis, took a beating. Even so, Hashimoto was furious when he was ordered back to base. Only when he reached Kure on April 29 had he learned that his boat was the sole Japanese submarine to return safely from Okinawa. He was also informed that I.58 would have to remain in dock for a major inspection.

Too tired to really care, Hashimoto had stumbled home to bed, giving firm instructions to his wife that nothing should be allowed to disturb him.

Now, all her urgent calling did not awaken him. Then she realized it was too late—the familiar drone of aircraft engines was overhead.

Kure Harbor held most of Japan’s remaining warships. It was a priority target for American bombers, which regularly attacked the area in spite of its well-entrenched defenses. This morning, the bark of antiaircraft fire mingled again with the noise of exploding bombs.

Clutching her children, Mrs. Hashimoto lay down beside her still-slumbering husband and listened to the sounds of war.

35

Precisely at 9:00 A.M. on May 8, 1945, President Truman broadcast live to the American nation. In London and Moscow, Churchill and Stalin gave their people the news at the same time. “The Allied armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help….”

Victory in Europe was a fact.

Truman’s words, delivered on this, his sixty-first birthday, confirmed what every American wanted to hear: Germany had surrendered unconditionally. For the first time in modern history, the entire armed forces of a nation became prisoners of war.

In the national rejoicing for V-E Day, most ordinary Americans momentarily forgot Japan. Truman did not. In the twenty-four days he had been president, he had thoroughly briefed himself on his predecessor’s position on a Japanese surrender. Truman had come to the same conclusion: just as with Germany, only unconditional surrender was acceptable for Japan. Pearl Harbor and Japanese atrocities against American prisoners of war made such an uncompromising attitude virtually inevitable.

However, inside the State Department, some officials were arguing that the American government should modify this position, and that a way should be found to make peace with Japan before the Russians intervened and established a Soviet influence in the Pacific. Opposing this view were those who felt that any leniency was unwarranted and would allow the Japanese militarists to survive.

While the internal debate continued, U.S. monitors listening to Japan Radio had picked up a report of a recent statement by Suzuki, the new prime minister of Japan. Although secretly charged by the emperor to bring an end to the war, Suzuki had delivered an astonishingly militant speech to the Diet, telling them that unconditional surrender was totally unacceptable. Japan must fight to the very end.

Suzuki made a passionate appeal to the people.

Truman’s first public pronouncement on Japan since becoming president answered Suzuki.

It was a clear statement of the American government’s position: Surrender unconditionally, or face Armageddon. Shortwave broadcasts beamed it to Japan.

Truman’s warning was dismissed as propaganda. Japan Radio repeated the nation’s determination to fight on.

Truman could only reflect: They have been warned.

Shortly before dawn, Mayor Awaya and his family, along with many other households in the district, were awakened by the sound of trucks, loud knocking, and cries of fear.

The Kempei Tai, the dreaded military police, were continuing the roundup they had begun in early May of people suspected of voicing in private the opinion that the government should make peace. Almost four hundred prominent public figures had been arrested in Hiroshima in the past fortnight.

The Kempei Tai throughout Japan had begun arresting all suspected radicals following the broadcast of Truman’s speech on May 8.

Since then, the American broadcasts had been a constant reminder to those in Japan who dared risk their lives listening that the truth was other than as broadcast by Japan Radio.

Many of the American broadcasts were made by Captain Ellis Zacharias, U.S.N., speaking in fluent Japanese. His voice was becoming as familiar to some Japanese as was that of Tokyo Rose to American servicemen in the Pacific.

Few of his listeners suspected that Zacharias’s words were being carefully studied by government officials in Tokyo for a sign that the United States might, after all, change its mind about unconditional surrender. To the bulk of his listeners, Zacharias was simply an astonishingly well-informed foreigner with a rare understanding of how the Japanese thought and expressed themselves. He did not threaten or bluster; he simply presented the inescapable facts.

In Hiroshima, the Kempei Tai had carried out their customary predawn arrests. Operating from headquarters on the grounds of Hiroshima Castle, the eight-hundred-man-strong Kempei Tai unit had full powers over every civilian and soldier in the city. The interrogators were provided with an official manual, entitled Notes for the Interrogation of Prisoners of War, which contained specific instructions on how to apply a variety of tortures to the body and mind.

The Kempei Tai in Hiroshima were able to perfect their techniques on local civilians whom they had arrested. But what the interrogators hoped for were American prisoners. All units in the area had been alerted that if any enemy fliers were shot down, they must immediately be delivered to Kempei Tai headquarters at Hiroshima Castle.

