Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

1

Exhausted from his climb up Mount Lasso in the northern part of Tinian, Chief Warrant Officer Kizo Imai, Imperial Japanese Navy, lay flat on the moist jungle carpet of rotting leaves and fungi, face close to the earth, frayed cap pulled down over his forehead.

Hunger and a sense of duty drove the thirty-year-old officer to crawl regularly to this vantage point; at 564 feet, it was the highest hill on the island.

From here, Imai could see many of the compounds where the twenty thousand Americans on Tinian were billeted. More important, he could watch where they dumped their garbage. They constantly changed the sites. Imai supposed it was to make it more difficult for him, and the five hundred other Japanese troops in hiding on Tinian, to scavenge for food. Starvation had made them desperate. Even when the Americans dumped their garbage in the treacherous currents around the island, the Japanese plunged into the sea at night to grub for it.

Imai’s home on Tinian was a cave, “a hole in Hell,” where lice, rats, and other vermin added to the misery of life. Unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, he and others like him lived a troglodyte existence, seldom daring to light fires in their jungle hideaways lest they give away their positions. In his cave, Imai had left behind eighteen soldiers—all who survived of the forty-eight men he had originally led into hiding when the Americans had overrun the island eleven months before.

Imai had come to Tinian to help build airfields; three runways had been completed and a fourth was under construction when, in June 1944, the Americans had struck.

Air attacks and naval bombardments had softened up the islands for six weeks. After Saipan was overrun, heavy artillery based there systematically pounded the northern end of Tinian. In one fifteen-day period, a shell a minute fell on the island. Fighters swooped low over Tinian dropping napalm bombs, the first time they were used in the Pacific.

In between, the Japanese garrison dug in. They believed that the Americans would attempt a landing at Tinian Town. The Japanese fortified the area; many of their guns were British six-inchers, captured at Singapore. And throughout the island, around sugarcane fields and behind thick jungle foliage, machine-gun nests were positioned and small foxholes prepared in which a solitary soldier huddled, cuddling explosives close to his body; if an American tank passed over his foxhole, he was ready to blow himself up along with the tank.

On the fortieth day of the siege, July 24, Imai had peered through the half-light of dawn to see the American battle fleet slowly circling the island, pumping thousands more shells on the ravaged landscape.

Opposite Tinian Town, the armada had halted and lowered its landing craft. The Japanese began firing their heavy guns. The Americans quickly retreated and reembarked. The Japanese were delighted.

Too late, they realized the attack on Tinian Town was a ruse. The bulk of the American forces had landed in the north of the island—a rugged, rocky area that the Japanese had thought unassailable.

With a foothold established, the U.S. marines had stormed inland. It took them eight days to reach Tinian Town and capture the island. Four hundred Americans were killed; over eight thousand Japanese died.

Chief Warrant Officer Imai had fled to the jungle, along with some seven hundred other Japanese survivors. In the months since then, that number had been whittled away to less than five hundred hunted men.

Now, on Mount Lasso, waiting for the garbage trucks to appear, Imai began his other task: noting down how the American forces were deploying themselves. This he did in preparation for an event he still expected to happen “at any moment”: an invasion by imperial forces come to recapture the island. When that day came, Imai hoped to lead his men in a banzai charge against the Americans.

Meanwhile, through his binoculars, he could survey almost the whole island. Tinian from north to south is about twelve miles long; its width is never more than five miles. Gently undulating, the island is really a plateau jutting up from the Pacific. Most of its coastline consists of sheer cliffs of rusty brown lava rising from the sea. Tinian is at the southern end of the Mariana Islands, which together form an arc over 425 miles of the Pacific—clumps of coral that, until World War II, few people knew existed.

Scanning the horizon to the north, Imai could see the coast of Saipan, less than four miles away. As usual, the intervening sea was busy with American ships of all sizes and kinds. Some were making their way to the American naval anchorage at Tinian Town, three miles southwest of where Imai lay.

Inland from Tinian Town, originally only a cluster of shacks but now a busy military port, the Americans had completed the work the Japanese had begun: clearing away jungle to make runways, aprons, taxiways. Paved roads led to fuel and bomb dumps, workshops, and warehouses. There was a growing number of hospitals. Imai concluded that the Americans must be expecting a large number of casualties in some impending battle. His belief in the imminence of a Japanese assault on the Marianas grew. In fact, the hospitals were being readied to receive the casualties expected from the invasion of Kyushu.

Surveying the countryside, Imai’s attention was attracted by something unusual. Below and about half a mile to the northwest, gangs of soldiers were completing the fencing in of a compound.

Rectangular in shape, half a mile long by a quarter-mile wide, the compound was tucked away in a low-lying area near the coast.

The new fence around the compound was high and forbidding. Behind the wire were different-sized Quonset huts connected by paths and roads. Until this morning the huts had been occupied by army construction gangs whom Imai had previously watched completing work on the giant airfield beyond the compound. Now they were vacating these quarters.

In the center of the compound, a smaller, closed-off area had been erected; thick coils of barbed wire surrounded a group of windowless huts. Armed guards stood at the only gate to this area. There were also several guards at the main entrance to the compound.

Imai felt uneasy. The compound looked like a prison camp; perhaps the inner area was a punishment block. In Imai’s mind, this could mean only one thing: the Americans were planning a new drive to round up the remaining Japanese on the island.

Imai touched his weapons: a long ceremonial sword and a pistol. He didn’t know if damp had made the bullets useless, but he was sure the sword blade, made by the same secret process that had fashioned the swords of the ancient samurai, was as sharp as the day he had received it, shortly before he had arrived on Tinian, in March 1944.

Peering down on the strange new compound, Imai was determined about one thing: he would rather die than surrender and end up imprisoned there. He was fascinated by the activity around the main entrance to the compound; a continuous procession of trucks was now driving up to the gates. There, the guards stopped and checked every vehicle.

As one of the trucks pulled up, two men got out and removed a large board from the back.

Imai focused his binoculars on the scene. Two white-helmeted MPs, carbines cradled in their arms, came into sharp focus. They looked tanned, healthy, and bored. He moved his glasses slightly to bring the board into view. Imai could read and speak a little English. Although he could not make out all the lettering, he was able to distinguish the numbers and some of the words. They were:

A feeling of relief filled Imai. It was not, after all, a prison camp. But the compound was clearly different from all the others he had observed; it seemed to Imai that this one “must be very important.”

Then another and more pressing thought filled the warrant officer’s mind. So intent had he been on watching all the activity that he had completely neglected to note where the American garbage trucks had emptied their loads. Now he and the men waiting back in his cave would have to forage in the darkness among the trash cans—a risky business in view of the patrols that guarded each compound.

Nevertheless, Imai’s time on Mount Lasso had been worthwhile. Careful not to leave any trail, he hurried back to the cave.

Inside, it was filthy, the ground littered with old food tins and other bits of flotsam scavenged during night forays throughout the island. Stacked in a corner were rifles and a few cases of ammunition. Beside them was a radio transmitter-receiver.

The last message it had received was on the night Tinian fell, when the supreme commander of the Imperial Japanese Army in Tokyo had sent word that help would be coming. Since then, there had been silence. Imai wished somebody knew how to fix the transmitter so that he could send a message to headquarters in Tokyo about the strange new compound on the island.

Maybe they could even arrange to have it bombed.

2

Tibbets continued to inspect the compound to ensure it would be a suitable final home for the 509th. He had flown from Wendover to do so. He would have been there sooner, but had delayed his departure from the United States so that his senior navigator, van Kirk, who had come with him, could have news before leaving of the birth of his new baby son. It was a gesture in keeping with Tibbets’s aim to treat his men with consideration at all times—until they tried to take advantage. Then he could treat them, in his own words, “rougher than any MP master sergeant in a military prison.”

Tibbets took his time over the inspection: he wanted the 509th to have “the best going,” and not even Groves’s personal representative on the island, Colonel E. E. Kirkpatrick, who was accompanying him on the inspection, was going to hurry Tibbets into a decision.

Impassive as usual, restricting his words to a few questions, Tibbets led Kirkpatrick and the commanders of the 509th’s squadrons from one hut to another. Kirkpatrick had hoped Tibbets would not be “too finicky about housing.” The rule on crowded Tinian was twelve officers or twenty enlisted men in a Quonset hut twenty-nine feet wide by fifty feet long. As group commander, Tibbets would share his accommodation with three or four senior staff officers.

Tibbets responded typically. “Before you settle my living space, I want to make sure the men are comfortable. This will be the fourth move they’ve had to make since arriving out here. I want it to be the last.”

Kirkpatrick thought Tibbets a “bit cocky”—a view he would express to Groves in a secret memo—“inclined to rub his special situation in a bit, but smart enough to know how far he can go. He plays his cards well.”

Tibbets thought it essential to establish the ground rules on how the 509th were to live and work. During his one previous visit to the Marianas, he had made it clear what those rules were. He wasn’t, he would later insist, “looking for special treatment,” but simply seeking to ensure that the group was properly settled within the framework of an existing and complicated air force operation.

On this second visit, he detected opposition—muted but discernible—behind the “glad-handing.”

Some of it came from the Seabees, who were being moved from the most comfortable quarters on the island to make room for the 509th. Tibbets sympathized with them. They were all Pacific veterans, many of whom would be called upon to shed more sweat and blood in the invasion of Japan.

Tibbets knew that the invasion would be costly. The long and bitter campaign to secure Okinawa had just ended. It had taken over 500,000 troops three months to subdue the Japanese garrison of 110,000, who had fought fanatically and died almost to a man. If the American casualty figures for Okinawa were any guide—49,151 dead plus 34 warships sunk and 368 badly damaged—the resistance to be expected on the main islands would be formidable.

The latest American intelligence reports indicated that some of the two million battle-hardened troops in China were being brought home to help defend the homeland. Already in Japan were another two million soldiers, untried in battle but eager to fight. The vast mass of the imperial forces had not been beaten.

Tibbets had expressed to LeMay the hope that the atomic bomb would make them “see sense,” and avert unnecessary bloodshed. LeMay concurred. The meeting between the two men at LeMay’s Guam headquarters on June 27 had been cordial enough, though LeMay still had reservations about being able to pinpoint a target from thirty thousand feet. He told Tibbets the 509th fliers should get some experience, suggesting that, initially, they could drop their practice bombs on the nearby island of Rota, which was still in Japanese hands.

As their meeting was ending, LeMay made an unexpected remark. “Paul, I want you to understand one thing. No flying for you over the empire.”

Tibbets was stunned.

Puffing steadily on his ever-present cigar, an action which made him look like a younger, not quite so bulldoggish Churchill, LeMay explained his reasons. “We don’t want to risk losing you. I understand you know more about this bomb than any flier in the air force. You’re too valuable. You’d better stay on the ground.”

Tibbets said nothing. LeMay’s order made sense: if he fell into Japanese hands, the entire project would be jeopardized. But Tibbets was determined on one thing: he would fly the first atomic strike, “come Hell or high water.”

On Tinian, having completed his inspection of the new compound’s living quarters, kitchens, and mess halls, Tibbets examined the “inner sanctum,” the Tech Area workshops. There, if all went well, the bomb would be finally assembled. Two of the workshops would be ready in a few days; the other pair would not be complete until August 1.

Tibbets thought schedules were “running tight”; he wished he could remain on Tinian to see things through. But his presence was required as an observer during the critical test-firing of the plutonium bomb at Alamogordo.

His tour of the compound complete, Tibbets expressed himself satisfied. The 509th would move into its new quarters on July 8.

For the moment, there was no more he could do on Tinian. Having briefed the group’s senior officers on daily routine matters, Tibbets began the long, weary plane journey back across the Pacific.

3

Squatting around an upturned crate, Beser and the other players tried to concentrate on their game. Even now, in the sudden tropical darkness, the cloying, enervating heat was stifling. The only garment each man wore, shorts—khaki trousers cut off about six inches below the crotch—was soaked with sweat.

As the evening wore on, the men around the makeshift card table had to raise their voices to make their bids heard. Not far away, a stream of B-29s were taking off on another firebomb raid.

Tonight, as usual, the officers in the hut counted the number of aircraft, keeping score by the distinctive sound of engines being boosted to maximum power prior to takeoff. So far, the tally was 249 bombers airborne.

Silence returned to the island. But Beser offered a side bet that another bomber would take off within the next half hour, to make a round total of 250. Nickels and quarters were tossed onto the crate.

Soon afterward, the unmistakable roar of four 2,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines starting up shattered the silence, and Beser collected his winnings.

Tired now of their game, he and the others listened to the bomber going through its preflight engine tests. Navigator Russell Gackenbach—the young lieutenant who had survived the security snares on that first day at Wendover—went out of the Quonset hut to watch the takeoff.

It was a pitch-black Tinian night, moonless, with a hot breeze blowing in off the sea.

Gackenbach sensed, rather than saw, the B-29. His ears followed the bomber as it left the apron and taxied to the runway. He glimpsed short stabs of flame from the engine exhausts. The engines were boosted to full power, the stabs grew brighter, then disappeared as the bomber roared down the runway.

Gackenbach cocked his head: one of the engines was out of pitch. He shouted into the Quonset hut. The others had also heard the sound. They joined Gackenbach. The group listened as the aircraft continued to roar down the runway.

“He’s airborne!”

Gackenbach’s shout of relief was followed by Beser’s warning. “He’s not going to make it!”

The words were followed by a bright, orange-red flash, low in the sky over the runway, enveloping the bomber.

A split second later, the roar of high-octane fuel exploding over incendiary bombs reached the horrified watchers. The flash spilled across the night sky, briefly lighting up an area of several hundred square yards.

The flames and noise faded as the wail of crash trucks took over.

The 509th officers turned and went back into the hut. They all knew that the most the crash trucks could do was sweep up a few charred remains.

Lewis switched on the intercom and told the crew to prepare for landing. Until now, it had been an eventless journey. Some fifteen miles ahead, Tinian appeared as an indistinct mass, hidden by a morning sun haze.

At his station, a small, windowless cubbyhole just forward of the front bomb bay, radioman Dick Nelson tuned the radio compass to Tinian’s signal. Three days in the air, interspersed with brief stopovers where the food and accommodations were poor, had dampened Nelson’s enthusiasm. He felt tired, in need of a bath, and, though he would never admit it to any of the men around him, a little apprehensive about the future.

He checked the IFF; the device continued to give out the silent signal which identified the B-29 as an American military aircraft.

The flat voice of a ground controller on Tinian gave Lewis the wind’s speed and direction at North Field.

