Enola Gay: Mission to Hiroshima

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By the morning of August 7, news had trickled through to the Japanese leaders that Hiroshima had been hit by a new kind of bomb. They were told the destruction caused was very great but, in devastated Tokyo, the reports sounded distressingly familiar.

President Truman’s statement describing the weapon in some detail, which had been released to an astounded world and a delirious American public the day before, was then broadcast to Japan. It was dismissed by many politicians as propaganda. The Japanese public was told nothing by its leaders.

Worldwide reaction was mixed.

The Vatican condemned the new bomb as a “catastrophic conclusion to the war’s apocalyptic surprises.” A spokesman compared the bomb’s invention with that of the submarine by Leonardo da Vinci and expressed regret that the nuclear scientists did not, like da Vinci, “destroy their creation in the interest of humanity.”

In Britain, the government welcomed the bomb as a means of speedily ending the war. H. G. Wells, who had forecast atomic bombs twelve years earlier in his book The Shape of Things to Come, remarked, “This can wipe out everything bad, or good, in this world. It is up to the people to decide which.”

In a Luxembourg prison camp, top-ranking Nazi war criminals—among them Göring, von Ribbentrop, and Field Marshal Keitel—agreed that warfare had reached a turning point. Von Ribbentrop, the former foreign minister, said, “No one would be so stupid as to start a war now. It is the opportunity for mankind to end war forever.”

In the Soviet Union, the media did not rate the atomic bomb worthy of headline news. While expressing “interest in the new weapon,” radio and newspaper reports stressed that Russian scientists were also “well advanced in atomic research.”

In Washington, D.C., senators called on the newly created United Nations to ensure that the “peace-loving nations share the benefits of the discovery that led to the bomb.”

What most everyone agreed on was that the world would never be quite the same again.

When the Japanese Cabinet learned about the bomb, Major General Arisue was chosen to head a group of high-ranking officers and scientists to go to Hiroshima to investigate. Among the scientists was Professor Asada, the physicist who had worked on Japan’s atomic bomb and who was still perfecting his death ray.

In Hiroshima, with the mayor dead, Field Marshal Hata took over administrative control of the city. He himself had been only superficially injured, although his wife was severely burned. Hata moved his headquarters to the underground bunker cut into the side of Mount Futaba.

Many of his senior officers were dead. Prince RiGu and his white stallion were gone; so, too, Colonel Katayama, whose horse had been found compressed to half its breadth in a crack in the ground. Hata’s orders were relayed through Colonel Imoto, who, although badly injured, was the field marshal’s highest-ranking surviving officer.

Relief workers were slow to arrive in Hiroshima. The first help came from the soldiers based at Ujina. The harbor was over two miles from the epicenter, and little damage was done to it. Marines collected the explosive-filled suicide boats, prepared for the American invasion, from the coves around Hiroshima Harbor. The small craft were emptied of their charges, lashed together, and covered with planks. Raftlike, they moved slowly up the rivers to Hiroshima’s center, collecting wounded and taking them to the military hospital at Ujina. The boats’ passage was hampered by the dead bodies in the rivers; the corpses floated in and out with the tide for days.

The fate of the American prisoners of war is not certain. Two were reported to have been escorted, wounded but able to walk, to Ujina. One was seen under a bridge, apparently dying, wearing only a pair of red-and-white underpants. Two were said to have been battered to death in the castle grounds by their captors.

Warrant Officer Hiroshi Yanagita, the Kempei Tai leader, was still suffering from a hangover when the bomb exploded. Less than half a mile from the epicenter, he was thrown naked from the bed in his second-floor room. The house was on fire. He went to the window and jumped—only to find the house had collapsed and his room was at street level. Dressed in a sheet, skirting the edge of the city, Yanagita made his way to Ujina. There he collected some clothes and ten soldiers, and went to the leveled site where Hiroshima Castle once stood. He saw no American POWs. But when he reached his divisional Kempei Tai headquarters in the west of the city, one of his men told him he had tried to bring two prisoners to the headquarters but, finding it impossible, had left them by the Aioi Bridge. There, one person reported seeing them, hands tied behind their backs, being stoned to death.

American records so far available show that at least pilot Thomas Cartwright and tail gunner William Abel survived the war. Both were awarded the Purple Heart. Cartwright’s commission terminated in 1953. Abel retired from the American forces in 1968. It is possible that they, and indeed other POWs, had been moved from Hiroshima before the bomb fell.

On Tinian, the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, some 509th crews, including the Enola Gay’s, with Lewis in command, took off for a follow-up attack on Japan using conventional bombs. In the meantime, Tibbets flew to Guam, where, on August 8, he held a short press conference in which he confined his comments to a straightforward recital of the facts of the mission.

President Truman had warned the Japanese leaders that if they “did not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

The Japanese had not accepted the terms.

American leaders, fearing that the Hiroshima bomb might have hardened Japan’s will to resist and might also be regarded as an unrepeatable phenomenon, decided to use the second bomb, which was the only other one then ready. They hoped to convince Japan’s leaders that America’s nuclear capability was far greater than it was.