36

The evening of May 8, Tibbets sipped a few soft drinks in the officers’ mess at Wendover and retired early. He had moved into the club after his wife and children had vacated their house just outside the base gates; all the 509th’s families had now departed in preparation for the group’s move to Tinian. Lucie Tibbets and the boys had gone home to her parents. Tibbets, caught up in an ever-increasing merry-go-round of flying between Wendover, Washington, and Albuquerque, felt it was “best” that his family were away. He was being driven hard; his mind was a whirl of conferences and high-level telephone conversations, often conducted in code, with Groves. He was having to cope with the strain of running a complex organization in which he was the only one who knew the precise details of the end product. Every problem ultimately ended up on his desk; every hour he had to make decisions, whether they involved flying-fitness reports, engine reports, bombing reports, security reports, or sickness reports. His life, he felt, was “just one damn report after another.”

Lucie wrote that she and the children had settled in “just fine” with her mother. Tibbets was pleased, but without his wife, life at Wendover was even emptier. The departure of the eight-hundred-man-strong main ground echelon for Tinian two weeks earlier had left the base seeming “like a ghost town.”

Tibbets was glad of an excuse to get away to Omaha to do what he called “a little shopping.”

On the south side of Omaha, covering hundreds of acres, the Martin bomber plant was carefully guarded. Flying over the plant, Tibbets glimpsed the guards at the main gate and the men patrolling the high fence that surrounded the area.

He landed and taxied his transport to the aircraft reception area, passing several B-29s being towed out of the assembly sheds. He was happy to see that here, at least, it was just another working day and that the airplane workers had not taken time off to recover from their victory-in-Europe celebrations.

At the reception area he presented his ID card to a waiting manager and was taken to a long, cavernous building. There, his credentials were checked again. Nobody without proper authority was admitted.

The code name Silverplate ensured that Tibbets was going to be able to do something few other fliers in the air force could: he was going to choose his own personal B-29, the one he intended to use on the first atomic mission.

The senior assembly-line foreman escorted Tibbets down the production line. Regularly, they paused to clamber up the scaffolding to look at a bomber. Once, Tibbets turned to the foreman and said the B-29 they were inspecting looked fine.

The foreman shook his head. “First shift.”

“First shift” signified a bomber whose assembly had been started by a shift that had just returned to work after its days off—by men who were still recovering from two days of drinking and partying or just plain relaxing. They were not quite at their best; they sometimes produced a bomber “where all the nuts and bolts haven’t always been double-checked.”

Tibbets moved on.

The foreman stopped at another B-29. Gangs of riveters and fitters swarmed over the fuselage. They gave Tibbets a brief, curious stare, then continued their work.

Tibbets and the foreman climbed up to the cockpit. It was already fitted with its leather seats. Tibbets sat down and looked out through the domed nose at the bustling factory floor.

The foreman’s shout was reassuring. “This is the one for you.”

The plane’s assembly had been started by men who were working at their peak, where “even the screws on the toilet seat were given an extra turn.” The foreman told Tibbets this was the best plane in the factory. His words sealed the transaction.

A delivery date was agreed upon. Tibbets told the foreman that he would send Lewis and his crew to pick up the plane.

37

There was one vacant chair at the long conference table on May 28. It was next to Tibbets’s chair. Senior naval and army officials and scientists from the Manhattan Project looked pointedly at the empty space. Tibbets stared back impassively. Inwardly, he was seething. Inexplicably, Beser had failed to show for this important Target Committee meeting.

The previous meeting, on May 12, had clarified many operational details: the proximity fuzes on the atomic bomb would probably be set to detonate about two thousand feet above the ground; if the weather over the target made it impossible to bomb visually, the weapon should be brought back, this operation inevitably involving some risks to the base and other aircraft; if for any reason it was found necessary to jettison the bomb, care must be taken that this was not done in water near American-held territory, since “water leaking into the gun-type bomb will set off a nuclear reaction.”

The May 12 meeting had also discussed specific targets. The emperor’s palace in Tokyo had been considered, but was not recommended. However, the committee members “agreed we should obtain information from which we could determine the effectiveness of our weapon against this target.”

Finally, the meeting had earmarked four cities for possible atomic attack. They were, in order of preference, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. All four cities had been “reserved”: bombing of them by conventional weapons was henceforth prohibited. Now, at this third meeting of the Target Committee, these and other targets were to be further considered.

Promptly at 9:00 A.M., Groves took his place at the far end of the room. The meeting opened with an aide’s handing out target-description files. Each contained large-scale maps, reconnaissance photographs, and related data; as the meeting was also to review air-sea rescue procedures and navigational aids, maps of the Pacific and Japanese coastal waters were distributed.