Now Lewis gave the crew an enthusiastic view of the island. “It’s wonderful! The jungle looks just like in the movies! Those beaches are made for Esther Williams! And the water’s the bluest I’ve ever seen! We’re gonna have a great time!”

After some six thousand miles and three days of flying, Lewis called out the landing orders.

When the wheels had been lowered, Stiborik and assistant engineer Shumard, in the waist blister turrets, confirmed the landing gear was locked in position.

“Flap check. Five degrees.”

Again, Stiborik and Shumard reported when the flaps were down.

“Flap check. Twenty-five degrees.”

The men in the blister turrets confirmed the change.

Moments later, Lewis touched down on North Field and taxied to the 509th’s special dispersal area.

Caron’s immediate—and abiding—impression when he crawled out of the tail turret was that “we had landed on the world’s biggest latrine.”

The bomber had parked downwind of one of the giant cesspools dug by the Seabees.

Lewis guessed he would soon get used to the stench. If that was the only drawback to Tinian, it really was Paradise, with its Quonset huts beneath palm fronds, and paths made of crushed coral kept tidy by smiling natives.

To further a feeling of home-away-from-home, and because Tinian was roughly the same shape as Manhattan, the principal roads had been named and signposted as New York streets.

Broadway was the longest thoroughfare, running from North Field past the foot of Mount Lasso down toward Tinian Town; a splendid highway, over six miles in length, lined with living and working quarters.

Parallel to Broadway, on the western side of the island, was Eighth Avenue, running from the beachhead the marines had established when they invaded Tinian, down past the island’s second-largest landing strip, West Field, and eventually ending at Tinian Harbor.

Hugging the west coast was Riverside Drive, a gently curving road off which were several small beaches and coves.

Forty-second Street was at a busy crossroads in the southern section of Tinian, close to Wall Street, Grand Avenue, Park Row, and Canal Street, which led to Second Avenue, and another group of familiar-sounding roads, Fifty-ninth Street, Sixty-fourth Street, Seventy-second Street, and Eighty-sixth Street.

The 509th were in temporary quarters just east of Broadway near Eighty-sixth Street. When Lewis and his crew reached their huts, they found them empty. Nine of the 509th’s crews were away on a practice mission, dropping high-explosive bombs on Rota.

It seemed to Lewis that he had arrived on Tinian not a moment too soon.

4

After two weeks of study, the situation was becoming clear. While there were still some gaps, Major General Arisue had been able to make an authoritative assessment of Japan’s internal political situation.

It was desperate.

The battles between the militarists and the moderates, so far confined to words, threatened to shake the imperial throne. What concerned Arisue was the prospect of bloodshed after the talking between the two sides finally stopped. In his heart he believed the most extreme elements would even kill the emperor if he opposed their stated intention to lead Japan to victory or to fight until not a single person was left alive in the country.

Opposing these fanatical diehards were the moderates, led by the Marquis Koichi Kido, lord keeper of the privy seal, the man the emperor trusted above all others. It was Marquis Kido who had kept the peace when the two factions had confronted each other at the imperial conference of June 8. But he had been unable to keep the conference from deciding to continue the war to the bitter end. In the emperor’s presence, and without his saying a word, they had decided there must be no surrender.

Then, four days later, a moderate, a naval admiral, his path to the throne cleared for him by Kido, had presented the emperor with clear confirmation of what Kido had already told him.

The admiral’s report detailed serious shortages of raw materials. In the war industries, the workers—many of them schoolchildren—were beset by lack of experience; output was constantly falling short of expectations. Industrially, Japan was becoming moribund. Except for morale, the overall situation was dire.

On June 18, Prime Minister Suzuki called a meeting of Japan’s Inner Cabinet. While Arisue had been unable to obtain precise details of the meeting—held the same day President Truman approved the invasion plans—he did establish that the war minister and the representatives of the army and navy had maintained their stated position: all forward planning must be linked to the demands an enemy D-Day would create.

However, these three hard-liners had agreed on one important concession. While they still opposed direct negotiation to end the war, they now had no objection to talks starting after Field Marshal Hata’s army had dealt the enemy a crushing blow on the invasion beaches.

To Arisue, the fact that the three had been moved this far from their previously entrenched position was a “major victory for reality.”

Outwardly maintaining his careful position between the militarists and the moderates, Arisue had come to favor peace at almost any price apart from unconditional surrender. His overriding objection to such a surrender was that it would likely mean the removal of the emperor, and that was unthinkable.

On June 22, ten days after the admiral had delivered his report on raw materials and morale, Emperor Hirohito had requested the Inner Cabinet to initiate peace negotiations, using, if possible, the good offices of Russia.

To this end, on June 24, a former prime minister, Koki Hirota, called upon the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo, Jacob Malik.

Malik correctly saw the move as an attempt to keep the Russians out of the war. Hirota’s efforts came to nothing.

There, for the moment, the diplomatic maneuvers rested. Arisue had increasing evidence that Russia was bent on war. His staff was monitoring Soviet troop movements near the Chinese border: a formidable force was being assembled there, probably preparing to attack the Japanese troops facing them in Manchuria.

Arisue believed that a Russian attack would not be so much concerned with helping the Allies win the war as with establishing Soviet influence in the Pacific. The thought of a Soviet-dominated Japan chilled him.

The intelligence chief felt it was more urgent than ever to come to terms with the United States. He decided he would have to formulate a new approach to America through the one pipeline he had: the Office of Strategic Services in Bern.

His agent in the Swiss city, Lieutenant General Seigo Okamoto, had been standing by for weeks to carry a message to the OSS, which could then relay it to Washington.

Arisue cabled Okamoto requesting he find out the minimum conditions that America would accept for a Japanese surrender.

Even with a dozen radio sets tuned to different stations, the room was almost totally silent except for the gentle whirring of the fans suspended from the ceiling. Each radio could be heard only through the headset of the man seated before it. The men were monitors, the morning shift of a round-the-clock watch being kept on the airwaves of the Pacific and beyond. They were a part of the communications bureau of Field Marshal Hata’s Second General Army Headquarters.

The bureau, the nerve center of Hata’s headquarters, was housed in a former school, a long, two-story building at the foot of Mount Futaba, near the East Training Field. Special landlines linked the bureau to General Army Headquarters in Tokyo; other lines ran to military centers on Kyushu—Fukuoka, Sasebo, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima; the bureau was also linked to the naval base at Kure, marine headquarters at Ujina, and the regional defense command in Hiroshima Castle.

The monitoring room was the bureau’s showpiece; only the large transmitting and monitoring center just outside Tokyo rivaled the listening post at Hiroshima. And never had it been so busy as in these past few weeks, following the arrival in Hiroshima of Lieutenant Colonel Kakuzo Oya, Arisue’s specialist in American affairs, transferred to Hata’s staff as chief intelligence officer.

The monitoring room could provide the first indication that an actual landing on Kyushu was about to take place. Prior to that, it was expected that the Americans would spend weeks bombarding the invasion area by sea and air.

Hata hoped he would have sufficient warning of an impending landing for Kyushu’s kamikaze planes and suicide motorboats to attack the invasion armada. Much of the success of this plan depended on the men manning the monitoring room. All of them were either too old or otherwise unfit for combat service. Each had an excellent command of English.

In eight-hour shifts, they sat, writing pads at the ready, listening to an endless stream of words and music relayed from as far away as Washington, D.C.

The busiest time was from midday to midnight. During these hours, half the sets in the room were tuned to transmissions from Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and the Marianas. Many of them were in code, but a sufficient number were made in clear language to provide the monitors with information that could be acted upon speedily. These intercepts included not only military radio traffic but also brief radio tests made by B-29 radiomen just before takeoff.

There was an hour’s time difference between Japan and the Marianas—Hiroshima was one hour behind Tinian—and if the radio tests were made around 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. Hiroshima time, then the monitors knew that a raid could be expected that night. They used the number of tests they picked up as a rough guide to the number of aircraft to be expected.

The monitors passed their notes to supervisors who, in turn, sent the information to the central communications room. From there, the entire air-raid alert system of western Japan was informed. The whole operation took only minutes.

As the bombers entered Japanese airspace, the monitors picked up snatches of conversation between aircrews, enabling the supervisors to estimate which areas of Japan the planes meant to attack. The information, along with the intercepts of radio messages to and from ships at sea, was typed up for later analysis. It all helped Hata and Oya to gauge the enemy’s strength and intentions with remarkable accuracy.

Since coming to Hiroshima, Oya had visited the monitors regularly, hoping his presence was an indication to them of the importance he placed on their work.

But his real specialty was interrogation. From the days he had first come to work with Arisue, he had shown an aptitude for questioning. It was Arisue’s proud boast that if Oya couldn’t make a man talk, then nobody could.

Oya still regretted that he had arrived in Hiroshima too late to be the first to interrogate the ten American fliers who had been shot down over Okinawa and brought to the city before the island fell.

So far, they were the only American POWs in Hiroshima. They were kept at Kempei Tai headquarters in the grounds of Hiroshima Castle.

5

The sun was still a glowing ball skimming the horizon on July 12 when Charles Perry, the 509th’s mess officer, rose from his bunk. He stepped gingerly onto the floor. The night before, one of the other officers in the Quonset hut had set traps to catch the rats which roamed the group’s compound. The 509th had moved into their new quarters on Tinian four days ago, and, in spite of the rodents, the consensus was that this time “the Old Man has done us proud.” The men accepted Tibbets’s absence without question: back at Wendover they had become accustomed to their commander’s disappearing.

Perry hoped that when Tibbets returned from the States he would bring a few “presents”—liquor and cigarettes. In the deft hands of Perry, these items were valuable commodities to barter. The usually urbane, sophisticated mess officer was nowadays behaving “like an Arab trader.”

Because of his efforts, the group enjoyed a selection of dishes not available to the twenty thousand other Americans on Tinian. It was Perry’s proud boast that “in the 509th a PFC eats better than a five-star general.”

This morning, as usual, Perry saw that the returning B-29s were “like beads on a string. As soon as one landed, another made its approach. There was always the same number of planes in sight. It was thrilling to watch.”

It was broad daylight when the last returning bomber landed. The weary crews, who had been almost thirteen hours in the air, would spend most of the day sleeping. As they went to bed, some of the 509th’s crews were preparing, yet again, to practice-bomb the Japanese on nearby Rota. None of them had yet been allowed to fly over Japan.

Their B-29s were parked in segregated areas on North Field and guarded around the clock. The sentries had orders to shoot any unauthorized person who attempted to approach the airplanes after being challenged.

This stringent security had already attracted the curiosity of other squadrons. Their questions remained unanswered. Now, as planes from the 509th took off for Rota, catcalls and jeers from a group of combat veterans drifted across North Field.

The muted resentment which Tibbets had detected was out in the open; the 509th had become an object of derision.

Soon, the taunts would be turned into verse penned by a clerk in the island’s base headquarters.

Thousands of copies of this doggerel were mimeographed and distributed throughout the Pacific command. From Hawaii to the Philippines, men read about this strange outfit on Tinian who stirred themselves to make occasional sorties against a tame target, the Japanese on Rota.

In public, the 509th laughed off the poem, but it touched a raw nerve among many in the group. Six weeks had now passed since the ground echelon had arrived on Tinian. For them in particular, the weary waiting, having to parry relentless sniping questions, dividing their time between the beach, mess hall, and movie theaters—all had combined to dent their pride. Some of the 509th even wondered if their compound, with its tough-talking guards, was fenced in not as a security precaution but because the group needed “baby-sitting.”

Beser awoke late, having been until the early hours of the morning in the Tech Area workshop where the atomic bomb would be finally assembled. There, Jeppson and members of the First Ordnance Squadron were preparing for the arrival of the bomb’s component parts.

Jeppson and the five other specialists on the proximity-fuze mechanism had been among the first to arrive on the island. In their spare time, they had made for themselves a porch out of bomb crates which formed the entrance to the tent they chose to live in; carefully sited on a high bluff where it received maximum breeze, the accommodation was the envy of almost all in the 509th.

Beser was in a hut close to the cemetery where the Americans who had died taking Tinian were buried. It was also where the remains of the crew he had seen crash were interred; Beser had learned that such crashes by B-29s loaded to the maximum with incendiary bombs were a frequent and disturbing fact of life on Tinian.

As he dressed, Beser saw that his Quonset hut was empty. He guessed his fellow officers had gone to the beach. He turned on the hut’s radio. The strains of “Sentimental Journey” came through the static. It was followed by a dulcet voice that Beser was fascinated by, but hated.

Tokyo Rose was making one of her regular propaganda broadcasts to the American forces in the Pacific.

Twice already she had startled the 509th by making specific references to the group. The first was shortly after the ground echelon landed on Tinian on May 30, Memorial Day. Tokyo Rose noted their arrival and urged them to return home before they fell victim to the victorious Japanese forces.

Some of the 509th had jeered. Others had shown concern. They wondered how she could possibly know about the most secret unit in the entire American air force. Two weeks later, Tokyo Rose mentioned them again. She warned that the group’s bombers would be easily recognizable to Japanese antiaircraft gunners because of the distinctive “R” symbols on the B-29 tails. This time, nobody scoffed. The insignias had only just been painted on.

But even if Beser found the omnipresent sources of Tokyo Rose disturbing, he still listened to her beguiling voice.

This morning, as usual, she had the latest baseball scores from the States; news of the dramas and comedies playing on and off Broadway; details of the fiction and nonfiction bestsellers—all interspersed with current selections from the “Hit Parade.”

There was no mention of the 509th. Beser switched off the radio, leaving Tokyo Rose to entertain other lonely men thinking of home.

6

On July 15, over breakfast, Swedish banker Per Jacobsson explained that all the terms were negotiable—except the clause relating to the emperor. Now he awaited his old friend Allen Dulles’s response.

Twelve days before, Lieutenant General Seigo Okamoto had received Arisue’s instructions to establish the minimum surrender terms the Allies would accept from Japan—other than unconditional surrender.

Okamoto had discussed the matter with the Japanese ambassador to Switzerland. They had called in two senior officials of the Bank for International Settlements—to which Jacobsson was financial adviser.

For several days, this consortium debated what surrender terms they believed would be acceptable to Japan, having received no guidance or encouragement from Tokyo. The group had devised a ploy so daring that even the conservative Jacobsson thought it had a good chance of success.

They proposed that if the American government would accept the terms of surrender that they, the consortium, had devised and believed the Japanese government would accept—then America should publicly advance those terms as emanating from Washington. In this way, Japan would be offered a face-saving opportunity to surrender.