LeMay asked Tibbets, “Don’t you think you should lead the second attack?”

Tibbets replied, “No. I’m getting enough publicity. The other guys have worked long and hard and can do the job as well as I can.”

Sweeney was chosen to command the second strike. He told his crew he wanted “to do it just like Paul did.” Among those on board would be Jacob Beser, the only man to accompany both atomic bombs to Japan. Cheshire and Penney, the British representatives, would ride in one of the two observer planes.

There were only two potential targets: Kokura was the primary, Nagasaki the alternate. Both cities were on the island of Kyushu, southwest of Hiroshima.

From the beginning, the mission was bedeviled. The predicted weather over the targets was not promising. Sweeney’s plane, the Great Artiste, had been fitted with scientific equipment for the first atomic run and would again be so used on the second. To carry the bomb, Sweeney borrowed another B-29, Bock’s Car. Just before takeoff, a fault was found in the plane: six hundred gallons of gas were trapped in one tank and would not be available for use during the flight. Sweeney decided to risk it.

When he reached the rendezvous point, where the other two planes were to join him, Sweeney could find only one. He waited forty minutes for the third bomber to appear, but then could wait no longer. He headed for Kokura.

Bock’s Car made three runs over the target, but the aiming point, a munitions complex, remained obscured. Puffs of antiaircraft fire were exploding below. Beser noticed signs of activity on the Japanese fighter-control circuits he was monitoring. Interceptor planes were on the way.

Sweeney, his fuel running low, decided to “go for Nagasaki.” There, again, he found heavy overcast. Then, suddenly, bombardier Kermit Beahan, like Ferebee a veteran of the war in Europe, shouted that he had spotted a break in the clouds. He told Sweeney, “I’ll take it.”

Beahan called minor course corrections and then dropped the plutonium bomb. It fell wide of the intended aiming point, exploding above the northwest section of the city. Although the plutonium bomb was more powerful than the uranium bomb used at Hiroshima, it did less damage and caused fewer casualties, mainly because of the difference in Nagasaki’s terrain. Even so, its effect was devastating.

Following a harrowing landing at Okinawa, its fuel supply almost gone, Bock’s Car returned belatedly to Tinian, after twenty hours.

Tibbets praised Sweeney and Beahan for their achievement. Privately, he decided that if another atomic attack proved necessary, he himself would lead it.

Meanwhile, in Moscow on August 8, Naotake Sato, the Japanese ambassador who had tried repeatedly to get his government to surrender before it was too late, was bluntly told by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that as of midnight the Soviet Union would be at war with Japan.

Next morning, while the six members of Japan’s Inner Cabinet met for the first time since the nuclear bomb had fallen on Hiroshima, they learned that Russian troops had marched into Manchuria, and that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki.

But the members of the Inner Cabinet could not bring themselves to surrender. They talked all morning, afternoon, and into the evening. Those in favor of continuing the war pointed out that millions of Japanese soldiers had hardly been tested. They were spoiling for a fight and would probably not surrender even if ordered to do so.

Premier Suzuki, desperate to break the deadlock, suggested that Emperor Hirohito might graciously agree to help them come to a conclusion.

At 2.00 A.M., August 10, Japan’s divine ruler stated that he was in complete accord with his foreign minister. He then left the meeting.

The view of Foreign Minister Togo was that Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Proclamation, on the understanding that the Allied demands did not “prejudice the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”

When Truman and his advisers learned of this qualification, they, too, found themselves divided. Eventually, Secretary of State Byrnes came up with an agreeable formula. While making clear the emperor’s authority to rule would at first be subject to that of the Allied supreme commander in Japan, it reiterated that eventually the Japanese people would be free to choose whatever form of government they wished.

When the Japanese leaders received America’s reply, they still could not agree to capitulate. They talked through August 12, 13, and into August 14. Then Emperor Hirohito acted again. He told the military and civilian leaders that they should “bear the unbearable and accept the Allied reply.” He agreed personally to inform his people by radio of the decision the next day.

The Japanese surrender was made known to the American public late in the afternoon of August 14. Most had no doubt that the atomic bomb had ended the war.

The Russian public was told the Red Army had forced Japan to submit.

In truth, it was probably the fact of the bomb plus fear of the Russians that caused—or made it possible for—Japan to give up.

On August 15, just before noon, people all over Japan waited to hear their emperor speak. They had been told in the past—and most still believed—they were winning the war. They had no understanding yet of what had happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In Hiroshima, a crowd gathered by a loudspeaker in the demolished railway station to hear the sacred words of their divine monarch.

Emperor Hirohito used such formal and oblique phrases—the word surrender was never uttered—that it was almost impossible for the average person to grasp what he meant.

But when he ended his address, a great number no longer thought they were winning the war. They believed they had won. For, as one of those in the crowd at the Hiroshima railway station remarked, “How else could the war end?”