Tibbets had wanted Beser present specifically to answer any questions about radar. He had allowed him to fly to Washington in advance so that the radar officer could visit his parents in Baltimore over the weekend. Beser had promised to meet Tibbets outside the conference room before the meeting began, but there was no sign of him.

Beser arrived after an MP had closed the doors to conference room 4E200 and posted himself outside them.

The WAC officer at the reception desk near the MP eyed Beser suspiciously. “Are you lost, Lieutenant?”

“Not if this is the Pentagon, ma’am.”

“This is a restricted area, Lieutenant.”

“I know. And I’m late!”

Beser turned toward the guarded door. The MP stiffened. The WAC raised her voice. “You can’t go in there!”

Beser turned. “Ma’am, if this is the Target Committee meeting, they’re expecting me!”

“You want me to believe a lieutenant is expected in there with all that top brass!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lieutenant, why don’t you go get some coffee and forget you ever walked in here.”

“Ma’am, you’re making a heck of a mistake—”

“Lieutenant, go!”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Beser left and waited outside the reception area. Thirty minutes later he was still there when he heard a whispered conversation going on behind him. He turned to see an angry major towering over the WAC. The door of the conference room was ajar. The major spotted Beser.

“Are you Beser?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Goddam, you should have been inside!”

“I know. Somebody should have told this lady that.”

“They’re waiting for you to answer a question! Get in there!”

Beser strolled as nonchalantly as he could into the conference room.

A navy captain was addressing the gathering. He stopped in midsentence and glared at Beser.

Tibbets motioned for Beser to sit beside him. Beser began to whisper an explanation to Tibbets. “First the train from Baltimore was late. Then I couldn’t get a cab at Union Station, and finally this WAC—”

The captain interrupted Beser’s soliloquy. “If the lieutenant is quite ready to answer the question?”

Beser looked around helplessly.

Tibbets saved him from further embarrassment by restating the question. “The matter is this. The navy wants to place a submarine three miles off the Japanese coast and put out a loran beam for us to navigate by on our approach to the target. In the event of trouble, the beam could also be used to guide us to the submarine for a possible sea rescue.” Loran was a sophisticated radar development that both the navy and air force had started using.

The captain spoke again to Beser. “The question is, Lieutenant, what are your views on this proposal?”

“It’s bullshit!”

The captain gaped. Tibbets groaned. The rest of the room remained deathly quiet. From the top of the table, Groves’s voice filled the void. “Why do you say that?”

“Sir, I don’t believe you can hold a submarine that steady. The tides are going to pull it off track. The boat’s going to be fighting the motion of the sea. The submarine must be on the surface for loran to work. And in no way can it remain surfaced three miles off the Japanese coast without coming under attack.”

Groves’s next words closed the matter. “Those seem good enough reasons. Let’s move to the next item on the agenda, the positioning of rescue aircraft….”

Beser turned to Tibbets and whispered anxiously, “Was that all right?”

Tibbets mouthed a one-word reply. “Bull’s-eye!”

For two days, in the closest secrecy, some of the best civilian, scientific, and military brains in the United States had met to consider the future of the atomic bomb.

The Interim Committee, under the watchful eye of Secretary of War Stimson, was holding its fourth and, as it was turning out, its most crucial meeting in a month.

For this meeting, the committee’s distinguished scientific panel was also present. The members were Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence, and Arthur Compton. Not only did this panel advise the committee, it also acted as a conduit for the ideas of other scientists.

The committee’s discussions had continued well into this first day of June. The committee listened intently as the Manhattan Project’s scientific director revealed details of both types of bomb, the uranium gun-type weapon and the plutonium bomb, which would undergo testing at Alamogordo in seven weeks’ time. Since each bomb was virtually handmade, supplies were strictly limited, and it had been decided not to test the uranium bomb, as “it is expected that it will work.”

The uranium bomb, like its sister, would achieve its principal effect by blast; that effect might be felt up to a mile or more away from the explosion.

In answer to another question, Oppenheimer stated the bomb would be ideal for use against a concentration of troops or war plants, and that it might kill “about 20,000 people.”

Shortly afterward, the meeting adjourned for lunch.

No notes were taken during the meal, and who said what would forever remain a matter of dispute. According to physicist Arthur Compton, he asked Stimson whether it might be possible to arrange a nonmilitary demonstration of the atomic bomb in such a manner that the Japanese would see the futility of continuing the war.

Both Lawrence and Oppenheimer were said to be skeptical of the suggestion. Oppenheimer was said to have doubted “whether any sufficiently startling demonstration could be devised that would convince the Japanese that they ought to throw in the sponge.”