Jacobsson had brought the proposals to Dulles’s current headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany. The suggested terms were: unconditional surrender should be modified so as to include a guarantee of the continuing sovereignty of the emperor; no changes in the Japanese constitution; internationalization of Manchuria; continuation of Japanese control over Formosa and Korea.

Dulles knew the weakness of his present position. Roosevelt had given him a free hand; Truman had shown himself unwilling to grant such latitude. Dulles was not authorized to speak for the new president or the American government. Further, he was aware of the possible repercussions in America that could result from any sign of appeasement toward the Japanese. And yet, Jacobsson’s view that if the Japanese could keep their emperor they would probably surrender, interested Dulles.

The Russians were crouched, committed to leap at Japan’s northern flank in August—less than a month away. But Dulles believed the Soviet Union would not stop there. Once she was in the Far East, Russia would stay there, permeating the whole area with her influence.

He made up his mind.

He gave Jacobsson a counterproposal. Carefully couched in lawyers’ language, it drew a clear distinction between a firm promise and an “understanding.” But what Dulles was saying was clear: there was a good chance that America would let the emperor stay, provided Hirohito took a public stand now to help end the war.

Jacobsson was relieved. Dulles’s proposal, if not what the banker wanted, was at least something.

He hurried back to Bern.

Dulles began to make plans to fly from the nearby Frankfurt air base to Berlin. He wanted to report to Stimson, who was due in Berlin shortly to take part in the upcoming Big Three Conference at Potsdam.

7

From Oppenheimer’s office at Los Alamos, a telephone call was made to the guardhouse farther down on the mesa. The call ordered the sentries to let the approaching convoy pass out through the gates unhampered.

Accompanied by seven cars was a closed black truck. Four men sat in each car. Beneath their coats were pistols in shoulder holsters; on the car floors were shotguns, rifles, and boxes of ammunition. The men had orders to shoot to kill anybody who attempted to stop the convoy.

In the car immediately behind the truck rode two army officers. Their field artillery collar insignia were upside down—an indication of the hurry with which Major Robert Furman and Captain James Nolan had assumed their disguises.

In reality, Furman was a Princeton engineering graduate, attached to the Manhattan Project. His normal role was to procure strategic materials and help recruit scientific personnel. Nolan was a radiologist at the Los Alamos hospital.

Today, the two men were beginning a journey scheduled to end on Tinian. Until they reached that destination, they had strict orders not to let out of their sight a fifteen-foot-long crate—it contained the atomic bomb’s inner cannon—and a lead-lined cylinder two feet high and eighteen inches in diameter in which was the uranium projectile. Crate and cylinder were now being carried in the truck.

Oppenheimer had impressed upon both men the virtual irreplaceability of the material they were accompanying.

Only a mile down the mountain road from Los Alamos, near-disaster struck when the car in which Furman and Nolan were traveling blew a tire and slewed out of control, threatening to plunge with its occupants into a nearby ravine.

The truck screeched to a halt. Security agents cocked their guns.

The car was brought under control; its tire was changed, and the journey resumed. In a cloud of dust the convoy passed through Santa Fe and reached Albuquerque’s airfield.

Three DC-3s were waiting. Furman and Nolan were given parachutes and boarded the center plane. The crate and bucket-shaped cylinder were put on the same plane; they, too, had their own parachutes.

The crew had been given one instruction: in the event of an emergency, the crate and cylinder were to be jettisoned before the passengers.

The planes reached Hamilton Field, San Francisco, without incident. A new team of agents then escorted the crate, cylinder, Furman, and Nolan to their next means of transport—a heavy cruiser whose recent battle scars, earned at Okinawa, were hidden under a fresh coat of paint. It was the Indianapolis.

A few hours after Dulles made his plans to travel to Potsdam, in Wendover Paul Tibbets watched a transport plane make its final approach. It descended over the salt flats, banked to avoid the town, and then touched down, rolling past the three B-29s still on the base.

How long the bombers would remain there depended on the news the transport brought. The plane carried a Manhattan Project courier who shuttled between Washington, Wendover, and Los Alamos carrying instructions too secret to be delivered by other means.

The courier brought news that part of the atomic bomb had been delivered to the Indianapolis. The other part—the uranium 235 “target,” the lump of uranium that would be placed at the muzzle end of the gun inside the bomb—was to be flown to Tinian by the crews still at Wendover.

The operation was code-named “Bronx Shipments.” Tibbets often wondered who invented the endless cover names that were given everybody and everything associated with the project. He was still surprised each time Groves came on the telephone with the words, “This is ‘Relief,’ ” or when Ashworth announced himself as “Scathe,” sometimes bringing news from the “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture,” the pseudonym given to one of the scientists working on the plutonium bomb.

Today’s memo confirmed a recent one from “Judge” (Captain Parsons) giving details of how the “target” for “Little Boy” (the uranium bomb) should travel to “Destination” (Tinian). “Little Boy” was just one of a variety of names for the bomb. It was also known as “the gadget,” “the device,” “the gimmick” (an expression Tibbets favored), “the beast” (often used by scientists now critical of the project), “S-1” (preferred by Stimson), and “it” (used by the 509th, still mystified about what, exactly, the weapon was).

Groves had originally called the uranium bomb “Thin Man,” after Roosevelt. When it was found necessary to shorten the bomb’s gun barrel, Groves renamed it “Little Boy.” The plutonium bomb, from its conception, was known as “Fat Man,” after Churchill.

Work in Britain on the bomb was hidden under the guise of “The Directorate of Tube Alloys.”

To keep track of who was who and what was what in the codified world of the Manhattan Project was hard even for the retentive memory Tibbets possessed.

But these instructions were clear enough. One of the B-29s at Wendover was to carry certain of the remaining bomb parts to Tinian; others would travel on board C-54 transport planes of the 509th.

Tibbets assigned crews for the flights and then prepared to travel to Alamogordo for the test-firing of the Fat Man.

Packed and just about to leave for New Mexico, he received an unexpected and urgent message from Tinian. It was signed by Ferebee, the one man above all others in the 509th whose judgment in all matters Tibbets trusted. The easygoing bombardier, who had just arrived on Tinian, was not a man to press the panic button. Yet there was no mistaking the gravity of Ferebee’s words urging Tibbets to fly at once to Tinian to deal with a major crisis. It looked as if the 509th were going to be dumped from the atomic bomb ticket.

Pausing only to send a coded message to Groves that he would not be at Alamogordo, Tibbets set off on the fifty-five-hundred-mile flight to Tinian. He had not spent the past ten months working himself to the bone, sacrificing his family life, his leisure, and his friendships only to have someone snatch the atomic mission from him at the last moment.

8

Using for illumination the jagged shafts of lightning that intermittently broke through the pitch-blackness before dawn on this chilly July 16 morning, many of the 425 scientists and technicians gathered at the test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico, carefully rubbed sun lotion on their faces and hands. Though some of them were twenty miles away from its source, they feared the flash, when it came, might cause instant sunburn. But that could be the least harmful of its side effects. They all knew the radioactive fallout accompanying the flash could kill. If it reached them, no lotion or potion could prevent them from being contaminated.

And since nobody knew for certain what the outer limits of an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction were, it was conceivable the destruction could spread beyond this semidesert area, which Groves and the scientists called Site S, and the natives called Jornada del Muerto, the “tract of death.” Even those scientists who, along with Groves, believed that the world’s first atomic explosion would not spread too far, shared a feeling of taking a huge leap into the unknown.

Nine miles from the base camp where Groves and Oppenheimer spent most of these early-morning hours, the plutonium bomb stood on a one-hundred-foot-high structural-steel scaffold. This point in the desert was code-named “Ground Zero.”

In mid-May, when the tower was still under construction, the air force had bombed the site, mistakenly believing the area to be part of a practice target range. Two buildings had been hit and fires started, but, miraculously, there had been no casualties. Then, a few days ago, during a rehearsal using a conventional bomb, a bolt of forked lightning had struck the tower and detonated the explosive. Again, no one had been hurt.

Now, with the test scheduled for 2:00 A.M., everyone hoped there would be no further mishaps. But the weather was getting worse. Lightning was accompanied by showers. Sporadic rain could be a serious danger, causing shorts in the electrical circuits leading to the bomb; heavy rain could prevent the test-firing altogether.

It was one more worry for Groves, already concerned that Tibbets was not at Alamogordo. And because of the weather, the B-29 Tibbets had ordered to be in the air at the time of the explosion was grounded. Now there was no way of knowing what effect the bomb would have on the airplane that would drop it over Japan.

Groves was further distressed by the way some of the scientists were trying to pressure Oppenheimer to postpone the test. The brilliant physicist was now wound up “like the spring in a very expensive watch.”

Groves decided to cast himself in the unusual role of the man who would dispel the tension. Clutching his scientific director firmly by the arm, the project chief marched him up and down around the base camp area, assuring him that the weather would improve. In Groves’s opinion:

The test was delayed while the harassed weathermen tried to predict conditions in the coming hours.

Finally, the firing was scheduled for approximately 5:30 A.M., Mountain War Time.

At 5:25 A.M., the observers who were out in the open took up their final positions, lying flat on the earth, faces down, feet toward the blast.

At 5:29 sharp, the last in a series of automatic timing devices took over. There were forty-five seconds to go.

Oppenheimer and his senior staff waited tensely in a concrete bunker. Groves was in a slit trench a short distance away from the scientific director, because “I wanted us to be separated in case of trouble.”

5:29:35.

From another dugout, a man spoke into a microphone linked to the four lookout posts around the base camp. “Zero minus ten seconds.”

A green flare flashed from the ground and burned against the low cloud base, briefly and eerily lighting up the darkness.

5:29:40.

“Zero minus five seconds.”

A second flare cascaded.

5:29:43.

Silence and darkness reigned once more over the desert.

5:29:44.

At 5:29:45, everything happened at once. But it was too fast for the watchers to distinguish: no human eye can separate millionths of a second; no human brain can record such a fraction of time. No one, therefore, saw the actual first flash of cosmic fire. What they saw was its dazzling reflection on surrounding hills. It was, in the words of the observer from The New York Times:

Many of the observers were transfixed, rooted to the ground by a mixture of fear and awe at the immensity of the spectacle. Oppenheimer remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred epic of the Hindus. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The sinister cloud continued to billow upward, its internal pressures finding relief in one mushroom after another, finally disappearing into the dawning sky at well over forty thousand feet. At Ground Zero, the temperature at that moment of explosion had been 100 million degrees Fahrenheit, three times hotter than the interior of the sun and ten thousand times the heat on its surface.

Within a mile radius of Ground Zero, all life, plant and animal, had vanished; around what had been the base of the tower, the sand had been hammered into the desert to form a white-hot saucer five hundred yards in diameter. There had never before been sand like it on earth. When it cooled, it turned into a jade-green, glazed substance unknown to scientists.

The steel scaffold, impervious to any heat known in the preatomic age, had been transformed into gas and dispersed.

Groves was among the first to regain his composure. He turned to his deputy, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, and uttered a prediction. “The war’s over. One or two of these things and Japan will be finished.”

9

Furman and Nolan, the two young Manhattan Project specialists who were escorting some of the vital bomb components to Tinian, watched the final sailing preparations of the Indianapolis.

Knowing as little about ships as they did about guns, Furman and Nolan were impressed by the Indianapolis’s towering superstructure and her eight-inch gun batteries. She was the flagship of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet. He was now on Guam helping to plan the invasion of Japan. They were blissfully unaware that the admiral believed the ship’s center of gravity was entirely too high, and, as a result, he had once remarked that if she ever took a clean torpedo hit, she could capsize and sink in short order.

The Indianapolis’s problem was age. Her keel had been laid in 1932, well before the advent of radar. To remain on active service, she had been fitted with lookout aids following Pearl Harbor; her superstructure, from the bridge aft, bristled with radar devices which were efficient but heavy. To those who knew her well, the venerable old warship seemed always to be in danger of toppling over. She was a curious choice to carry the crucial components of the world’s most sophisticated weapon.

For Furman and Nolan, the journey to Tinian would have all the trappings of a luxury cruise. There would be nothing for them to do except take turns sitting in their spacious cabin watching over the lead bucket containing the uranium projectile. It had been welded to the cabin floor. The fifteen-foot-long crate carrying the cannon was lashed to the deck and guarded around the clock by marines. With an armed man at each corner, it resembled a bier.

Gossip spread to every corner of the ship. In wardrooms and mess halls, bets were laid that the mystery cargo was anything from a secret rocket to gold “to bribe the Japs to quit.”

Even rosy-cheeked Captain Charles Butler McVay III, the ship’s forty-six-year-old commander, knew little more than any enlisted man as to what his ship was carrying or why she was making this headlong dash to the Marianas.

Yesterday, Parsons had come from Los Alamos to brief McVay. The two men had met in Admiral William Purnell’s office at the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Parsons had spelled out the mission in words McVay would always remember. “You will sail at high speed to Tinian where your cargo will be taken off by others. You will not be told what the cargo is, but it is to be guarded even after the life of your vessel. If she goes down, save the cargo at all costs, in a lifeboat if necessary. And every day you save on your voyage will cut the length of the war by just that much.”

Mystified but having the good sense not to ask questions, McVay had returned to his ship still wondering what his cargo was and why his ship had been chosen.

Pure chance had decided on the Indianapolis. She was available, and, from the standpoint of speed and space, she was right. But nobody could be sure how well the cruiser had recovered from the mauling she had received at Okinawa, when a kamikaze plane had killed nine of her crew and blown two huge holes in her hull. Skilled artisans at Mare Island, the largest repair yard on the West Coast, had given her a new port quarter, radio and radar equipment, and fire-control mechanisms. She had also received a new “team.” Captain McVay and some of his senior officers were still there, but over 30 officers, almost half the cruiser’s complement, and 250 enlisted men had come aboard as replacements for the veterans of Okinawa. Most of the new officers were distinctly junior; 20 of them had come straight from midshipman’s school or the Naval Academy, and many of the enlisted men from basic training.

McVay had planned to work them up in a series of training exercises off the California coast. Now, these plans were scrapped. With untried officers and crew, with a ship that had undergone the skimpiest of sea trials after major repairs, he was about to set off.

He sent for Nolan, who, as Parsons had suggested, told the captain he was not a gunnery officer but “a medical orderly,” and that, as such, he could state “the cargo contained nothing dangerous to the ship or crew.”

