I looked at him and said, “Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?”
This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, “That’s about it.”
Caron’s third try, which he styles “a lucky guess,” apparently decided Tibbets to complete the crew’s briefing; back in his seat he switched on the interphone, called “Attention!” and remembers saying something like “Well, boys, here’s the last piece of the puzzle.”2577 They carried an atomic bomb, he told them, the first to be dropped from an airplane. They were not physicists; they understood at least that the weapon was different from any other ever used in war.
Lewis took control from George to weave his way through a mass of towering cumuli, clouds black in the darkness that swept aside to reveal a sky shot with stars. “At 4:30,” he jotted, “we saw signs of a late moon in the east.2578 I think everyone will feel relieved when we have left our bomb with the Japs and get half way home. Or, better still, all the way home.” Ferebee in the nose was quiet; Lewis suspected he was thinking of home, “in the midwest part of old U.S.A.” The bombardier was in fact from Mocksville, North Carolina, close enough to the Midwest for a native of New York. Dawn lightening a little past 0500 cheered them; “it looks at this time,” Lewis wrote coming out of the clouds, “that we will have clear sailing for a long spell.”
At 0552 they approached Iwo Jima and Tibbets began climbing to 9,300 feet to rendezvous with the observation and photography planes. The Enola Gay circled left over Iwo, found its two escorts and moved on, its course continuing northwest by north toward the archipelago of green islands the men called the Empire.
“After leaving Iwo we began to pick up some low stratus,” Lewis resumes his narrative, “and before long we were flying on top of an undercast. At 07:10 the undercast began to break up a little bit. Outside of a high thin cirrus and the low stuff it’s a very beautiful day. We are now about two hours from Bombs Away.”2579 They flew into history through a middle world, suspended between sky and sea, drinking coffee and eating ham sandwiches, engines droning, the smell of hot electronics in the air.
At 0730 Parsons visited the bomb bay for the last time to arm Little Boy, exchanging its green plugs for red and activating its internal batteries. Tibbets was about to begin the 45-minute climb to altitude. Jeppson worked his console. Parsons told Tibbets that Little Boy was “final.” Lewis overheard:
The bomb was now independent of the plane. It was a peculiar sensation. I had a feeling the bomb had a life of its own now that had nothing to do with us. I wished it were over and we were at this same position on the way back to Tinian.2580
“Well, folks, it won’t be long now,” the copilot added as Tibbets increased power to climb.2581
The weather plane at Hiroshima reported in at 0815 (0715 Hiroshima time). It found two-tenths cloud cover lower and middle and two-tenths at 15,000 feet. The other two target weather reports followed. “Our primary is the best target,” Lewis wrote enthusiastically, “so, with everything going well so far, we will make a bomb run on Hiroshima.”2582 “It’s Hiroshima,” Tibbets announced to the crew.2583
They leveled at 31,000 feet at 0840. They had pressurized the aircraft and heated it against an outside temperature of –10°F. Ten minutes later they achieved landfall over Shikoku, the smaller home island east of Hiroshima, a city which looks southeastward from the coast of Honshu into the Inland Sea. “As we are approaching our target, Ferebee, Van Kirk and Stiborik are coming into their own, while the colonel and I are standing by and giving the boys what they need.”2584 Correcting course, Lewis means, aligning the plane. He got excited then or busy: “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.” But bombing the target was the main event.
The crew pulled on heavy flak suits, cumbersome protection the pilots disdained. No Japanese fighters came up to meet them, nor were they bothered by flak.
The two escort planes dropped back to give the Enola Gay room. Tibbets reminded his men to wear their protective goggles.
They carried no maps. They had studied aerial photographs and knew the target city well. It was distinctive in any case, sited on a delta divided by the channels of seven distributaries. “Twelve miles from the target,” Tibbets remembers, “Ferebee called, ‘I see it!’ He clutched in his bombsight and took control of the plane from me for a visual run.2585 Dutch [Van Kirk] kept giving me radar course corrections. He was working with the radar operator. . . . I couldn’t raise them on the interphone to tell them Ferebee had the plane.” The bombardier flew the plane through his bombsight, the knurled knobs he adjusted instructing the automatic pilot to make minor corrections in course. They crossed the Inland Sea on a heading only five degrees south of due west. Van Kirk noticed eight large ships south of them in Hiroshima harbor. The Enola Gay’s ground speed then was 285 knots, about 328 miles per hour.
Above a fork in the ta River in central Hiroshima a T-shaped bridge spanned the river and connected to the island formed by the two distributaries. The Aioi Bridge, not a war plant surrounded by workers’ houses, was Ferebee’s chosen aiming point. Second Army headquarters was based nearby. Tibbets had called the bridge the most perfect AP he’d seen in the whole damn war:2586
Ferebee had the drift well killed but the rate was off a little.2587 He made two slight corrections. A loud “blip” on the radio notified the escort B-29’s that the bomb would drop in two minutes.2588 After that, Tom looked up from his bombsight and nodded to me; it was going to be okay.
He motioned to the radio operator to give the final warning. A continuous tone signal went out, telling [the escorts]: “In fifteen seconds she goes.”