After lunch, Stimson reportedly argued that “nothing would have been more damaging to our effort to obtain surrender than a warning or a demonstration followed by a dud—and this was a real possibility. Furthermore, we had no bombs to waste. It was vital that a sufficient effect be quickly obtained with the few we had.”

The ultimate responsibility rested with Stimson for recommending to Truman whether and how the bomb should be used. Privately, he had already made up his mind. He felt that “to expect a genuine surrender from the Emperor and his military advisors, they must be administered a tremendous shock which would carry convincing proof of our power to destroy the Empire. Such an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese, that it would cost.”

The Interim Committee came to the same conclusion. At the end of its deliberations, it offered three recommendations for the president about the first use of the atomic bomb.

While the president was being advised to act, some of the scientists who had helped make the awesome new weapon were still trying to limit its use. Some preferred that Japan be warned; others insisted that a public demonstration of the bomb’s might would be enough to cause Japan’s militarists to capitulate.

On June 12, seven scientists from the Chicago laboratory submitted a petition to the secretary of war urging a demonstration before observers from many countries in an uninhabited area. It was the Franck Report, destined to become the most famous document concerned with the use of the atomic bomb. It was submitted, through channels, to the Interim Committee’s Scientific Panel.

On June 16, the panel met in Oppenheimer’s office in Los Alamos to consider the report. They acknowledged it was a fair-minded and serious attempt to present all sides of a complex issue. But in the end, the panel reported “with heavy heart” to the Interim Committee that “we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.”

The committee agreed with the conclusion of its Scientific Panel. In four momentous days, the Franck Report had been delivered, discussed, and discounted.

In the meantime, on June 12 General Groves had received a summons in midmorning to see Stimson at the War Department. Stimson’s first request to Groves was for the names of the Japanese cities that had been reserved for possible atomic attack.

Groves hesitated. Only this very morning he had completed drafting a memo to Marshall. It was headed “Atomic Fission Bombs,” stamped “top secret,” and contained concise summaries of four targets: Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata, and Kyoto.

These were the latest revised recommendations of the Target Committee. In making that selection, the committee had taken into account the “psychological factors”; it was deemed desirable to make the first use of the bomb “sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released.”

Psychologically, Kyoto was seen as the best target: it had the “advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.”

On the other hand, Hiroshima “has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed.”

Groves still favored Kyoto. Its intelligentsia would spread the word of the bomb’s awesome power. Faced with such evidence, the Japanese government would have to surrender.

Groves believed that bringing about that surrender was a military matter. He therefore told Stimson that he planned to submit the suggested target list to General Marshall the next day for approval.

“I wish to see it.”

Groves tried to conceal his alarm. “I would rather not show you the report without having first discussed it with General Marshall, as this is a military operational matter.”

Stimson had spent thirty-five years in public service, most of it close to U.S. presidents. He was not used to being opposed, though old age had taught him tolerance. He continued to extend it toward Groves. “This is a question I am settling myself. Marshall is not making that decision. I would like to see the report.”

Groves continued to hedge. “It’s back in my office.”

“Then have it brought over.”

“It will take some time.”

Stimson’s patience ran out. Fixing his eyes on Groves, he made his point acidly clear. “I have all morning. Use my telephone to get it over here right away.”

An unhappy Groves sent for the report.

Stimson again asked Groves to name the targets.

“The primary is Kyoto….”

“I will not approve that city.”

“Mr. Secretary, I suggest you will change your mind after you read the description of Kyoto and our reasons for considering it to be a desirable target.”

“I doubt it.”

Stimson explained something Groves had never seriously considered. “Kyoto is an historical city, and one that is of great religious significance to the Japanese. I visited it when I was Governor-General of the Philippines, and was very much impressed by its ancient culture.”

A messenger arrived with the target report. Groves launched into the argument in favor of Kyoto: the city was filled with booming war plants; it was an ideal choice. Stimson cut him short, called in Marshall, and repeated his strong objections to Groves’s proposal.

Groves later produced the only detailed account of what followed.

Still “ill at ease and annoyed,” Groves retreated to his office. Despite Stimson’s strictures, during the time ahead Groves would continue to press for Kyoto even though he was told that the president himself also opposed atom-bombing that city.

Later Groves would claim, by a somewhat dubious twist of logic, that it was he who was responsible for actually saving Kyoto. “If we had not recommended Kyoto as an atomic target, it would not of course have been reserved and would most likely have been seriously damaged, if not destroyed, before the war ended.”

