Fermi experienced a delayed reaction, he told his wife: “For the first time in his life on coming back from Trinity he had felt it was not safe for him to drive.2470 It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between. He had asked a friend to drive, despite his strong aversion to being driven.” Stanislaw Ulam, who chose not to attend the shot, watched the buses returning: “You could tell at once they had had a strange experience. You could see it on their faces. I saw that something very grave and strong had happened to their whole outlook on the future.”2471
A bomb exploded in a desert damages not much besides sand and cactus and the purity of the air. Stafford Warren, the physician responsible for radiological safety at Trinity, had to search to discover more lethal effects:
Partially eviscerated dead wild jack rabbits were found more than 800 yards from zero, presumably killed by the blast. A farm house three miles away had doors torn loose and suffered other extensive damage. . . .2472
The light intensity was sufficient at nine miles to have caused temporary blindness and this would be longer lasting at shorter distances. . . . The light together with the heat and ultraviolet radiation would probably cause severe damage to the unprotected eye at 5–6 miles; damage sufficient to put personnel out of action several days if not permanently.
The boxes of excelsior Frank Oppenheimer had set out, and the pine boards, also recorded the coming of the light: they were charred beyond 1,000 yards, slightly scorched up to 2,000 yards. At 1,520 yards—ninetenths of a mile—exposed surfaces had heated almost instantly to 750°F.2473
William Penney, the British physicist who had studied blast effects for the Target Committee, held a seminar at Los Alamos five days after Trinity. “He applied his calculations,” Philip Morrison remembers. “He predicted that this [weapon] would reduce a city of three or four hundred thousand people to nothing but a sink for disaster relief, bandages, and hospitals. He made it absolutely clear in numbers. It was reality.”2474
Around the time of the Trinity shot, in the predawn dark at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco Bay, a floodlit crane had loaded onto the deck of the Indianapolis the fifteen-foot crate that carried the Little Boy gun assembly. Two sailors carried aboard the Little Boy bullet in a lead bucket shouldered between them on a crowbar. They followed the two Los Alamos Army officers to the cabin of the ship’s flag lieutenant, who had vacated it for the voyage. Eyebolts had been welded to its deck. The sailors strapped the lead bucket to the eyebolts. One of the officers padlocked it into place. They would take turns guarding it around the clock for the tenday voyage to Tinian.
At 0836 Pacific War Time, four hours after the light flung from the Jornada del Muerto blanched the face of the moon, the Indianapolis sailed with its cargo under the Golden Gate and out to sea.2475
19
Tongues of Fire
At the end of March 1945, as Curtis LeMay’s bombers shuttled back and forth burning cities, Colonel Elmer E. Kirkpatrick, a plainspoken Army engineer, arrived in the Marianas to locate a small corner where he could lodge Paul Tibbets’ 509th Composite Group.2476 Kirkpatrick met with LeMay and then with Pacific Fleet commander Chester Nimitz on Guam on the day he arrived, March 30, and found the commanding officers cooperative. LeMay personally flew Kirkpatrick to Tinian on April 3. The next day, he reported to Groves, he “covered most of the island [and] decided on our sites and the planning forces went to work on layouts.” Though there was no shortage of B-29’s, he found that cement and buildings were scarce; “housing and life here is a little rugged for everyone except [general] officers & the Navy. Tents or open barracks.” Kirkpatrick flew back to Guam on April 5 “to dig up some materials some place” and “to get authority for the work I required,” threaded his way through the Air Force and Navy chains of command with his letters of authority from Washington and by the end of the day had seen a telex sent to Saipan “directing them to give me enough material to get the essential things done.” A Navy construction battalion—the SeaBees—would build the buildings and hardstands and dig the pits from which the bombs, too large for ground-level clearance, would be lifted up into the bomb bays of Tibbets’ B-29’s.