McVay looked at Nolan and said, “I didn’t think we were going to use bacteriological weapons in this war.”

Nolan did not reply. He rejoined Furman in their cabin keeping watch over the bucket, leaving McVay as baffled as ever.

At exactly 8:00 A.M., the Indianapolis weighed anchor. Thirty-six minutes later, she passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, outward bound.

10

Soon after his arrival in Potsdam on the morning of Monday, July 16, Churchill had paid a brief call on Truman. It was the first time the two men had met. Truman had taken an “instant liking” to Churchill, who had entered into “an amiable relationship” with Truman, showing “a marked disposition to agree with him as far as possible.”

The two leaders had parted after discussing the news that Stalin was unwell and would be one day late for the conference. They had guessed, correctly, that the Soviet leader was recovering from a minor heart attack.

Truman had taken advantage of the delay to go sightseeing in the ruins of Berlin. He had been much affected by what he saw, remarking that the destruction “is a demonstration of what can happen when a man [Hitler] overreaches himself.”

Upon his return to Babelsberg, Truman had been given a message by Stimson which had just arrived from Washington. It made Truman the most powerful of the three leaders soon to meet over the negotiating table.

The message read:

The message had let Truman know that the Alamogordo test had been a success, so much so that a fake, pre-prepared press release had been fed to the wire services claiming that an ammunition magazine had exploded, “producing a brilliant flash and blast” which had been observed over two hundred miles away.

As Truman had read the message, he realized “that the United States had in its possession an explosive force of unparalleled power.” He had ordered Stimson to respond. From Potsdam had gone the message:

Now, at noon on this Tuesday, as Stimson met with Churchill and told him the good news from Alamogordo, Stalin called on Truman.

Truman was impressed enough by the Soviet leader to feel that at this first meeting he could “talk to him straight from the shoulder. He looked me in the eye when he spoke and I felt hopeful that we could reach an agreement that would be satisfactory to the world and to ourselves.”

But the president was not impressed enough by Stalin to confide in him what he had just learned about the atomic bomb. Nor did he do so later in the day when they met again at the opening session of the Potsdam Conference.

Not that it mattered much. The Russians already knew about the bomb—through the treachery of a few scientists in the Manhattan Project who were feeding information to the Soviet Union. Even now, Russian scientists were engaged in an attempt to catch up with the Americans.

That night, Truman discussed the Alamogordo results with Stimson, Secretary of State Byrnes, and Admiral Leahy, who had stubbornly refused to believe the bomb would work. Over dinner, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—General Marshall, General Arnold, and Admiral King—joined in the conversation.

Truman forbore asking Leahy if he wished to revise his estimate. Instead, in his later words:

The die was cast. The bomb was ready. There would be no further tests to indicate what it might do in war. If the Japanese did not react positively to the final appeal for surrender Truman was planning, then he knew the responsibility was his to decide whether to use the new weapon.

11

Ferebee met Tibbets when his plane landed on July 18 after its three-day flight from Wendover. His first words were: “It’s bad news, Paul, really bad news.”

After listening to Ferebee, Tibbets knew he had been right to fly pell-mell to Tinian. The future of the 509th was endangered. In Ferebee’s words, “They’re trying to tear your outfit apart.”

A determined effort was under way to break up the tightly knit 509th and reassign the flying and ground crews to other groups based on the island.

A number of reasons were advanced for this astonishing move: the 509th’s fliers would benefit from working alongside combat veterans; they were needed to plug gaps in squadrons that had lost men over Japan; the ground crews were needed to help already harassed line chiefs keep the endless flow of bombers moving into the air.

Tibbets suspected these were mostly excuses. Like Ferebee, he now thought the trouble was caused mainly by others envious of the 509th’s special situation.

Matters were not helped by a brush Ferebee had just had with LeMay on Guam. The two men knew each other from Europe; their mutual respect was strong. It was based partly on the fact that while there was a considerable gap in rank between Major Ferebee and General LeMay, they had always spoken frankly to each other.

LeMay had succeeded in angering Ferebee by casting doubt on Tibbets’s ability to fly the atomic mission. Ferebee had exploded. “Look, General, if Colonel Tibbets is not qualified, then I’m not qualified, so neither one of us is qualified, so you don’t have anybody qualified, and the navy doesn’t have anybody qualified!”

LeMay had told Ferebee to cool down.

The advice had not been heeded. Today, the bombardier was as angry as ever, not only over LeMay’s remarks but over an “attempt by the navy to have their own man fly the mission.”

Tibbets knew the naval pilot—and disliked him. To Tibbets, the flier was “a prima donna, quite the wrong personality for the job.”

Tibbets promised Ferebee that he would go to LeMay “tomorrow, and settle the whole shooting match once and for all.”

The return of their commander acted as a tonic for the 509th. The sniping and sneering by other units had intensified: at night, some of the fliers lobbed stones onto the roofs of the group’s Quonsets as they passed by on their way to North Field for another mission over Japan.

Tibbets’s popular deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Classen, had tried to ease the situation; Tibbets felt that Classen was finding the strain of a second tour overseas barely endurable.

The group’s intelligence officer, the roly-poly Lieutenant Colonel Hazen Payette, had disappointed Tibbets. Payette was a trained lawyer and had always concerned himself with facts, not feelings; results, not excuses. On Tinian he had carried this to excess. “In trying to keep the men on their toes, he trod on too many feet,” was how radio operator Dick Nelson saw Payette’s behavior. Payette had also managed to ruffle Colonel E. E. Kirkpatrick, Groves’s energetic engineering officer on Tinian, the man who had worked wonders to ready the island’s facilities for the 509th before and since its arrival.

Unknown to Tibbets, Groves was receiving regular reports on the 509th from Kirkpatrick; it was a classic example of the way Groves worked: in his perfect world, everybody would watch everybody else.

To the 509th, Kirkpatrick was just one more outsider attached to their unit. Scientists from Los Alamos—men most of the 509th had never seen before—were now flying in and bedding down in the compound.

They created unexpected paperwork for Charles Perry. The mess officer had received written orders from the Air Force Quartermaster’s Office that he must collect thirty-five cents for every meal the civilians ate, get receipts for the money, and send them in a special pouch by air to Washington.

Perry thought the idea “plain stupid.” He did not suspect that behind it all was a continuing Manhattan Project concern about using civilian scientists alongside military personnel to make and maintain and eventually to help deliver a military weapon. At Los Alamos, some of the scientists refused to wear a uniform; here, on Tinian, they wore khakis without insignia or markings.

The charges for their meals kept a “distance” between them and the military.

Beser had no patience with such niceties. To him, it was “simply a matter of trying to play it both ways. The fact was, they were part of the American war effort like everybody else.”

In the seven weeks he had been on Tinian, Beser had made only a few short flights to check out his equipment; the nearest he had come to seeing action was when a solitary flak battery on Rota opened up as the B-29 he was in cruised high overhead.

A few days ago, a friend in the 504th had invited Beser to fly with him as a passenger for a fire raid on Japan.

Classen and Sweeney, now the commanding officer of the 393rd Heavy Bombardment Squadron, refused Beser permission to go.

Beser saw Tibbets’s arrival as fortunate: the raid was scheduled for this very night. He found Tibbets in his Quonset and repeated the request.

“I’m sorry, Jake, you can’t go.”

Beser looked miffed. “Colonel, it’s just one raid—”

“No.”

Tibbets settled back on his bunk, indicating that the interview was over.

Beser misunderstood the gesture. He thought Tibbets was merely tired after his trip from Wendover, and with a little more persuasion would let him go. “Paul, all I want to do is just this one mission to see what it’s like.”

Tibbets leaped from his bed. “Godammit, Lieutenant Beser, I’ve said no, and I mean no! Now get the hell out of here and go about your business. And the next time you come with a request, it’s Colonel Tibbets. Understand?”

A chastened Beser backed out of the hut. He spread the word that “the Old Man’s on a rampage.”

Tibbets’s long absences had convinced Lewis that when it came to the mission that really mattered, his commanding officer would not be on board; it would be Lewis himself who would fly the strike. Lewis’s reasons for coming to this conclusion were based on a number of premises.

He believed that his own record and his crew’s fitted them for the mission. Further, he assumed that Tibbets saw his own role as a “chairborne commander, planning the operation, leaving its execution to men who regularly flew B-29s.”

Lewis also believed that Tibbets “didn’t have an airplane.” Technically, that was true. The 509th’s commander had not assigned himself the aircraft; instead, he had chosen almost always to fly with Lewis. In Tibbets’s view, this made it clear to everyone with “a couple of dimes’ worth of sense that Lewis and his boys were actually my crew. When I went aboard, Lewis was copilot and I drove the plane.”

Lewis interpreted the position “somewhat differently. First of all, Tibbets had never been inside my airplane since I collected it from the factory; secondly, he had not flown on Tinian with us; thirdly, I could do the job as well as he could—as well as anybody could.”

Nobody doubted Lewis’s flying ability. But the first atomic strike called for more than professional flying expertise. It called for decision making of the highest order. And indeed, it was Tibbets’s duty to command the mission. But Lewis believed he should do the job.

Only Eatherly matched Lewis in eagerness to fly the mission. He had even named his B-29 Straight Flush, partly because of his obsession with gambling and partly because he believed his crew was the best in the group.

Whatever flying standards the officers of the Straight Flush had achieved, nobody could match them for the comfortable life they lived on the ground. Through Eatherly’s good offices, they had inherited a group of five nurses on Tinian. On an island filled with men starved for female companionship, this was the most desirable gift Eatherly could bestow. The officers, equipped with perfume and silk stockings that they had brought from America, in the words of flight engineer Eugene Grennan, “came, saw, and conquered.”

From then on, they had lived “in the laps of goddesses who waited on us hand and foot.”

For other officers, the Tinian evenings were long; some, like navigator Russell Gackenbach, relieved their boredom by playing endless practical jokes. His specialty was to creep through the Stygian darkness tossing rescue flares into the campfires which at night flickered all over the compound. The flares created considerable panic—and provided much amusement for Gackenbach.

Caron devised a different way to spend his nights. When he wasn’t at the movies, he was stealthily removing, plank by plank, parts of the officers’ club, and using the wood to build himself a porch at the back of his Quonset hut. The job was coming along nicely; he hoped he could finish it before the mission took place. If he was selected for that, he planned to wear the new Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap that the team had just sent him.

Flight engineer Duzenbury had found potentially the most dangerous way of all to spend his free time. Despite having heard that the Japanese on Tinian had recently killed two GIs, at night he and a handful of friends, armed with carbines, went out into the jungle “in search of souvenirs—Japanese guns and bayonets.” So far, during his scrambling down into caves, Duzenbury had discovered three bottles of sake; he didn’t much like the taste.

Late in the evening of July 18, Tibbets received a coded message. It was from Groves. It told him the Alamogordo test had been a total success. Tibbets went to sleep knowing the “next atomic bang would be the real thing.”

12

The July 19 confrontation between Tibbets and LeMay was brief and direct. Tibbets explained that it was necessary for the 509th to be left alone and intact, that he hoped there would be no more “meddling,” and that he intended to fly the first atomic mission.

LeMay had crossed swords with Groves a month earlier over the question of who would be in charge once the weapon was ready for combat use. LeMay believed that “it was my baby once it came to my area.” Groves thought otherwise.

LeMay still could not understand why Groves and the others in Washington wanted to entrust the bomb to a unit that had not been fully tested in combat over Japan. But he could see that “to turn it over now to someone else was a little more than they could swallow.”

He decided to agree to Tibbets’s request, with one proviso. LeMay would send his operations officer, Colonel William “Butch” Blanchard, up on a training ride with Tibbets and his crew later that day, “just to satisfy the requirement that you guys know what you’re doing.”

Tibbets took his time over the preflight checks. Just behind him, seated on a pile of cushions, Blanchard was listening to each instruction, watching every response of the crew.

Lewis was strapped in the copilot’s seat. Van Kirk was at the navigator’s table, Ferebee in the bombardier’s position. Duzenbury was at the engineer’s panel, Nelson at the radio, Shumard and Stiborik in the blister turrets, and Caron in the rear turret.

In the bomb bay was a single blockbuster filled with high explosive; the fuel tanks carried enough for the round trip from Tinian to Rota.

Tibbets taxied to the end of the airstrip and, having received clearance for takeoff, sent the B-29 thundering down the central runway on North Field. Just as the wheels were about to leave the ground, he feathered an engine. Many of the Tinian crashes on takeoff happened because an engine failed at this critical moment. Tibbets fought the bomber’s yawing movement, brought it back on course, and deftly coaxed it into the air.

Then he ordered a second engine to be cut. On the same side.

“Yes, sir!” replied Duzenbury.

Pulled by only two engines, both on one wing, the huge plane, carrying its five-ton bomb, very slowly began to climb.

Banking the B-29, dipping the wing with the silent engines toward Tinian, Tibbets offered Blanchard an excellent view of what was now the world’s largest operational airfield.

Blanchard was not interested in sightseeing; his eyes were on the two propellers gently windmilling in the air.

Tibbets winked at Lewis—and increased the aircraft’s bank until the bomber seemed to be standing on one wing.

Blanchard called Tibbets on the intercom. “Okay, I’m satisfied with engine performance. Let’s head for Rota.”

Tibbets leveled off, and at full power, the B-29 roared toward the island. It arrived over the initial point at exactly the time van Kirk had predicted. Tibbets called Blanchard. “Guess we can agree navigational error was nil.”

“Agreed.”

“Now it’s Ferebee’s turn.”

The bombardier was in the nose, head glued to the bombsight.

From thirty thousand feet, the blockbuster plummeted down. Blanchard watched it fall and hit. “It came so close to the target that there was no use even talking about it,” Tibbets later said.

Then, without warning his passenger, Tibbets put the B-29 into the usual 155-degree turn.

A strangled cry came from Blanchard. “What—what’s happening?”

“The damn tail is stalling on me!”

“What’ya mean?”

Blanchard, pinned to the cushions by centrifugal force, felt the plane shudder as if it were going to pieces.

Tibbets shouted to him. “This is the only way I can make a tight turn. I’ve got to keep the tail stalling, and then I know I’m doing it right. Now, you wouldn’t want me to do it any other way, would you?”

“Okay, that’s enough. I’m satisfied!”

“Oh, no, we’re not through yet!”

Coming out of the turn, Tibbets yanked back the control column, sending the huge bomber up into a sickening stall. It hovered momentarily on its tail, then slid back, turned, and spun toward the ground.