38

For the past seven days, Lewis and his crew had been waiting in Omaha to pick up the new bomber. Ever since Tibbets had chosen the plane, it had been receiving “special handling,” and consequently the plant was delayed in turning it over to Lewis.

While waiting, some of the crew had picked up girls and held a succession of increasingly wild parties at a local hotel. One of the men got involved with a married woman, and they were caught in bed together by her husband. In the ensuing fight, the police were called, and it had taken Lewis’s considerable diplomacy to square matters. He had also placated irate motorists after another of the fliers “bombed” passing cars with beer bottles from his bedroom window. When the hotel management complained, Lewis managed to calm them down.

Over the past months, Lewis had become increasingly protective toward his crew. Within the group, the barriers of rank largely disappeared; there was an easy, first-name relationship between officers and enlisted men. Socially, Lewis spent considerable time in the enlisted men’s club, removing his officer’s jacket and often wearing one of Sergeant Joe Stiborik’s instead.

Private Richard Nelson, the nineteen-year-old radioman, found the way Lewis treated him as an equal surprising. Caron believed the pilot was trying to develop a close-knit, interdependent unit in which the men “could rely on each other in combat.”

When flying, Lewis still did everything “by the book”; he punished mistakes with a few choice words. But no outsider was allowed to criticize what he considered “his crew.” He told the men, “You got a problem, I’ll sort it out.”

Before flying to Omaha, Sergeant Robert Shumard, the tall, soft-spoken assistant engineer, came to Lewis visibly upset because one of the MPs at Wendover had shot and killed his red setter dog. Lewis’s anger was awesome; he verbally flayed the MP. His reaction only increased the respect and affection the crew had for their unorthodox captain.

Equally, some of them resented the intrusion of Ferebee and van Kirk, even Beser and Jeppson, and, on those rare days when he flew with them, Tibbets. On those occasions, Lewis was “demoted” to copilot. Even then, he tried to make it clear that it was “his crew” that was flying the plane.

Caron felt that Lewis and his overpossessiveness could create a problem when the colonel came to fly the mission. The tail gunner had no doubt that it would be Tibbets who would command the first strike. He liked the days when Tibbets flew with them. “He was just a gentleman, quiet and studious. Now Bob, he was a fine pilot, but he behaved like a cowboy.”

This morning of June 14 at the Martin plant in Omaha, Lewis had his regular crew with him. It was a red-letter day for them all. With a good deal of joking and storytelling, they inspected their shiny new B-29. After preflight-checking the plane thoroughly, flight engineer Duzenbury said he was satisfied. Lewis ordered the crew aboard, started engines, and took off. He circled Omaha once, and then set course for Wendover.

At 9:30 A.M., the Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived in Truman’s office. With them came Stimson, his assistant, John J. McCloy, and other senior advisors.

For two days, on June 14 and 15, the chiefs, the military heads of the armed forces, had been perfecting their invasion plans for Japan, code-named “Olympic” and “Coronet.”

Olympic called for an initial assault against southern Kyushu on November 1, 1945, with a force of 815,548 troops; Coronet was the plan for the invasion of Honshu five months later, in the Tokyo area, with a commitment there of a further 1,171,646 men.

Truman listened intently as General Marshall presented the case for invasion. A “considerable discussion” followed on the expected casualty rate.

Stimson summed up the prospects. “A landing operation would be a very long, costly and arduous struggle on our part… the terrain, much of which I have visited several times, has left the impression on my memory of being one which would be susceptible to a last-ditch defense.”

The possibility of a political settlement after a warning to the Japanese was raised by Stimson’s assistant. McCloy believed there were many Japanese who did not favor the war, and, given the opportunity, their opinions might be influential.

The suggestion caught the meeting unawares.

Stimson agreed that Japan was “not a nation composed of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours.” He also agreed that before the actual invasion some sort of “last-chance warning” should be given which made clear to the Japanese leaders that if they did not surrender, they would be responsible for what followed. Stimson was not yet sure whether or how this warning should be linked to the atomic bomb.

The chiefs listened but expressed no opinion about the atomic bomb—except that if it was used it should be dropped without prior notice. The matter was not pressed, for nobody in the room could yet know what the bomb would actually do. And nobody, in McCloy’s words, could even be “certain in spite of the assurances of the scientists that ‘the thing would go off.’ ”

Without positive proof of the weapon’s viability, it was impossible to plan a meaningful strategy other than in terms of conventional warfare.

Truman reluctantly approved the invasion plans, aware that ultimately a million American lives could be lost as a result of his decision.

President Truman’s concern about casualties would doubtless have been even greater had he known that Japanese intelligence had anticipated the American plans, and that at the very moment he was giving the go-ahead for the invasion of Kyushu, reinforcements were being rushed to that island.