By early June, when Tibbets arrived to inspect the accommodations and confer with LeMay, Kirkpatrick could report that “progress has been very satisfactory and I have the feeling now that we can’t miss.” He sat in on an evening meeting between Tibbets and LeMay and heard evidence that the Twentieth Air Force commander did not yet appreciate the power of an atomic bomb:
LeMay does not favor high altitude bombing. Work is not as accurate but, more important, visibility at such altitudes is extremely poor especially during the period June to November. Tibbets advised him that the weapon would destroy a plane using it at an altitude of less than 25,000 feet.
Kirkpatrick demonstrated his progress to Groves with an impressive list: five warehouses, an administration building, roads and parking areas and nine magazines completed; pits completed except for lifts; hardstands for parking the 509th aircraft completed except for asphalt paving; generator buildings and compressor shed completed; one air-conditioned building where the bombs would be assembled to be completed by July 1; two more assembly buildings to be completed by August 1 and August 15. Of the 509th’s men more than 1,100 had already staged out by ship “and more [are] coming in every week.”
The first of Tibbets’ combat crews arrived June 10, flying themselves to Tinian in advanced, specially modified new B-29’s. The early-model aircraft delivered to the group the previous autumn had become obsolete, Tibbets explained to readers of the Saturday Evening Post after the war:
Tests showed us that the B-29’s we had weren’t good enough for atom bombing.2477 They were heavy, older types. Top cylinders were overheating and causing valve failures in the long climb to 30,000 feet at 80 per cent of full power. . . .
I asked for new, light-weight B-29’s and fuel-injection systems to replace carburetors.
He got those improvements and more: quick-closing pneumatic bomb doors, fuel flow meters, reversible electric propellers.
The new aircraft had been modified to accommodate the special bombs they would carry and the added crew. The cylindrical tunnel that connected the pressurized forward and waist sections of the plane had to be partly cut away and reworked so that the larger bomb, Fat Man, would fit in the forward bomb bay. Guide rails were installed to prevent the tail assemblies from hanging up during fallout. An extra table, chair, oxygen outlet and interphone station for the weaponeers responsible for monitoring a bomb during flight went in forward of the radio operator’s station in the forward section. “The performance of these special B-29’s was exceptional,” writes the engineer in charge of their procurement. “They were without doubt the finest B-29’s in the theater.”2478 By the end of June, eleven of the new bombers shone on their hardstands in the Pacific sun.2479
To men used to the blizzards and dust of Wendover, Utah, the 509th’s historian claims, Tinian “looked like the Garden of Paradise.”2480 The surrounding blue ocean and the palm groves may have occasioned that vision. Philip Morrison, who came out after Trinity to help assemble Fat Man, saw more reverberantly what the island had become, as he told a committee of U.S. Senators later in 1945:
Tinian is a miracle. Here, 6,000 miles from San Francisco, the United States armed forces have built the largest airport in the world. A great coral ridge was half-leveled to fill a rough plain, and to build six runways, each an excellent 10-lane highway, each almost two miles long. Beside these runways stood in long rows the great silvery airplanes. They were there not by the dozen but by the hundred. From the air this island, smaller than Manhattan, looked like a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers. . . .
And all these gigantic preparations had a grand and terrible outcome. At sunset some day the field would be loud with the roar of motors. Down the great runways would roll the huge planes, seeming to move slowly because of their s
ize, but far outspeeding the occasional racing jeep. One after another each runway would launch its planes. Once every 15 seconds another B-29 would become air-borne. For an hour and a half this would continue with precision and order. The sun would go below the sea, and the last planes could still be seen in the distance, with running lights still on. Often a plane would fail to make the take-off, and go skimming horribly into the sea, or into the beach to burn like a huge torch. We came often to sit on the top of the coral ridge and watch the combat strike of the 313th wing in real awe. Most of the planes would return the next morning, standing in a long single line, like beads on a chain, from just overhead to the horizon. You could see 10 or 12 planes at a time, spaced a couple of miles apart. As fast as the near plane would land, another would appear on the edge of the sky. There were always the same number of planes in sight. The empty field would fill up, and in an hour or two all the planes would have landed.