Blanchard turned white. “For Chrissake, you’re going to kill us!”

Judging the moment perfectly, Tibbets brought the B-29 under control and headed back for Tinian. He touched down within fifteen seconds of van Kirk’s estimate.

Blanchard did not speak until his feet were firmly on the ground. “Okay. You’ve proved your point.”

Tibbets laughed, now certain Blanchard would pose no further challenge to his authority.

Tibbets chose ten crews to fly the first 509th missions over Japan on July 20. Each flew separately, against a preselected target. The purpose was to accustom the fliers to combat, and the Japanese to seeing single high-flying aircraft that dropped only one bomb.

The crews had orders that if their given targets were weather-bound, they must “under no circumstances” drop their blockbusters on Hiroshima, Kyoto, Kokura, or Niigata. Otherwise, their choice of alternative targets was unrestricted.

The first of the B-29s took off from Tinian at 2:00 A.M. On the way to Japan, one of them had engine trouble and had to jettison its bomb in the sea; five managed to drop their blockbusters in or around their target areas; four, including the plane piloted by Claude Eatherly, found the weather so bad that they were forced to seek alternative targets.

Eatherly chose Tokyo—and the emperor’s palace. He was completely oblivious of the fact that his plan was not only against the official policy of the United States but could also affect the Potsdam Conference and, perhaps more important, strengthen the will to resist of every person in Japan.

Only one thought concerned Eatherly. If he succeeded, he would be guaranteed a place in history. He believed he might even end the war.

Eatherly circled at thirty thousand feet just south of Tokyo while his navigator plotted a course that would allow the Straight Flush to drop its ten-thousand-pound high-explosive bomb directly on the emperor’s palace.

The navigator, Francis Thornhill, was having trouble. Tokyo, like the original target they had been assigned, was socked in with cloud.

Bombardier Ken Wey said he could see no gaps in the overcast.

“Then drop it by radar!” Eatherly commanded.

“Right,” replied the bombardier.

Wey lined up the Straight Flush for a radar drop and released the bomb. Eatherly, whooping with excitement, immediately threw the B-29 into a 155-degree turn.

They left the Tokyo area without being able to see where the bomb had fallen.

13

Kizo Imai, the Japanese naval warrant officer in hiding on Tinian, waited until images flickered on the outdoor movie screen. Then, moving swiftly and surely, he left the jungle and wriggled toward the high wire fence.

He ran his fingers along the barbed strands. The gap was still there. Imai eased himself through, moving slowly now, careful not to snag his clothes. He would leave no clue for the guards who patrolled the 509th’s compound.

Imai squirmed on his belly to the nearest Quonset hut, then carefully checked himself and his surroundings. The mud he had smeared on his face and neck, buttons and belt buckle, was still there; so was the sacking he had wrapped around his boots to deaden his footsteps. Imai doubted whether in the darkness anybody could spot him from more than a few feet away. And then, if he was lucky, he could kill before the alarm was raised; he carried a small knife in his belt for just such a purpose.

Imai moved away from the hut, running in a half crouch, pausing from time to time to get his bearings. From behind him, the movie sound track carried clearly; the glow from the screen outlined nearby buildings.

Like a dog sniffing for a bone, Imai’s nose directed him to Perry’s kitchens. He found a door unlocked and sneaked inside.

On the table were rows of cooked chickens. He grabbed a couple, stuffed them in his tunic, and was reaching for another when he heard a sound. He darted outside as someone entered by another door.

Imai stealthily retraced his footsteps, stopping in the shadow of the hut near the hole in the fence to rummage through a garbage can. Tonight’s haul yielded a chunk of smoked sausage, a half-full jar of jam, and some peanuts. Wrapping his find carefully in old newspapers, Imai stuffed the package inside his tunic and trousers and moved toward the wire.

A voice stopped him. The words were in English, but there was no mistaking the accent: it was a Japanese woman’s.

Imai felt a sudden surge of excitement as from a nearby Quonset hut came the voice of Tokyo Rose, making her nightly broadcast from Japan.

His spirits raised, Imai fled into the jungle. He was eager to return to his cave to scan the American newspapers he had stolen for reports of a Japanese advance toward Tinian.

Grouped around the radio, Eatherly and his crew listened impatiently to Tokyo Rose’s diatribe. Finally, she gave them the news they were all waiting to hear.

No further reference was made to the raid. Clearly the bomb had not hit the palace.

Disappointed, Eatherly turned away from the radio, his hopes of worldwide fame temporarily quashed.

14

At 6:00 A.M. on July 21, as he did every morning, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata awoke, bathed, dressed in a kimono, and breakfasted with his wife.

Around 7:00, he padded in his slippers to the Shinto shrine that was an integral part of his home. His prayers said, he changed into his uniform and was ready to begin the next part of his daily ritual: tending the vegetables in the garden he had planted at the rear of his home. This outdoor manual work kept him lean and fit; his appearance belied his sixty-five years.

Near 8:00, Hata went into the house. Awaiting him was an overnight situation report, prepared with the help of Lieutenant Kakuzo Oya, presently acting as Hata’s intelligence chief. This morning’s summary offered no clue as to where or when the Americans intended to invade Japan, but the field marshal was ready for the assault. Hata’s inland defenses stretched from the shores of Kyushu almost two hundred miles back as far as Hiroshima on the main island of Honshu. Designed to allow for an orderly falling back to prepared positions, the system utilized the natural terrain to the maximum: murderous arcs of cross fire, tank traps, and booby traps awaited the Americans at every turn.

Hata finished his tea. Then, at about 8:15 A.M., the most important soldier outside Tokyo left in his staff car for headquarters in Hiroshima.

Most of Hiroshima’s officers rode on horseback to work, and their equestrian parade regularly earned admiration from the milling crowds on their way to or from Hiroshima’s war factories.

The animals, like their owners, and in marked contrast to the civilians, were sleek and well-groomed.

Particular approbation was reserved for the Korean prince, Lieutenant Colonel RiGu, who was attached to Hata’s staff. His was the most superb horse in Hiroshima, a huge stallion, snow white with black fetlocks.

Sitting bolt upright on his steed, ceremonial sword at his side, the handsome young prince was a reminder of past glories, when the Imperial Japanese Army’s cavalry had swept all before them.

Mayor Awaya and his personal assistant, Kazumasa Maruyama, walked to work each morning. Today, their conversation turned to a recurring topic: what could be done for the children who still remained in Hiroshima? Many of them worked in the factories and were receiving only a token education. Teachers traveled from one war plant to another, holding short classes on the factory floors.

Awaya thought the situation appalling and wanted to enlarge the city’s industrial college. Maruyama believed all children should be evacuated.

The two men entered the Town Hall and were immediately overwhelmed by complaints about food distribution; about the lack of fuel; about shops overcharging; about Kempei Tai brutality; about the need for more large air-raid shelters. The problem of caring for the children of Hiroshima was lost in the welter of demands.

Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama received a letter this morning from his father in Tokyo. Carefully worded and showing signs of long deliberation, the message rejected Colonel Abe’s marriage proposal.

Yokoyama’s parents’ investigation had shown that Abe’s daughter “has an unhappy disposition. Her teachers indicate she is not obedient or good at her work. In spite of his high position, we do not see from our most patient inquiries that your colonel’s antecedents are always what we would desire for uniting our two families.”

As a dutiful son, the gunnery officer knew he must accept his parents’ decision. But how would he break the news to Colonel Abe, who had been pressing for an answer for weeks? His commander, he knew, would regard the rejection of his offer as an unforgivable insult. Yokoyama might well find himself banished to a noncombat post.

Yokoyama’s reverie was disturbed by excited shouts from his gunners. It was midday, and American bombers were back over Kure to bomb and machine-gun the port. They came regularly now at noon and at midnight. From his vantage point, just seven miles away, Yokoyama could clearly see the flashes from the ground batteries.

The feeling of hopelessness he had brought back from Tokyo lifted. The capital might, indeed, be in ruins. But here, in the west of Japan, the army was fighting back as hard as ever; he desperately wanted to be part of that fight.

Suddenly Yokoyama knew what he must do about the letter: he would pretend he had never received it. He would tell Abe that his parents were still considering the matter, that it might be some months before they were able to give a decision, as their life had been disrupted by the bombing.

15

On July 20, Secretary of War Stimson was just finishing breakfast when OSS director Allen Dulles was shown into his Potsdam quarters. Dulles told Stimson of the Japanese offer relayed to him by Jacobsson five days earlier in Wiesbaden, and of his counterproposal: that America might allow Emperor Hirohito to retain his throne if he took a public stand now to end the war.

Stimson respected Dulles’s judgment. But he believed it was unlikely that peripheral peace feelers stemming from Switzerland could represent official government thinking. In addition, although Stimson himself had come to Potsdam thinking that in the final appeal to Japan to surrender, some assurance might be given for the continuance of the imperial system, he knew that such a view was unpopular back home. To many Americans, the very idea of a ruling dynasty was repugnant. To some, Hirohito was not much different from Hitler.

Stimson thanked Dulles for coming, but made it clear he had no faith in the Jacobsson connection.

On Sunday morning, July 22, Stimson called on President Truman in Potsdam. Washington had cabled that the uranium bomb would be ready for use “the first favorable opportunity in August”; if the mission was to go ahead, its complicated preparations must be set in motion no later than July 25.

Following Groves’s detailed report of the success at Alamogordo, which had arrived the previous day, the news seemed to please Truman immensely.

At 10:40 A.M., Stimson called on Churchill, who read Groves’s report in full and commented, “Stimson, what was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? Meaningless. The atomic bomb is the Second Coming in wrath.”

Stimson made it clear the president intended to tell Stalin about the weapon, although he would “withhold all details,” merely “divulging the simple fact that the United States and Britain had the bomb.” The question of how much to tell the Russian leader was a controversial one.

The prime minister agreed; he believed the current situation should be used as “an argument in the negotiations” going on at Potsdam.

Back in his quarters, Stimson summoned General Arnold, chief of the air force, and brought him up to date.

The air chief suggested that in place of Kyoto, Nagasaki should be considered one of the potential targets—the first time the city had been earmarked for possible atomic destruction.

Arnold told Stimson that General Carl A. Spaatz, recently promoted commander of the Strategic Air Forces and about to travel to the Marianas, could make the final choice in consultation with LeMay.

While Stimson talked with Arnold, Truman met with Churchill.

To the prime minister, the weapon was “a miracle of deliverance.” It might make invasion unnecessary. It could end the war in “one or two violent shocks.” Its almost supernatural power would afford the Japanese an excuse that would save their honor and release them from the samurai obligation to fight to the death. Nor would there now be a need to beg favors of Stalin, to rely on Russian intervention to help bring Japan to her knees.

Churchill concluded that “while the final decision lay in the main” with Truman, there was no disagreement between them. As he later put it:

But before resorting to use of the atomic weapon, the Allies would offer Japan one last chance to surrender.

16

At the foot of Mount Lasso, hemmed in by the pitch-black night, Jacob Beser was taking part in what had become a favorite Tinian pastime.

Clutching a carbine he had traded for a quart of whiskey, the skinny young officer had persuaded a marine patrol to take him with them into the jungle in search of Japanese.

The marine officer had explained the hunt rules to Beser. “First we surround the area where we think the Nip is hidden. Then we work inward, pen him into a few square yards, and illuminate the area with flashlights. Then we try to talk him into surrendering.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Wait and see.”

At nightfall, the marines, with Beser in their midst, had entered the jungle. Twice they had encircled suspicious patches but had drawn blanks. Now the patrol was moving into higher ground.

Suddenly the marines froze.

Beser could hear nothing.

The lead soldier turned and tapped his nose.

Beser sniffed. Faint but unmistakable, he detected a human odor.

The marine officer deployed his men swiftly, ordering Beser to remain stationary while the soldiers melted into the dark.

Alone, crouching with his carbine, Beser wondered what he would do if a Japanese soldier appeared before him. He had never killed a man; he prayed he would not have to do so now. He wished he had stayed in his Quonset hut playing poker.

For long minutes, nothing happened. Then Beser heard the sound of branches being moved. Beams of light probed the darkness, and an American voice called out in Japanese. “Surrender! You are surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

Beser started to rise to his feet. Another American voice stopped him. “Stay down—or you’ll be shot!”

There was a grunt from the jungle, followed by a movement through the foliage.

The flashlights followed the sound.

“He’s coming out!”

Out of the undergrowth in front of Beser, a figure emerged. The lights held the Japanese soldier, blinding him, forcing him to close his eyes.

Beser joined the marines milling around their prisoner. The flashlights were lowered. The captured soldier opened his eyes and spoke in passable English. “Please. Cigarette.”

He was given one. Inhaling deeply, he stood still while a marine frisked him and fished out of a pocket a silver cigarette case. In halting English, the prisoner explained he had taken the case from a dead Australian soldier in New Guinea.

The marine officer looked at the captured man, shook his head in disgust, and turned away. Two marines fell in beside the prisoner, pinioning his arms. In silence, the patrol returned to base.

17

In his office at General Army Headquarters in Tokyo, Major General Arisue listened carefully as Lieutenant Colonel Oya described the network of defenses that radiated outward from Hiroshima.

Oya had traveled 550 miles by train to make a personal report to Arisue on Field Marshal Hata’s plans for repelling the invaders.

Arisue wished the area around Tokyo were in the same high state of readiness. By July 27, the city and its environs were devastated, its industries either obliterated by bombs or paralyzed by lack of manpower and materials. The attacks had driven millions of workers from Tokyo, reducing its population from seven million to less than four million.

Arisue and Oya were interrupted by the arrival of a messenger from the radio monitoring unit of army intelligence. Arisue took the batch of papers and realized they contained the long-expected communiqué from Potsdam. Excitedly, he studied the hurriedly prepared Japanese script, the result of transcribing and translating at high speed the words of a monitored shortwave transmission from Washington.

The Potsdam Proclamation, perhaps the most important message the Japanese received from the Allies in the entire war, reminded Japan of “the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world” and spelled out the terms for ending the war. Japan must reject its militaristic leaders, submit to Allied occupation, respect fundamental democratic rights, and establish a “peacefully inclined” government. Except for war criminals, the Japanese military forces would be allowed to return home. Industry would be maintained, and eventually Japan would participate in world trade.

The proclamation concluded:

Stimson had agreed to leave out mention of the emperor on the understanding from Truman that if the Japanese, in their reply, raised the question, it would be treated sympathetically, if not at first publicly.