Those forces, charged with repelling the Americans, now had their headquarters in Hiroshima.

39

Shortly after dawn on June 19, a dull rumble awoke Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama. The sound came from within Mount Futaba. Construction gangs were using compressor tools to burrow out an underground communications complex inside the base of the hill.

Yokoyama’s gun post was immediately above the bunker, and it meant that he and his men lived from dawn to dusk with a jarring sound beneath their feet that reminded Yokoyama of earth tremors.

The destruction he had witnessed on his last visit to Tokyo, coupled with his parents’ attitude toward the proposed marriage to his commanding officer’s daughter, had left Yokoyama badly shaken. To make matters worse, he had been away during the second American air attack on Hiroshima. Nor was he consoled by Colonel Abe, his commander, who said that with each day that passed, the chances of Yokoyama’s seeing action increased.

Abe continued to be solicitous, treating Yokoyama as if he were already a member of the family. But Yokoyama was not so sure. His mother had written a guarded letter saying his father was having to delve deeper into the girl’s background. Until these inquiries were complete, she urged her son to limit his social contact with his commander. Yokoyama found himself inventing excuses to turn down invitations to dine at Abe’s home or visit him at the officers’ mess in Hiroshima Castle. The temptation to go was strong. Yokoyama would have given anything to escape the tedium of life on the gun post.

Instead, he would spend this day, as he did all the others, drilling his men—and surveying through his binoculars the signs that Hiroshima was now the linchpin in the defense of the whole of the western half of Japan. By road, rail, and sea, in defiance of American bombers and submarines, men and supplies were pouring into the city. After further training and fitting-out there, they were moved to their forward positions on Kyushu. Remaining in his command center in Hiroshima, in charge of all troops in the west, was the man who had been chosen by his emperor and the high command to save Japan from defeat.

At the foot of Mount Futaba, not far from Yokoyama’s protective antiaircraft guns, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata had set up his headquarters.

Hata was one of the most successful, famous, and respected commanders in all Japan. He was close to the emperor and had once been considered for the post of prime minister. Instead, he was given a position perhaps as important: he was named head of the Second General Army and told that only he could save Japan from ignominious defeat.

His arrival in Hiroshima disturbed the officers in Hiroshima Castle. Quiet-mannered but stern, Hata overawed them. The sixty-five-year-old field marshal had more experience of war than all of them put together. They were relieved when he decided not to make his headquarters in the castle.

By the middle of June, Hata’s headquarters staff of some four hundred men included many of the best military brains in the country. They planned to wage a war of attrition the like of which the world had never witnessed.

Gradually, under Hata’s command, the island of Kyushu was being turned into an armed fortress; from the Goto Archipelago in the north to the Osumi Islands in the south, a system of interlocked defenses was being erected. They stretched back from the coast, layer upon layer, devised to cause the maximum casualties to the enemy. Linking it all was a complicated communications network controlled from Hiroshima and ending at Hata’s headquarters.

The city itself was a beehive of war industry; hardly a home was not involved in manufacturing parts for kamikaze planes and boats, for bombs, shell casings, rifles, and handguns.

Recently an order had been given to plaster the walls of the city with a new slogan:

Hata planned that when invasion came, every man, woman, and child in western Japan would carry a weapon.

Children were shown how to construct and hurl gasoline bombs; enough bottles and fuel were being conserved to make over three million.

Even the infirm were mobilized. In Hiroshima the bedridden and wheelchair-bound were assembling booby traps to be planted in the beaches of Kyushu.

For the main thrust against the invaders—an engagement now commonly referred to as “the great climactic battle”—Hata had under his command some four hundred thousand men, many of whom were already in place on Kyushu. Minoru Genda, the architect of the Pearl Harbor raid, had recently arrived there as commanding officer of a large, newly formed fighter group. In addition, there were about five thousand aircraft standing by, ready to be used as kamikazes.

In Hiroshima, forty thousand troops had their headquarters in the castle. Down by Hiroshima Harbor, at Ujina, a further five thousand soldiers, mostly marines, were perfecting their own novel seaborne kamikaze tactics. Hundreds of small suicide craft, most the size of rowboats, were being fitted with motors, filled with explosives, and concealed in coves around the bay. If an invasion force arrived, the boats would be brought out of hiding, and each, manned by its crew of one, would be steered into a landing craft to blow up on impact.

Hata believed that although it was impossible for Japan to defeat America, so also it could be made impossible for America to defeat Japan. He hoped that once the Americans had sampled the welcome he was preparing, they would come to the negotiating table and drop their demand that Japan surrender unconditionally.