A resemblance in shape between Tinian and Manhattan had inspired the SeaBees to name the island’s roads for New York City streets.2481 The 509th happened to be lodged immediately west of North Field at 125th Street and Eighth Avenue, near Riverside Drive, in Manhattan, the environs of Columbia University where Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard had identified secondary neutrons from fission: the wheel had come full circle.
“The first half of July,” Norman Ramsey writes of 509th activity, “was occupied with establishing and installing all of the technical facilities needed for assembly and test work at Tinian.”2482 In the meantime the group’s flight crews practiced navigating to Iwo Jima and back and bombing with standard general-purpose bombs and then with Pumpkins such bypassed islands still nominally in Japanese hands as Rota and Truk.
* * *
Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes left suburban Potsdam in an open car to tour ravaged Berlin at about the same time on July 16, 1945, that Groves and Oppenheimer at Trinity were preparing their first report of the tower shot’s success. The Potsdam Conference, appropriately coded TERMINAL, was supposed to have begun that afternoon, but Joseph Stalin was late arriving by armored train from Moscow. (He apparently suffered a mild heart attack the previous day.) The Berlin tour gave Truman an opportunity to view at close hand the damage Allied bombing and Red Army shelling had done.
Byrnes was officially Secretary of State now, invested in a sweltering ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on July 3 attended by a crowd of his former House, Senate and Supreme Court colleagues. After Byrnes swore the oath of office Truman had kidded him: “Jimmy, kiss the Bible.”2483 Byrnes complied, then gave as good as he got: passed the Bible to the President and bade him kiss it as well. Truman did so; understanding the byplay between the former Vice President and the man who had missed his turn, the crowd laughed. Four days later the two leaders boarded the cruiser Augusta for the Atlantic crossing to Antwerp and now they rode side by side into Berlin, conquerors in snap-brim hats and natty worsteds.
Though he had arrived before them in Potsdam, Henry Stimson did not accompany the President and his favorite adviser on their tour. The Secretary of War had consulted with Truman the day before Byrnes’ swearing-in—proposing to give the Japanese “a warning of what is to come and definite opportunity to capitulate”—and as he was leaving had asked the President plaintively if he had not invited his Secretary of War to attend the forthcoming conference out of solicitude for his health.2484 That was it, Truman had said quickly, and Stimson had replied that he could manage the trip and would like to go, that Truman ought to have advice “from the top civilians in our Department.”2485 The next day, the day of Byrnes’ investiture, Truman accorded the elderly statesman permission. But Stimson had traveled separately on the military transport Brazil via Marseilles, was lodged separately in Potdam from the President and his Secretary of State and would not be included in their daily private discussions. One of Stimson’s aides felt that “Secretary Byrnes was a little resentful of Mr. Stimson’s presence there. . . .2486 The Secretary of the Navy wasn’t there so why should Mr. Stimson be there?” Byrnes in his 1947 account of his career, Speaking Frankly, narrates an entire chapter about Potsdam without once mentioning Stimson’s name, relegating his rival to a brief separate discussion of the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan and awarding him there the dubious honor of having chosen the targets. In fact, Stimson at Potsdam would be reduced to serving Truman and Byrnes as not much more than a messenger boy. But the messages he brought were fateful.
“We reviewed the Second Armored Division,” Truman reports his Berlin tour in his impromptu diary, “ . . . Gen. [J. H.] Collier, who seemed to know his stuff, put us in a reconnaissance car built with side seats and no top, just like a hoodlum wagon minus the top, or a fire truck with seats and no hose, and we drove slowly down a mile and a half of good soldiers and some millions of dollars worth of equipment—which had amply paid its way to Berlin.”2487 The destroyed city fired an uneasy burst of associations:
Then we went on to Berlin and saw absolute ruin. Hitler’s folly. He overreached himself by trying to take in too much territory. He had no morals and his people backed him up. Never did I see a more sorrowful sight, nor witness retribution to the nth degree. . . .