But to Arisue, as well as other Japanese, the Potsdam Proclamation was a “warning of annihilation unless we give up what we hold sacred.”

Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo brought a copy of the communiqué to Emperor Hirohito in the audience hall of the imperial palace’s Gobunko, or “Library Building.”

The Gobunko, screened by trees near the north gate, was one of the few buildings within the palace grounds that was unscarred by war. On May 25, the emperor had suffered the agony of seeing many of the buildings and pavilions within the imperial compound burn to the ground. During the previous night there had been a firebomb raid; LeMay’s bombers had concentrated on the two districts adjoining the palace. Though the Americans intentionally avoided dropping incendiaries within the imperial precincts, they had converted the surrounding areas into such tornadoes of flame that the conflagration jumped the moat around the palace and set fire to dry brushwood on the far side. In minutes the flames had spread and engulfed the old wooden imperial residence built by Hirohito’s grandfather, the revered Emperor Meiji.

At dawn, Hirohito and his empress had emerged from their shelter and surveyed the destruction. The emperor had commented to a palace official, “Now the people will realize that I am sharing their ordeal with no special protection from the Gods.”

As the emperor studied the Allies’ proclamation, Togo sat bolt upright on a hard sofa. To Togo, steeped in the tradition of diplomatic exchanges, the manner in which the document had been sent to Japan—as the main story in a shortwave newscast emanating from Washington—was disheartening. Conveying such an important document by public broadcast “did not seem the way for government to speak to government.”

Yet, under the emperor’s questioning, Togo conceded that the communiqué did give detailed assurances of humane treatment, freedom of speech, religion, and thought. The occupation of strategic points of the home islands would end once stability was restored. And the Japanese people were to be consulted on the form of government they wished after the surrender.

The emperor dissected the proclamation clause by clause, asking questions and making points. Finally, Hirohito asked his foreign minister whether he felt the terms “were the most reasonable to be expected in the circumstances.”

Togo conceded this was the case.

“I agree. In principle they are acceptable.”

Silence enveloped the audience chamber.

Then, abruptly, Togo rose to his feet and faced the emperor. It was the traditional gesture of the imperial court to signify that a visitor had no more to say.

The emperor also stood, and, in another ritual act, he turned and left the room.

Togo bowed from the waist to the retreating emperor.

Togo had not revealed to the emperor the hardening attitude of Japan’s government and military leaders to the Potsdam Proclamation.

Prime Minister Suzuki and his colleagues were inclined to ignore the communiqué, partly on the grounds that officially they had not even received it. Further, the Cabinet still pinned its hopes on the Soviet Union’s mediating for them a “reasonable surrender.” There was total agreement that to “accept Potsdam would be to insult Russia.”

Suzuki arranged a press conference with a reporter planted to ask the Cabinet’s view of the proclamation.

Hands trembling, the prime minister read a prepared statement. He dismissed the proclamation, saying the government “does not regard it as a thing of great value. We have decided to mokusatsu the proclamation.”

Within minutes, Suzuki’s words were broadcast by the official Japanese news agency, Domei, which translated mokusatsu as “ignore.”

18

On July 28, Beser discovered he was being watched by the 509th’s flight surgeon for signs of psychological strain. Beser was delighted to discover the surveillance. “It meant we must be getting close to mission time.”

On orders from Tibbets, Dr. Don Young was watching all the group’s aircrews for such symptoms. He did his work so discreetly that few fliers suspected they were under observation.

Young himself still did not know exactly what the mission entailed. He had simply been told to report any flier showing “unusual behavior.”

The doctor watched every crew going off on a flight; he carefully noted the way the men walked and carried their gear. He eavesdropped on their conversations, listening for complaints of lack of sleep or loss of appetite.

When the planes returned, he was waiting, a gentle, unobtrusive man with a sharp clinical mind. Young observed the fliers drinking their ration of bourbon issued at the end of each mission; he was looking for the crewman who gulped his whiskey too quickly or asked for a second shot.

He sat in on debriefings, assessing the fliers’ choice of words for clues to their mental states.

Between missions, he dropped into the fliers’ Quonsets, searching for the man who laughed too loudly, lost his temper too quickly, played too boisterously. In the officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs, he would move from one table to another, on the lookout for indications of tension.

On the sports fields, he watched the fliers at play, looking for signs of “undue aggression” or bad sportsmanship.

And, against all regulations, he read their mail after it had cleared the censor’s office.

Then, late at night, the indefatigable Dr. Young would collate his findings into confidential reports for Tibbets.

He had tabbed Beser as one of the most normal men in the 509th: “balanced, filled with healthy aggression, calm under pressure.”

In fact, Young told Tibbets, his crews were psychologically “probably among the most balanced in the air force.”

Young spotted no signs of instability in Claude Eatherly. And Tibbets, well aware of Eatherly’s quirks, still felt the pilot’s skills outweighed all other considerations.

In the heavily guarded Tech Area where Beser worked, tension had increased markedly with the arrival from Los Alamos of Captain Parsons.

At Los Alamos, Beser had hardly known Parsons, whose punctuality, reserve, and exacting manner intimidated many of his fellow scientists. But here on Tinian, the middle-aged naval officer revealed himself to be a relaxed as well as dynamic leader; the faster the pace, the calmer he became. He impressed Beser as “a dignified officer and a fine gentleman.”

Parsons had come to Tinian to supervise the final delivery and assembly of the atomic bomb.

Also now on Tinian were two Englishmen: Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, an RAF hero, and a fair-haired scientist, William Penney, whose brilliant mathematical calculations had played a part in developing the weapon.

The War Cabinet in London had insisted that Britain be represented when the bomb was dropped. President Truman had agreed “in principle” to this at Potsdam. As a result, Cheshire and Penney firmly believed they would be going on the flight that dropped the bomb and, afterward, would be reporting their observations to London.

Strangely, while everybody in the 509th was helpful “and very jolly,” General LeMay had been evasive when the two Englishmen mentioned going on the mission.

Recently there had been a mysterious outbreak of diarrhea in the 509th. Dr. Young attributed it to “a generous quantity of soap” slipped into the cooking vats. Uanna, the group’s security chief, suspected that “a mischievous Jap who had gotten into the compound was responsible.” He was right; that was exactly what had happened. Security around the cookhouse was increased.

The hostility the group encountered outside the compound was an increasing concern for Tibbets. While every other flying unit on the island was putting in the maximum number of combat hours, the 509th was mainly occupied with practice missions around the Marianas. The group so far had been to Japan just three times—and on each of these occasions had used only ten bombers from its fleet of fifteen. At night, furious fliers from other groups hurled showers of rocks into the compound; it was a humiliating experience for the self-confident 509th.

Tibbets tried to dispel the frustration by holding regular pep talks. He encouraged Perry to excel himself in the kitchens. And he was pleased to see that Chaplain Downey was acting “like a cheerleader, always on hand to lend support.”

Tibbets encouraged jokes about life in the compound; he reasoned that if the men could laugh at their troubles, they would not seem so bad. One of the most successful jests was a song, sung to the tune of “Rum and Coca-Cola.”

As always, Tibbets was careful to hide the increasing strain he personally felt. His working day often stretched from 7:00 A.M. until midnight. His sleep was frequently disturbed by “eyes-only” messages from “Morose,” the new code name Groves used for his Washington headquarters, or from “Misplay,” Groves’s new name for Los Alamos. Messages from Morose inevitably ended with a request for the latest readiness report for “Centerboard,” the code name for the actual atomic strike.

19

At 12:50 P.M., July 28, the field telephone rang in Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama’s antiaircraft gun post on Mount Futaba. One of the controllers in Hiroshima Castle warned him of the possible approach of bombers from the south, the direction of Kure. Yokoyama already had his guns pointed that way, in case any of the American planes bombing the port were forced by the gun batteries there to flee toward Hiroshima.

Radio Hiroshima interrupted its program to announce an alert, and all over the city, people ran for shelter.

Dr. Kaoru Shima was performing an appendectomy when a nurse told him of the air-raid warning. He continued with the surgery. Outside the operating room, the staff hurried patients to the ground-floor shelter, carrying those unable to walk by themselves.

Mayor Senkichi Awaya and Kazumasa Maruyama were in the mayor’s office when they heard the alert siren. Maruyama rushed to the window and stared into the sky but could see nothing. He and Awaya resumed their discussion.

Field Marshal Hata invited his officers to join him at the windows of the conference room to watch developments.

Yokoyama, peering through his binoculars, could see at least two B-24s coming toward him. They were climbing after their bomb run over Kure Naval Dockyard, now obscured by a towering pall of smoke.

With growing excitement, the gunnery officer estimated that if the oncoming aircraft maintained their present course, they would be well within range of his guns when they crossed Hiroshima.

The planes approaching Hiroshima were from the 866th Bombardment Squadron of the 494th Bombardment Group of the Seventh Bomber Command, based on Okinawa.

They were part of a force of thirty B-24s that had taken off earlier in the morning to attack the Haruna, one of the last Japanese battleships still afloat. Each bomber carried twenty-seven hundred gallons of fuel, three two-thousand-pound bombs, and propaganda leaflets giving the Potsdam Proclamation surrender terms.

The bombers had arrived over Kure at exactly 12:40. But even from the designated attack altitude of ten thousand feet, the Haruna proved a difficult target; she was well camouflaged, and protected by shore batteries as well as her own guns.

By the time the B-24s from the 866th made their bomb run, some thirty misses had exploded at distances of between two hundred and six hundred yards from the Haruna. A number of other bombs had fallen on nearby dockyard buildings, and the immediate target area was shrouded in dense smoke.

Flying through heavy flak, the first bomber of the 866th, nicknamed Taloa, had dropped her three bombs into the smoke and broken away to the left, toward Hiroshima.

The eleven men aboard the Taloa were nervous. It was common knowledge that the Japanese often executed captured American fliers. Just over a month earlier, eight airmen had been publicly put to death—their bodies prodded into the ritual kneeling position and their heads chopped off by ceremonial swords.

The pilot of the Taloa, First Lieutenant Joseph Bubinsky, was too busy trying to gain height and chart a new course for home to dwell on such gruesome thoughts.

Bombardier Robert Johnston, also a first lieutenant, was still in the nose of the B-24, peering through the Plexiglas at the countryside below. His relief was considerable as the bomber cleared the concentration of gun batteries that made Kure one of the most heavily defended cities in Japan. Ahead, coming up fast, were the port facilities of Hiroshima and, just beyond, the welcome sight of wooded countryside.

The Taloa carried nine other frightened men: First Lieutenant Rudolph Flanagin, copilot; First Lieutenant Lawrence Falls, navigator; Technical Sergeant Walter Piskor, flight engineer; Technical Sergeant David Bushfield, radio operator; Staff Sergeant Charles Allison, upper turret gunner; Staff Sergeant Charles Baumgartner, ball turret gunner; Staff Sergeant Camillous Kirkpatrick, nose turret gunner; Staff Sergeant Julius Molnar, rear turret gunner; and a “passenger,” Captain Donald Marvin, on board to gain combat experience.

Not far behind the Taloa flew the Lonesome Lady, with its crew of nine: Second Lieutenant Thomas Cartwright, pilot; Second Lieutenant Durden Looper, copilot; Second Lieutenant Roy Pedersen, navigator; Second Lieutenant James Mike Ryan, bombardier; Sergeant Hugh Atkinson, radio operator; Staff Sergeant William Abel, tail gunner; Staff Sergeant Ralph Neal, ball gunner; Corporal John Long, nose gunner; and Sergeant Buford Ellison, flight engineer.

The men aboard both B-24s knew of the standing orders that forbade their bombing Hiroshima; but as far as they knew, there was no restriction on simply flying over the city.

None of the fliers knew anything at all about the ground defenses of Hiroshima. When the city had been “reserved” for possible atomic attack, all information about it had been restricted.

As they approached the southern end of Hiroshima, a concentrated stream of shells was sent up by antiaircraft guns in batteries near the gaisenkan, the “hall of triumphant return,” and in Eba park, guarding the Mitsubishi factory.

The bombers continued their headlong dash over Hiroshima, toward Mount Futaba.

And then, with the time nearing 1:00 P.M., with two-thirds of the city behind them and the safety of open countryside ahead, the fate of the twenty men aboard the two bombers, although never publicly reported by the American government, was about to become inextricably linked with that of Hiroshima.

As soon as the B-24s were within range, Yokoyama ordered the battery to fire.

The first salvo bracketed the Taloa. Pretty puffs of smoke exploded above and below it. Yokoyama shouted an immediate correction.

The next salvo seemed to hit the Taloa squarely on the nose. A frenzied cheer came from the gunners. Yokoyama shouted at them to keep firing.

The sky around the stricken bomber was now pockmarked with shrapnel bursts. Trailing smoke, the plane abruptly turned left, away from Mount Futaba.

Behind, the Lonesome Lady also seemed to have been hit.

From the conference room windows, Field Marshal Hata and his staff watched the tiny figures tumbling from the Taloa. Moments later, as the B-24 crossed western Hiroshima, their parachutes opened.

The bomber plunged into a hill between the two villages of Itsukaichi and Inokuchi. A great cloud of flame and oily smoke rose into the air. The sound of the crash brought people from nearby farms and hamlets out into the open. Some, workers from a local fish market, brandished knives and hatchets.

At least three men from the Taloa were now floating earthward. They were pilot Joseph Bubinsky, bombardier Robert Johnston, and tail gunner Julius Molnar.

All were deeply shocked and suffering superficial wounds, but instinctively they tried to juggle their parachute cords so they would drift away from the packs of civilians they could see converging below.

The Lonesome Lady was trailing smoke and coming under fire from a battery sited near Hiroshima Castle. The bomber banked sharply to the right, turning back in the direction of Kure. Yokoyama’s gunners would forever believe it was they who delivered the coup de grâce to the stricken plane.

The Lonesome Lady lost altitude, passing over the Toyo factory and heading for the dense forest southeast of Hiroshima. Eight men managed to jump from the bomber. Only navigator Roy Pedersen was still on board as the Lonesome Lady crashed to the ground.

The excitement at the Mount Futaba gun post knew no bounds. For Tatsuo Yokoyama, “this was my most thrilling day in all the war.” He promised his gunners the biggest celebration they could imagine. Then he turned his binoculars to the west, where those who had bailed out of the Taloa were about to touch down.

Squads of Kempei Tai military policemen were fanning out from Hiroshima in pursuit of the fliers.