40

Tibbets looked down on Hiroshima.

Its rivers, bridges, harbor, the castle and adjoining military drill fields were all clearly visible in the reconnaissance photographs before him. So were the roads, railroad, warehouses, factories, barracks, and private homes. Here and there the urbanization was broken up by parks and woods. Beyond the city lay the hills, cocooning Hiroshima on three sides. They provided an almost perfect natural barrier to contain an atomic blast.

He noted the ground defenses, an irregular chain of gun posts stretching from Mount Futaba in the northeast to the harbor in the south.

Speaking quietly and authoritatively, using all his accumulated experience of bombing, Tibbets delivered his judgment on the suitability of Hiroshima as a target. “The various waterways give ideal conditions. They allow for no chance of mistaking the city. Hiroshima can be approached from any direction for a perfect bombing run.”

His listeners silently considered this assessment.

Tibbets continued with his careful study, now turning to reconnaissance photographs of other Japanese cities spread out on the conference table in General Henry Arnold’s office in the Pentagon.

This June 23 meeting was the latest in a series that were settling the crucial details of how best to defeat Japan.

A few days ago, LeMay had flown in from Guam especially to attend. He had already been told—on a fleeting visit Tibbets made to Guam earlier in June—that it would be too dangerous for the crew to drop an atomic bomb from below twenty-five thousand feet. In Washington, Groves had spelled out to him the probable power of the bomb and the reason the potential targets had been chosen.

LeMay had barely reacted when Groves told him that the actual operation would be entirely under “your control, subject of course to any limitations that might be placed upon [you] by instructions.” Only Groves knew that those instructions would be so worded that effective control of the operation would remain in his own hands.

LeMay had announced he would want to carry out the bombing operation using a single unescorted plane. He pointed out that the Japanese were unlikely to pay any serious attention to a solitary aircraft flying at high altitude, and would probably assume it was either on a reconnaissance or weather mission.

Groves had approved the idea. He did not tell LeMay that Tibbets had already come to a similar conclusion and that the 509th’s training had been devised with that plan in mind.

LeMay had returned to Guam believing he would soon be responsible for delivering a weapon he didn’t yet entirely have faith in. Nor was he convinced that Tibbets and the 509th were the best choice for the mission. LeMay thought it might be preferable for one of his own Pacific combat-hardened veterans to do the job, a crew that had already proved its worth over Japan.

Tibbets, completely unaware of this, had flown from Wendover to Washington to attend this conference in Arnold’s office. Having completed his evaluation of the reconnaissance photographs, he waited for questions from Groves and Arnold, chief of the air force.

They did not come. The two men stared silently at the photographs, their eyes going first to the glossy, thirty-inch-square prints of Hiroshima, then to those of Niigata and Kokura, the two other targets now on the list of Japanese cities reserved for possible atomic attack.

Groves asked Tibbets how he would approach Hiroshima.

Using his hand to indicate a route across the photograph, Tibbets explained that he would begin his bombing run east of the city and approach Hiroshima at an angle of ninety degrees to the rivers bisecting it. He pointed at a spot on the photograph close to Hiroshima Castle, where the Ota River breaks into tributaries.

“Suppose that’s the aiming point. Approached crossways, any one of the riverbanks would provide a handy reference point against which the bombardier could check his final calculations. If we flew up one of the rivers, the bombardier would be looking mainly at water through his bombsight. It would be harder for him to tell when he was close to the AP.”

Groves permitted himself a rare joke. “Colonel, I think by the time your bombardier gets over the target, he’ll be able to spot it blindfolded.”

The men around the table sat down, and the discussion continued on other aspects of launching an atomic strike.

Groves was involving himself in such detailed discussions because he had come to believe that

The chief of the Manhattan Project felt the matter was “too complicated and all-important to be treated so casually”; that decisions about its use should be vested in him, though he did concede that “the President would also share in the control, not so much by making original decisions as by approving or disapproving the plans made by the War Department.”

Watching Groves now, on the opposite side of the table, Tibbets was struck yet again that here was a man “who would move hell on earth to get his own way.”

Tibbets had also worked out Groves’s tactics: he “didn’t like a face-off, preferring to attack from the flank.”

Tibbets, on the other hand, believed in a frontal assault on any problem—or on any opposition. He thought that too much of his time was being consumed “messing; a lot of hours were being spent discussing imponderables.”

But one imponderable Tibbets thought well worth discussing was that of the likely prevailing weather conditions over the target.

Ever since April, air force meteorologists had been preparing summary charts of the conditions that could be expected in the coming months over Japan. The data were based on information provided by the U.S. Weather Bureau and on old weather maps from the marine observatory at Kobe for the period 1927 to 1936.

