OneManGang
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Part 4
“My God!”
Hiroshima ...
Captain Bob Lewis was upset.
He had been flying B-29 number “82” for quite some time. Yes, he knew it was his commanding officer’s plane, but he’d been piloting it over the Empire and the CO hadn’t. Now as he came out on the ramp he saw that someone had seen fit to paint a name on it. “Who in Hell is that?” he demanded.
The crew chief piped up, “Sir, Enola Gay is the name of Col. Tibbets’ mother.”
“Oh.”
Col. Paul Tibbets waves from the cockpit of his B-29, the Enola Gay. (National Archives)
Tibbets recalled later, “I looked upon this airplane as one of the best B-29s ever built. I remember picking it out of the production line at the Martin factory in Omaha with the help of a couple of foremen.”
Now Tibbets, flying left seat and Lewis acting as co-pilot ran up the Enola Gay’s engines and peered down the runway on Tinian. Three weather planes had already departed Tinian to scout the three cities on today’s target list. They would check on weather at Hiroshima, Kokura and Nagasaki then radio which had the clearest weather. It was 0240 on August 6, 1945. They released the brakes and the B-29 thundered down the packed coral runway. Tibbets used every inch of runway. Indeed, some observers feared the plane would plunge into the Pacific. Tibbets knew what he was doing though, and the plane clawed its way into the sky.
The previous afternoon, Enola Gay had been backed over a pit containing the first operational nuclear weapon, code-named Little Boy. Little Boy differed from the device tested in New Mexico in that it used U-235 instead of plutonium to generate fission. Also its design was different. The plutonium devices were “implosion” weapons. In these, lenses of conventional explosives would be simultaneously detonated around a sphere of plutoniun and a neutron source to cause a critical mass to form and an uncontrolled nuclear reaction to occur.
“Little Boy” sitting in the pit on Tinian. Note the Enola Gay's bomb bay door at top right. (National Archives)
Little Boy used a different process. The nature of U-235 was such that if a sufficient amount (about 15 lbs) of it were brought together, an explosion would ensue. A simpler design could be used. In the Little Boy design, two masses of U-235 were separated by a six-foot cannon barrel salvaged from a 5” naval gun. The smaller mass would be fired down the gun tube into the larger mass and a critical mass would form. On both weapons, proximity radars would precisely measure the distance from the ground, and at about 1900 feet the fuses would fire.
Co-pilot Lewis kept a diary of the mission at the request of Laurence Williams of the New York Times, the only reporter allowed to know of the Manhattan Project. He had also been present at the Trinity test and would fly as an observer on the Nagasaki mission. Williams had been sworn to secrecy and accepted on the provision that he would have THE scoop of the Second World War. He kept his word.
Captain David “Deak” Parsons, USN, and his assistant, Lt. Morris Jeppson, USA, waited until the bomber was 100 miles from Tinian and 4,000’ in the air. They then crawled into the bomb bay and inserted the main electrical fuse that would bring Little Boy to life. Parsons had practiced this so many times his fingers were bleeding. Tibbets offered to loan him some calf-skin gloves but Parsons refused, “I’ve got to be able to feel it.”
At 7:09 am local time the air raid sirens in Hiroshima went off. Overhead the weather plane Straight Flush droned along at 32,000’ unconcerned and unmolested. The Japanese air force was no longer a threat and Japanese anti-aircraft guns couldn’t accurately shoot that high. It was a bright summer day with scattered clouds. At 7:25 Enola Gay received a coded message, “Advice: bomb primary.”
Hiroshima it was.
Hiroshima was a spread-out city centered on five large islands of a river delta. At the apex of one of the central islands is a landmark: the Aioi Bridge. The bridge is notable for its “T” shape. Bombardier Tom Ferebee, upon seeing it in recon photos proclaimed it “The perfect AP” (Aiming Point). Ten miles out Ferebee looked through his bombsight and said “Okay, I’ve got the bridge.” 90 seconds from bomb release, Tibbets turned over control of the plane to Ferebee and his bombsight. Co-pilot Lewis wrote, rather jauntily, “There will now be a short intermission while we bomb the target.”
At 8:14:17 local time Ferebee tripped a toggle switch sending a tone through the crew’s headphones indicating 60 seconds to drop. At 8:15:17 Little Boy dropped free.
Tibbets immediately put Enola Gay into a 155-degree turn and a 60-degree bank to clear the target area. At 8:16 Hiroshima time, the gun fired, a small mass of U-235 shot down the cannon tube and as the two masses came together, a critical mass formed and released its energy.
Just as the physicists said it would.
A brilliant blue flash filled the planes, and an estimated 75,000 people on the ground simply ceased to exist.
Tibbets noted one other thing, “My teeth told me, more emphatically than my eyes, of the Hiroshima explosion. At the moment of the blast, there was a tingling sensation in my mouth and the very definite taste of lead upon my tongue. This, I was told later by scientists, was the result of electrolysis – an interaction between the fillings in my teeth and the radioactive forces loosed by the bomb.”
“Little Boy” explodes over Hiroshima. (National Archives)
As the grey-purple mushroom cloud over Hiroshima surged upward, Bob Lewis made one last entry in his diary:
“MY GOD!”
The rest of the mission proceeded normally and Tibbets and the Enola Gay returned to Tinian.
Elsewhere in Hiroshima ten people left their shadows on the Yorozuyo Bridge. Their bodies were vaporized.
Three hours after the blast, Hiroshima burns.
Private Shigeru Shimoyama, wandering around semi-stunned, came upon a pink horse. It tried to follow him but lacked the strength. The blast had skinned it alive.
Twenty-two Americans, including several women being held as POWs were also killed in the blast. A twenty-third prisoner was pulled alive from the wreckage then killed by an angry mob of other survivors.
The Enola Gay returns from the mission to Hiroshima.
Still the military leaders of Japan would not countenance surrender. They directed the Foreign Minister to continue courting the Russians to explore any opportunities for a negotiated settlement. Their meetings were fruitless, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov was non-committal. Zhukov’s forces were standing by.
(continued below...)