One of those squads, led by Warrant Officer Hiroshi Yanagita, stopped to check its bearings with Imperial Army Corporal Kanai Hiroto, who lived locally and had been furiously peddling his bicycle in the direction of the crash.

Hiroto told Yanagita that he spoke English and would be happy to offer his services as an interpreter. He stepped onto the running board of the Kempei Tai car, and they sped toward Inokuchi.

Hiroto had attended a high school in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. He returned to Japan in 1934 and afterward was drafted. Following three years’ fighting in Manchuria, he had experienced an uneventful war.

Yanagita was one of the most senior Kempei Tai leaders in Hiroshima. He was a tough, professional soldier.

When they reached the foot of the hill into which the Taloa had crashed, the Kempei Tai officer and his men raced toward the parachutes they could see caught in the trees.

Hiroto stopped by the still-smoldering bomber. It had split in two sections, lying some two hundred yards apart. He was about to go into the wreckage when Yanagita returned, saying one of the Americans had been caught and was being held a little way down the hill.

It was the tail gunner, Staff Sergeant Julius Molnar from Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Even before reaching him, Hiroto saw that Molnar was in grave danger. The slightly built sergeant was surrounded by civilians who “wanted to beat him to death. I forced my way in, took hold of him, and tried to ward off their blows.”

Yanagita stepped forward, brandishing a pistol. He threatened his men would shoot the next civilian who moved.

Sullenly, the crowd stood back.

Flanked by Hiroto and Yanagita, Molnar was escorted to the relative safety of a nearby farmstead. There, Molnar was surrounded by Kempei Tai policemen.

Hiroto could see that the young airman was making an effort to control his trembling. He spoke to the tail gunner for the first time, telling him in English that he had once lived in the United States. The terrified Molnar began to calm down.

Prompted by Yanagita, Hiroto questioned Molnar. He willingly gave his name, serial number 36453945, and rank. He said that he was twenty-one years old, had been trained in Texas, and that his plane had taken off from Okinawa to attack the port of Kure. He claimed he did not know the names of the other crew members of the Taloa.

Hiroto was then called to another part of the farmyard, where bombardier Robert Johnston was being held. The crowd of villagers menacing the officer were again warned back by the Kempei Tai.

Johnston concealed his fear better than Molnar, but Hiroto “could tell from his eyes that he was very frightened.” Johnston also gave his name, serial number 0698565, and rank.

When Johnston refused to say more, the Kempei Tai leader told Hiroto his translation services were not needed further. Hiroto returned to the crash site, where he searched in the wreckage for food and radio components.

Yanagita and his men rounded up three other crew members from the Taloa, including its pilot, Joseph Bubinsky, and drove them to Kempei Tai headquarters at Hiroshima Castle, where specialist interrogators could question them more thoroughly.

By now the eight crewmen from the Lonesome Lady were also on their way to the castle.

Of the twenty original fliers in the two bombers, thirteen had survived being shot down and captured. When they arrived in Hiroshima, there would be a total of twenty-three American prisoners of war being held in the city.

For them, the most terrible experience of all was yet to come.

20

In the early hours of July 29 on Tinian, eighty-one fliers assembled to be briefed for the fourth—and, as it turned out, last—practice mission the 509th would make over Japan. Lieutenant Colonel Hazen Payette, the group intelligence officer, confirmed the targets allocated at an earlier briefing to each of the nine crews.

Lewis was to bomb a factory complex at Koriyama; Captain Frederick Bock was to drop his ten-thousand-pound blockbuster on Osaka; Eatherly was to bomb the railway sidings at Maizuru; others were to attack targets at Kobe, Shimoda, Ube, Nagoya, Wakayama, and Hitachi. Ferebee, like Tibbets, had been forbidden to fly over Japan until the atomic mission.

For this mission, Lewis would be flying Sweeney’s airplane, nicknamed the Great Artiste, while his usual B-29 was given a special inspection and servicing by group technicians. Van Kirk was taking the place of Lewis’s regular navigator. The changes made Lewis uneasy.

The briefing was routine. Antiaircraft fire would probably be “moderate to light.” Van Kirk spoke to the navigators about routes to the targets, where they planned to arrive, as usual, around nine in the morning. Then, trucks took the crews to their planes.

The Straight Flush was the first to take off. Eatherly was bent on making a record flight to Japan and back in order to resume an unfinished poker game.

Minutes later, Bock’s Car, commanded by Captain Frederick Bock, trundled down the runway.

Next, it was the turn of Major James Hopkins in Strange Cargo. Lewis watched the four engines spin into life. Then Strange Cargo moved from its apron.

Suddenly, there was a rasping sound of metal grinding on metal. The bomb-bay doors of Strange Cargo were slowly forced open, their reinforced-steel hinges screeching under the pressure.

Hopkins brought the plane to a stop and, with a sickening thud, Strange Cargo’s blockbuster dropped onto the asphalt.

Lewis stared boggle-eyed at the huge bomb a few feet away. If it exploded, it would destroy everything within several hundred yards.

Quietly, Lewis warned his crew of what had happened. Over the radio he could hear Hopkins calling the control tower for help. In moments, the sound of crash trucks, ambulances, and MP jeeps filled the air.

The control officer told Lewis and Hopkins to keep their crews on board; the slightest jar might detonate the ten-thousand-pound blockbuster.

Portable searchlights were focused on the runway. Through binoculars, firemen and armorers studied the bright-orange bomb, its fins bent and twisted from its fall.

The firemen were the first to move in. They blanketed the blockbuster with foam, which they hoped would help deaden any explosion.

A volunteer gang of armorers pushed a dolly and winch crane under the gaping belly of the plane. Working in total silence, they gently placed shackles around the bomb and cranked it up, inch by inch. Then they slid the dolly under the bomb. A small tractor was backed into position, the dolly hooked up and towed away.

A relieved voice from the control tower told both crews they could relax.

Lewis bellowed a characteristic reply. “Like hell! We got a mission to fulfill!”

Within minutes, the engines of Great Artiste thundered into life. Without giving Strange Cargo a second look, Lewis and his crew took off on their night flight to Koriyama.

21

Six days previously, General Carl Spaatz had arrived in Washington, D.C., from Europe on his way to the Pacific to assume command of the Strategic Air Forces, newly created for the impending invasion of Japan. After Groves had briefed him on the atomic bomb, Spaatz, a graying, lean-faced Pennsylvania Dutchman, had faced General Thomas T. Handy, acting chief of staff while Marshall was in Potsdam, and stubbornly insisted that “if I’m going to kill 100,000 people I’m not going to do it on verbal orders. I want a piece of paper.”

The document was drafted by Groves on July 23. It was then transmitted to the Little White House in Potsdam for approval—immediately granted. The document had been prepared by Handy and, on July 25, handed to Spaatz.

When Spaatz arrived on Guam, his new chief of staff, LeMay, suggested that he hold an immediate meeting with the key personnel involved in the atomic mission. Spaatz agreed, and assembled now, on July 29, in LeMay’s office were LeMay, Tibbets, Parsons, Blanchard, and LeMay’s senior meteorologist. The exact date of the first mission would depend on his forecast of “a good bombing day,” when there would be a maximum of three-tenths cloud cover and favorable winds over Japan.

Spaatz read the order aloud.

At last, America’s senior soldier in the Pacific, MacArthur, was to be told about the revolutionary weapon.

Spaatz folded the document and placed it back in his briefcase. “Gentlemen,” he asked, “are your preparations on schedule?”

The men around the table nodded. Parsons then read a memorandum he had just received from Oppenheimer in Los Alamos.

Following the Alamogordo test, Oppenheimer had calculated that the energy release from the bomb to be dropped on Japan would be in the region of twelve thousand to twenty thousand tons, and the blast should be equivalent to that from eight thousand to fifteen thousand tons of TNT.

It would take nearly two thousand B-29s, carrying full loads of conventional high-explosive bombs, to match one atomic bomb. Even now, after almost a year with the Manhattan Project, Tibbets found such a thought “just awesome.”

Perhaps Oppenheimer felt the same when he wrote his memo to Parsons. In it, after mentioning the bomb would probably be fuzed to go off 1,850 feet above the target city, he stated:

Oppenheimer ended his memo: “Good luck.”

The meeting in LeMay’s office concluded with the introduction of two further code names. LeMay was to be known as “Cannon”; General Farrell, on route to Guam to function as the senior representative of the Manhattan Project in the Marianas, would be “Scale.”

As he flew back to Tinian with Parsons, whose code name was “Judge,” Tibbets mused that if he had a choice of pseudonym, he would like to be known as “Justice.”

Soon after returning to Tinian, Tibbets was again out on the runway, waiting to greet his crews as they returned from their solo missions to Japan.

None had been hit by flak. The weather over the targets was reasonable, and each aircraft had been able to bomb visually.

When Lewis landed, Tibbets congratulated him and his men for not being unnerved by the experience with the errant bomb just before takeoff. Lewis took the opportunity to remind his commander, “My crew is the best you’ve got.”

There then occurred a short conversation whose meaning Tibbets and Lewis would later dispute.

Although Lewis had expected to drop the first new weapon with “his crew” in “his plane,” Tibbets had already told him that van Kirk and Ferebee would be going along. Lewis did not like the idea but had come to accept it, viewing van Kirk’s flight with him today as confirmation of the plan.

Now, according to Lewis, Tibbets told him that he, Lewis, “would be flying the mission.” Lewis took that to mean that he would be the aircraft commander.

Tibbets would not deny that he made the remark, but he would differ radically from Lewis in interpreting it: “Lewis would fly as copilot; van Kirk and Ferebee would replace his usual navigator and bombardier. It was clear to anybody that on such a mission I had to be in the driver’s seat.”

22

Aboard submarine I.58, shortly before midnight, the officer of the watch awakened Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto from his catnap and reported all was well. Hashimoto told him he thought “it was going to be a good night for hunting.”

The previous day at 2:00 P.M., Hashimoto had sighted a tanker escorted by a destroyer. Judging it unwise to approach close enough to use conventional torpedoes, he had decided instead to launch two of his six kaitens. After quickly saying good-bye to Hashimoto, each suicide pilot had climbed through a hatch from I.58 into his torpedo, lashed to the mother submarine’s deck. When Hashimoto heard the young officers shout over the intercom, “Three cheers for the emperor,” he knew they were ready to be launched. In poor visibility, the kaitens had steered toward the tanker. Hashimoto tracked them through his periscope until the rain blotted them out. He waited. Then, faint but unmistakable, came the sound of explosions. Hashimoto guessed the tanker had been hit, but not being absolutely sure, he had logged it as a “probable.”

After leading the crew in prayers for the departed kaiten pilots, Hashimoto had set course for “the crossroads,” the intersection of American shipping lanes connecting Guam with Leyte in the Philippine Islands, and Okinawa with Peleliu in the Palau Islands.

The crossroads was exactly six hundred miles from Guam. The I.58 had reached there earlier this Sunday; the sea was calm, and the submarine had remained surfaced for most of the day. Toward evening, visibility had dropped as mist drifted over the area. Hashimoto had ordered the submarine to submerge until moon-rise, at about 11:00 P.M.

Now, having completed his prayers at the ship’s shrine, Hashimoto ordered night action stations. As the chief engineer increased speed to three knots, the crew moved to a state of alert.

Hashimoto ordered the submarine up to sixty feet and sent the night periscope hissing upward to break the Pacific surface. After adjusting the eyepiece, he swept the quarters of the compass. The moon was some twenty degrees high in the east, and there were a few scattered clouds.

He ordered the submarine brought to within ten feet of the surface. “Stand by type-thirteen radar.”

The mechanism for detecting aircraft rose just above the swell. Its operator reported no sign of planes.

“Stand by type-twenty-two radar.”

The surface radar, which indicated the presence of other vessels within a three-mile radius of I.58, rose out of the water. From past experience, Hashimoto knew that the device was capable of mistaking driftwood, shoals of fish, and outcrops of rock for ships.

Only when the operator was satisfied that the vicinity was empty did the captain give his next order. “Stand by to surface.”

Hashimoto lowered the periscope handles. “Blow main ballast.”

High-pressure air entered the main tanks, expelling the last of the water and sending the boat swiftly to the surface.

As soon as the deck was awash, Hashimoto ordered the conning-tower hatch opened. The signalman and navigator climbed up to the bridge with the watch officer, and each began looking through high-powered night binoculars.

Below, in the control room, Hashimoto kept watch through the night periscope; the operator of the surface radar continued monitoring.

The routine was broken by the navigator’s shout from the bridge. “Bearing red-nine-zero degrees. Possible enemy ship!”

Hashimoto lowered the periscope. “Action stations!”

The alarm bells rang and the crew ran to their battle stations as Hashimoto bounded up the ladder to the bridge. Peering through his binoculars, he could see in the moonlight a black spot clearly visible on the horizon. He leaped for the ladder shouting, “Dive!”

The bridge watch shinnied down behind him; the hatch was slammed shut. The main vents were opened, and I.58 crash-dived, with Hashimoto glued to the night periscope so as not to lose sight of the target.

It was the Indianapolis.

The aged cruiser had sailed from Tinian on Thursday, July 26, having safely delivered her mysterious cargo. After stopping at Guam, the Indianapolis had headed for Leyte in the Philippines; from there, it was likely she would be ordered back to San Francisco to collect more nuclear material.

This Sunday at sea had followed a familiar pattern: morning church service on the fantail, no smoking until after the service was over, and no work before the noonday meal was served.

By evening, the small chop of the sea had increased to a rough swell, but not enough to affect the standard zigzag course the ship was following. Its engines were phased to produce staggered turns on her four screws, ensuring an uneven pattern of sounds to hamper any enemy submarines listening to hydrophones.

At dusk, Captain McVay had told the watch officer that the ship need not zigzag after twilight.

At 10:30 P.M., with visibility still poor, McVay had signed the night orders; they contained no request to resume zigzagging if the weather improved. He had retired to sleep in his cabin close to the bridge.

At sixteen knots, the Indianapolis now steamed in a direct line toward submarine I.58. Less than ten miles of sea separated them.

Thirty feet below the surface, trimmed level, I.58 swung slowly to face the approaching ship. Hashimoto remained bent to the periscope, pressing so hard on the rubber eyepiece that his eyes watered. He blinked the tears away and resumed watching. As the target came closer, the black spot changed into a distinct triangular shape. Hashimoto felt a sense of excitement: this was no mere merchantman, but a large warship.

“All tubes to the ready. Kaitens stand by!”

The gap between the submarine and the Indianapolis was now five miles.