The prognosis was poor. From June to September there was a maximum of only six days a month when cloudiness was likely to be three-tenths or less. For this period, eight-tenths cloud could be expected for at least eighteen days in any month.

Bombing by radar had been considered and rejected. After considerable study, an expert had concluded:

By bombing visually, however, “in clear weather the probability that a good bombardier can place the bomb within a given circle of 1,000 feet radius lies between 20% and 50%.”

Tibbets’s own bombardiers were regularly dropping their practice bombs into a three-hundred-foot circle.

The air force meteorologist then told the meeting that between then and Christmas, August was probably the best time to drop the atomic bomb, “with the early part of the month offering marginally better weather conditions than the latter.”

Tibbets liked the meteorologist’s next suggestion. “Suppose no weather forecast at all was made, but that the mission started out on a given day, preceded by spotter planes who would radio back weather reports to the bomber while it was in the air. The bomber could then proceed to that target showing the clearest weather.”

Tibbets felt this would be a simple and relatively uncomplicated procedure. The 509th could provide the weather planes, and he himself would be free to make the final decision, in the air, clear of any outside interference and pressures and with the very latest weather information, on which Japanese city would be bombed.

Lewis held back sixty-five tons of bomber, its tanks filled with seven thousand gallons of fuel, while he watched the rev counter. The needle climbed to 2200 and remained constant. The bomber shuddered, protesting against the brakes that held it at the end of the Wendover runway.

The copilot, seated beside Lewis, angled the wing flaps for takeoff. Over the intercom, Shumard and Stiborik, in the waist blister turrets, confirmed the flaps were set. Duzenbury reported all four engines were functioning smoothly.

Only then, satisfied that all the checks prior to takeoff had been made, did Lewis push the throttles forward to their full power positions and release the brakes.

At 260 feet a second, the B-29 rushed down the runway, carrying nine men, their equipment and personal belongings on the most exciting journey any of them had ever made.

Beneath them, in the bomb bay, was the remainder of the whiskey that Beser had purchased in Cuba, and a variety of goodies from the Wendover PX. The ever-thoughtful Lewis, looking out for his crew, particularly the enlisted men, had suggested they should stock up on any of the things they might miss in the Pacific.

Nelson had picked up a pile of paperbacks, thrillers and adventure stories. He planned to read a book on every mission he made over Japan. Caron had stowed away some good-quality stationery to write home to his wife. Shumard had purchased a box camera to take some photographs.

Accompanying them were also the crew’s “trophies”—a couple of pairs of panties from bar girls in Salt Lake City, a carton of condoms which nobody claimed ownership to, and a garter belt, clipped over the toilet seat.

As usual, Lewis had explained the “house rule” for using the toilet. The first man to use it would be responsible for emptying and cleaning the chemical bucket at the end of the journey.

Lewis had known crew members to “bend their guts to avoid being the first to use the can.” This always amused him, as he had trained himself to manage a ten-hour flight without once having to crawl back through the plane’s central tunnel to use the toilet.

He eased the bomber into the air and began to circle over the base. He switched on the intercom. “Hold on! We’re gonna buzz the tower!”

Caron, in the tail turret, braced himself.

At full power, the B-29 swooped down on the base. Shouting like dervishes, the crew encouraged Lewis to fly ever lower. Lewis tipped the plane on one wing tip. Soon his port wing was inches clear of the ground as the bomber made its madcap way across the airfield. Caron thought they “must have scared the pants off anybody watching, buzzing the field like a fighter plane.”

The angry voice of the controller in the tower ordered Lewis to gain height at once.

The bomber continued on its low-level course, careering over the ground, its wing tip still only inches away from destruction. It was, for Nelson, “a magnificent example of flying skill.”

Lewis eased the bomber to its cruising height and headed south. Already on Tinian were over twelve hundred men from the 509th and twelve of the group’s B-29s.

The excitement on board Lewis’s aircraft was unabated. None of the crew had ever before been overseas to a combat area. Most of their knowledge of the war had come from the movies and the Saturday Evening Post articles that Caron collected.

To them, war was a “chance to do something for your country,” to “bring peace to the world,” or, as Lewis preferred it, “to go and beat hell outta the Japs like they tried to beat hell outta us at Pearl and other places.”

Lewis was not a bloodthirsty, vengeful young man; nor, indeed, were any of the crew flying south with him. They were, in Caron’s words, “just average guys going to do a job.”

Now, flying to what they hoped would be a tropical paradise, Lewis marked the moment of departure from Wendover. “Tinian, here we come!”