I thought of Carthage, Baalbec, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis; Peking, Babylon, Nineveh; Scipio, Rameses II, Titus, Hermann, Sherman, Jenghis Khan, Alexander, Darius the Great. But Hitler only destroyed Stalingrad—and Berlin. I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.
I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll be a reckoning—who knows?
The “Proposed Program for Japan” that Stimson had offered to Truman on July 2 had reckoned up that country’s situation—which included the possible entry of the Soviet Union, at present neutral, into the Pacific war—and judged it desperate:2488
Japan has no allies.
Her navy is nearly destroyed and she is vulnerable to a surface and underwater blockade which can deprive her of sufficient food and supplies for her population.
She is terribly vulnerable to our concentrated air attack upon her crowded cities, industrial and food resources.
She has against her not only the Anglo-American forces but the rising forces of China and the ominous threat of Russia.
We have inexhaustible and untouched industrial resources to bring to bear against her diminishing potential.
We have great moral superiority through being the victim of her first sneak attack.
On the other hand, Stimson had argued, because of the mountainous Japanese terrain and because “the Japanese are highly patriotic and certainly susceptible to calls for fanatical resistance to repel an invasion,” America would probably “have to go through with an even more bitter finish fight than in Germany” if it attempted to invade. Was there, then, any alternative? Stimson thought there might be:
I believe Japan is susceptible to reason in such a crisis to a much greater extent than is indicated by our current press and other current comment. Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours. On the contrary, she has within the past century shown herself to possess extremely intelligent people, capable in an unprecedentedly short time of adopting not only the complicated technique of Occidental civilization but to a substantial extent their culture and their political and social ideas. Her advance in these respects . . . has been one of the most astounding feats of national progress in history. . . .
It is therefore my conclusion that a carefully timed warning be given to Japan. . . .
I personally think that if in [giving such a warning] we should add that we do not exclude a constitutional monarchy under her present dynasty, it would substantially add to the chances of acceptance.
Within the text of his proposal the Secretary of War several times characterized it as “the equivalent of an unconditional surrender,?
?? but others did not see it so. Before Byrnes left for Potsdam he had carried the document to ailing Cordell Hull, a fellow Southerner and Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, and Hull had immediately plucked out the concession to the “present dynasty”—the Emperor Hirohito, in whose mild myopic figure many Americans had personified Japanese militarism—and told Byrnes that “the statement seemed too much like appeasement of Japan.”2489
It may have been, but by the time they arrived in Potsdam, Stimson, Truman and Byrnes had learned that it was also the minimum condition of surrender the Japanese were prepared to countenance, whatever their desperate situation. U.S. intelligence had intercepted and decoded messages passing between Tokyo and Moscow instructing Japanese ambassador Naotake Sato to attempt to interest the Soviets in mediating a Japanese surrender. “The foreign and domestic situation for the Empire is very serious,” Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo had cabled Sato on July 11, “and even the termination of the war is now being considered privately. . . .2490 We are also sounding out the extent to which we might employ the USSR in connection with the termination of the war. . . . [This is] a matter with which the Imperial Court is . . . greatly concerned.” And pointedly on July 12:
It is His Majesty’s heart’s desire to see the swift termination of the war. . . . However, as long as America and England insist on unconditional surrender our country has no alternative but to see it through in an all-out effort for the sake of survival and the honor of the homeland.2491
Unconditional surrender seemed to the Japanese leadership a demand to give up its essential and historic polity, a demand that under similar circumstances Americans also might hesitate to meet even at the price of their lives: hence Stimson’s careful qualification of his proposed terms of surrender. But to the extent that the imperial institution was tainted with militarism, an offer to preserve it might also seem an offer to preserve the militaristic government that ran the country and that had started and pursued the war. Certainly many Americans might think so and might conclude in consequence that their wartime sacrifices were being callously betrayed.