His eyes still firmly pressed to the periscope, Hashimoto assessed the ship’s masthead height as ninety feet. She was too big to be a destroyer; he guessed she was either a battleship or a large cruiser—a prime target indeed.

The hydrophone operators reported they could pick up engine noises. At three miles’ separation, Hashimoto fixed a set of earphones over his head. The target, clearly outlined in the moonlight, was on a near-collision course with his submarine.

Hashimoto suspected a trap: was the approaching ship acting as a decoy, drawing his fire while destroyers waited to pounce? Nervously, he scanned the field of view. There was nothing else in sight.

At two miles, he realized that his luck would hold. Turning to the men grouped around him, Hashimoto allowed himself a prediction. “We’ve got her!”

Silence fell over the boat. The crew waited tensely for the order to fire.

Suddenly, the kaiten pilots began clamoring to go. Hashimoto curtly told them they would be used only if the ordinary torpedo attack failed.

The range was three thousand yards as Hashimoto began his final calculations.

Aboard the Indianapolis, the 12:00 to 4:00 A.M. watch arrived on the bridge. There were now thirteen officers and men there, monitoring course and speed.

Aboard the I.58, Hashimoto revised his original estimate that the Indianapolis was traveling at twenty knots. Based on what he could see through the periscope and hear through the hydrophones, he now estimated that her true speed was twelve knots. He decided to delay firing until the range had closed to under a mile.

The torpedoes were set to travel through the water at a depth of twelve feet and a speed of forty-eight knots. Wakeless, they would be invisible to the most vigilant watchkeeper on the Indianapolis.

With less than fifteen hundred yards separating the cruiser and the submarine, Hashimoto finally shouted the words. “Stand by. Fire!”

At two-second intervals, the torpedo-release switch tripped. After twelve seconds, the torpedo officer reported. “All tubes fired and correct.”

Six torpedoes, launched to give them a spread of three degrees, were speeding fanwise toward the Indianapolis.

It was two minutes past midnight.

Aboard the Indianapolis, one of the officers on the bridge commented that the visibility was improving as the moon rose higher in front of the ship.

Below the bridge, several hundred men slept on mattresses and blankets on the open deck to escape the broiling heat below.

A party, far forward in a starboard cabin, was coming to an end. And in his emergency cabin behind the bridge, Captain McVay was in his berth, asleep, stark naked.

Hashimoto counted the seconds as the submarine turned parallel with the cruiser.

“Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three—”

A huge column of water rose into the air, blocking out the forward turret of the Indianapolis. Another column spouted near the aft turret. Then, bright-red flames leaped from various parts of the ship’s superstructure. As each of the torpedoes struck home, Hashimoto gave an exultant cry. “A hit! A hit!”

The crew of I.58 danced with joy, shouting and stamping their feet until the submarine resembled some underwater madhouse.

There was no panic aboard the Indianapolis, only stunned disbelief that the ship had been hit. Swiftly the crew moved to deal with the emergency. The cruiser was straining and groaning and settling at the bows.

Captain McVay ordered the radio room to transmit a distress message. Moments later, with smoke and flames enveloping the foredeck, without lights or power—certain indication of mortal damage—McVay gave the order to abandon ship.

The Indianapolis rolled onto her starboard side. As the cruiser filled rapidly with water, her stern rose higher and higher into the air until a hundred feet and more of hull reared straight up out of the Pacific, towering over hundreds of men, living and dying and already dead, floating in the sea.

For a few moments, the glistening hull remained poised. Screams of panic filled the air. Then, swiftly and cleanly, barely disturbing the Pacific swell, the Indianapolis plunged out of sight—the last major vessel to be lost in World War II, and victim of the greatest disaster at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.

It was 12:14 A.M., July 30, 1945.

After reloading his six torpedo tubes, Hashimoto brought I.58 to the surface. There was nothing to be seen in the darkness. It was over an hour since the action began. Finding nothing, he set course for the northeast.

A full ninety-six hours would pass before the first rescue ship would begin to drag from the water the few remaining survivors from the Indianapolis. When the news of the loss of four-fifths of its crew reached Tinian, it would cause shock and horror, and, in the case of Jake Beser, a sense of personal grief; before the Indianapolis had left Tinian, he had dined with an old classmate aboard the ship. Now his friend was dead, one of the nearly nine hundred victims of Hashimoto’s torpedoes.

In Washington, when Groves heard of the loss, he was relieved the ship had delivered her precious cargo of uranium before sinking. On the very day that the Indianapolis was attacked, Groves was writing a memo to the chief of staff in which he presented his projected production schedule for atomic bombs after August.

Clearly, the Manhattan Project chief would have to think carefully in the future whether delivery by ship, as with the Indianapolis, was the most sensible course.

23

The thirteen surviving crewmen from the two B-24s were all being held prisoner within Hiroshima Castle’s grounds: some at Kempei Tai headquarters, others in the dungeon of the castle itself, and two at the Second Infantry’s divisional headquarters.

The newly arrived airmen had no knowledge of the ten other prisoners of war who had already spent weeks in solitary confinement within the castle.

For all twenty-three Americans now in Hiroshima, life was a mixture of despair and fear. Their cells were bereft of furnishings except for a washbasin and one blanket. They had no clothes other than those they had been wearing when captured. Long hours of solitude were interspersed with bouts of hard questioning. The bowls of cornmeal mush or rice they received three times a day in their cells were barely enough to sustain them.

Regularly, squads of curious Japanese soldiers came to stare into the cells. Peering through the grilles, they heaped insults on the prisoners as they attempted to squat over the stinking toilet holes set into the floor.

Occasionally, the prisoners were taken to the special interrogation room used by the Kempei Tai. Some of the Americans invented stories, hoping to stay alive by saying what they imagined their captors wanted to hear.

Those held at the Second Infantry’s headquarters were guarded by Private Second Class Masaru Matsuoka, who was not a member of the Kempei Tai. The soldier stood guard, rifle and fixed bayonet at the ready, for a shift of three hours on, three hours off.

Matsuoka never spoke to the airmen, but he and his fellow guards thought their dress looked so shabby that “America must be in bad shape—we can win the war yet.”

Matsuoka pitied his prisoners. He could not understand why they had not killed themselves to avoid capture, as “we would have done.” To him, the disgrace of being shot down would have been sufficient reason to die.

The belts and shoelaces of the prisoners had been taken away, and when they asked for a razor to shave, the request was refused. The Japanese feared the Americans might yet commit suicide.

24

In Washington, Groves studied a copy of an urgent cable from Spaatz on Guam.

Groves knew that the prisoners in Nagasaki could, at the very minimum, be blinded by an atomic blast. More likely, they would die.

Unwilling for once to assume total responsibility for everything involving the Manhattan Project, he consulted General Handy. Handy thought the query should be brought to the attention of Stimson, who had just returned from the Big Three Conference.

Before going to see Stimson, Groves prepared a reply to Spaatz telling him there was to be no change in the targets because of the POW situation; Spaatz could, however, adjust the aiming points “in such a way as to decrease the possibility of hitting any POW camps.”

Mindful of his confrontation with Stimson over the proposal to bomb Kyoto, Groves presented the secretary with the Spaatz cable and the proposed reply. Groves later recalled, “His only reaction was to thank me for showing him the cable before it was sent.”

In the meantime, Spaatz had sent another top-secret message to Handy. It read:

Handy spoke with Groves by telephone before replying. He then cabled Spaatz:

Hiroshima was put at the top of the target list.

25

The biggest-ever task force from the Marianas was scheduled to bomb Japan on July 31. Almost a thousand bombers would take off at midday to attack a dozen selected Japanese cities.

Shortly after noon, the first Wright Cyclone engine banged into life. Then the next one started, and the next, until the sound of hundreds of engines echoed back from the jungle.

After moving from the apron to the taxiways, the bombers took off four at a time from the eighty-five-hundred-foot parallel runways of North Field. It took two hours for all the bombers to become airborne; by the time the last plane rose from North Field, the lead bomber was almost five hundred miles away.

Scores of ground crewmen had forsworn lunch to watch part of the armada take off. Beser was one of the few from the 509th who thought it worthwhile to miss Perry’s chow to “see the show.” Beser’s craving for action had not been satisfied in spite of his having by now made a number of trips over Japan. Today, as usual, he wished he were flying.

Yet Beser knew the planes carried a combined payload that in explosive power was less than that expected of the first atomic bomb.

And the radar officer was one of the few men on Tinian who knew that the weapon had now been finally assembled. It was resting on a cradle in a workshop in the Tech Area, ready for delivery. To Beser, the bomb looked like “an elongated trash can with fins.”

Tibbets, Ferebee, and van Kirk spent the morning on Iwo Jima checking on plans to use the island as an emergency “pit stop” for the atomic mission. Months before, it had been decided that if for any reason the atomic bomb–carrying plane developed a serious malfunction on the outward leg of its journey, it should land on Iwo; it was better to put at risk the few thousand U.S. servicemen stationed there than to endanger the more than twenty thousand on Tinian—not to mention Tinian’s second priceless piece of ordnance, the plutonium bomb.

In the center of one fenced-off area at Iwo Jima was a large, deep, open pit whose dimensions were precisely the same as another pit in a similarly fenced-off area on North Field, Tinian. The atomic bomb would first be lowered into the Tinian pit, then the B-29 wheeled into position over the hole so that the bomb could be winched up into the bomb bay. The pit on Iwo Jima would permit the quick transfer of the bomb to a standby plane if the original aircraft had to force-land on the island. A specially prepared communications center would act as a relay station between the strike aircraft and Tinian.

Satisfied, Tibbets and his companions left Iwo Jima as mysteriously as they had arrived. Flying south again, they found the airspace on the six-hundred-mile journey back to Tinian “a logjam of bombers.” Tibbets thought to himself that “soon all this will be obsolete—if the atomic bomb works.”

On August 1, after one of Perry’s magnificent breakfasts, Tibbets adjourned to his office in the 509th’s headquarters, closed the door, sat at his desk, and wrote rapidly. It took him only minutes to draft the top-secret order for the first atomic attack in history.

He sealed the order in an envelope and sent it by special courier to LeMay’s headquarters on Guam.

The order specified that a total of seven B-29s would be used for the historic mission. One would be needed at Iwo Jima to serve as the standby aircraft. Three would fly well ahead of the bomb-carrying plane, one to each of the potential target cities, to appraise the local weather and to relay the information back to the bomb carrier. This aircraft would be accompanied by two observer planes.

Tibbets now had to decide which of his crews would fly with him on the mission, and what role each would have.

He started by assigning Eatherly to fly the weather plane to Hiroshima.

At noon, Tibbets sent for his group intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonal Hazen Payette, and the intelligence officer of the 393rd Squadron, Captain Joseph Buscher. It was Buscher who on that first day at Wendover, almost a year ago now, had urged the complaining fliers to “give the place a chance.”

Tibbets told the two men about the impending mission and ordered them to be ready to brief the selected crews on what the target cities looked like from thirty thousand feet.

On Guam, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, Groves’s deputy, who had just arrived in the Marianas to act as the project’s “eyes and ears,” received his first cable from Morose, Groves’s Washington headquarters. It read:

Farrell, a man of commendably few words, cabled: NO.

After lunch, Tibbets sent, in rapid succession, for Perry, the mess officer; Sweeney, the commander of the 393rd; and Classen, the deputy commander of the 509th.

Among other instructions, he ordered Perry to make sure he had “a goodly supply of pineapple fritters ready from August 3 onward.” The fritters were Tibbets’s favorite meal; he liked several helpings before he flew.

Tibbets briefed Sweeney on the forthcoming mission. He told the Boston Irishman that his plane, the Great Artiste, would be turned into a flying laboratory, carrying sensitive instruments that would measure the blast and other effects of the bomb. Sweeney and a B-29 carrying photographic equipment would accompany Tibbets’s plane to the target.

Classen received a general briefing. Tibbets sensed his somewhat neglected deputy was glad to be filled in at last.

Tibbets did not send for Lewis to tell him that he would be flying as his copilot on the flight. He felt that was “so self-evident it didn’t warrant stating.”

In Washington, D.C., Groves received a further laconic cable from Farrell. “As of 1000 hours Eastern War Time,” the atomic bomb was ready to drop over Japan. Truman had insisted on giving Japan’s leaders several more days to reconsider their original reaction to the Potsdam Proclamation, but since then everything they had reportedly said seemed to confirm their initial rejection of its terms. For Groves, the operation was now put “fully into motion.”

26

In the early afternoon of August 2, Tibbets and Ferebee arrived at LeMay’s headquarters on Guam to complete the details Tibbets had been unable to incorporate in the draft mission order he had sent yesterday.

LeMay had just been promoted to chief of staff of the Strategic Air Forces. He was in a receptive mood.

The first thing the two fliers needed to know was which target city LeMay personally preferred. When Groves had originally recommended Kyoto, LeMay had disapproved. In LeMay’s view, Kyoto “wasn’t much of a military target; only a lot of shrines and things of that sort, and anyway, bombing people gets you nowhere—it’s just not profitable.” But LeMay was happy with Hiroshima. He knew it contained a large number of troops and war factories. He turned to Tibbets and said, almost casually, “Paul, the primary’s Hiroshima.”

Tibbets’s response was immediate. “I’ve always preferred it as the target.”

LeMay led his visitors over to a large map table, its surface covered with the latest reconnaissance photographs of Hiroshima. As Tibbets and Ferebee studied them, LeMay called in operations officer Blanchard. LeMay broke the silence. “Bombing from the height you intend, crosswinds can be a big problem.”

Ferebee agreed, saying his bombsight “could handle twenty-five to thirty degrees of crosswind, but it sometimes gets to forty to fifty degrees up there.”

Blanchard proposed a solution. “You should fly directly downwind. That would have the double advantage of increasing your speed, so you wouldn’t be vulnerable over the target so long and you wouldn’t have to worry so much about crosswinds.”

Tibbets disagreed. He thought it better to head directly into the wind, which could eliminate crosswind effect and give Ferebee the best chance to bomb accurately.

LeMay pointed out that going against the wind would also reduce the aircraft speed, making the journey over the target more hazardous.

Ferebee looked at Tibbets and then spoke for them both. “Our primary purpose is to hit the target. We’re going up there to bomb, not to play safe.”

“Okay, the heading will be into the wind.”

LeMay then asked Ferebee to select his aiming point.

The bombardier unhesitatingly placed his index finger on the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima.

LeMay nodded.

Tibbets agreed. “It’s the most perfect AP I’ve seen in this whole damn war.”