The distant weather planes also heard the radio signal. So did the spare B-29 parked on Iwo Jima. It alerted Luis Alvarez in the observation plane to prepare to film the oscilloscopes he had installed there; the radiolinked parachute gauges he had designed to measure Little Boy’s explosive yield hung in the bomb bay waiting to drop with the bomb and float down toward the city.
Hiroshima unrolled east to west in the cross hairs of Thomas Ferebee’s Norden bombsight. The bomb-bay doors were open. Ferebee had flown sixty-three combat missions in Europe before returning to the United States to instruct and then to join the 509th. Before the war he had wanted to be a baseball player and had got as far as spring tryouts with a majorleague team. He was twenty-four years old.
“The radio tone ended,” Tibbets says tersely, “the bomb dropped, Ferebee unclutched his sight.” The arming wires pulled out to start Little Boy’s clocks. The first combat atomic bomb fell away from the plane, then nosed down. It was inscribed with autographs and messages, some of them obscene. “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis,” one challenged.
Four tons lighter, the B-29 jumped. Tibbets dove away:
I threw off the automatic pilot and hauled Enola Gay into the turn.
I pulled antiglare goggles over my eyes. I couldn’t see through them; I was blind. I threw them to the floor.
A bright light filled the plane. The first shock wave hit us.
We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion, but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast. I yelled “Flak!” thinking a heavy gun battery had found us.
The tail gunner had seen the first wave coming, a visible shimmer in the atmosphere, but he didn’t know what it was until it hit. When the second wave came, he called out a warning.
We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.
No one spoke for a moment; then everyone was talking. I remember Lewis pounding my shoulder, saying, “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Tom Ferebee wondered about whether radioactivity would make us all sterile. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission. He said it tasted like lead.
“Fellows,” Tibbets announced on the interphone, “you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”2589
Van Kirk remembers th
e two shock waves—one direct, one reflected from the ground—vividly:
[It was] very much as if you’ve ever sat on an ash can and had somebody hit it with a baseball bat. . . . The plane bounced, it jumped and there was a noise like a piece of sheet metal snapping. Those of us who had flown quite a bit over Europe thought that it was anti-aircraft fire that had exploded very close to the plane.2590
The apparent proximity of the explosion would be one of its trademarks, much as its heat had seemed intimate to Philip Morrison and his colleagues at Trinity.
Turning, diving, circling back to watch, the crew of the Enola Gay missed the early fireball; when they looked again Hiroshima smothered under a pall. Lewis in a postwar interview:
I don’t believe anyone ever expected to look at a sight quite like that. Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could now no longer see the city. We could see smoke and fires creeping up the sides of the mountains.2591
Van Kirk:
If you want to describe it as something you are familiar with, a pot of boiling black oil. . . . I thought: Thank God the war is over and I don’t have to get shot at any more. I can go home.2592
It was a sentiment hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and sailors would soon express, and it was hard-earned.
Leaving the scene the tail gunner, Robert Caron, had a long view:
I kept shooting pictures and trying to get the mess down over the city. All the while I was describing this on the intercom. . . . The mushroom itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside.2593 As we got farther away, we could see the base of the mushroom and below we could see what looked like a few-hundred-foot layer of debris and smoke and what have you.
I was trying to describe the mushroom, this turbulent mass. I saw fires springing up in different places, like flames shooting up on a bed of coals. I was asked to count them. I said, “Count them?” Hell, I gave up when there were about fifteen, they were coming too fast to count. I can still see it—that mushroom and that turbulent mass—it looked like lava or molasses covering the whole city, and it seemed to flow outward up into the foothills where the little valleys would come into the plain, with fires starting up all over, so pretty soon it was hard to see anything because of the smoke.
Jacob Beser, the electronic countermeasures officer, an engineering student at Johns Hopkins before he enlisted, found an image from the seashore for the turmoil he saw:
That city was burning for all she was worth. It looked like . . . well, did you ever go to the beach and stir up the sand in shallow water and see it all billow up? That’s what it looked like to me.2594
Little Boy exploded at 8:16:02 Hiroshima time, 43 seconds after it left the Enola Gay, 1,900 feet above the courtyard of Shima Hospital, 550 feet southeast of Thomas Ferebee’s aiming point, Aioi Bridge, with a yield equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT.2595
“It was all impersonal,” Paul Tibbets would come to say.2596 It was not impersonal for Robert Lewis. “If I live a hundred years,” he wrote in his journal, “I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.”2597 Nor would the people of Hiroshima.2598
* * *
In my mind’s eye, like a waking dream, I could still see the tongues of fire at work on the bodies of men.
Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain
The settlement on the delta islands of the ta River in southwestern Honshu was named Ashihara, “reed field,” or Gokaura, “five villages,” before the feudal lord Terumoto Mōri built a fortress there between 1589 and 1591 to secure an outlet for his family holdings on the Inland Sea. Mōri called his fortress Hiro-shima-jō, “broad-island castle,” and gradually the town of merchants and artisans that grew up around it acquired its name. It was an 800-foot rectangle of massive stone walls protected within a wide rectangular moat, one corner graced by a high white pagoda-like tower with five progressively inset roofs. The Mōri family soon lost its holdings to the stronger Fukushima family, which lost them in turn to the Asano family in 1619. The Asanos had the good sense to have allied themselves closely with the Tokugawa Shogunate and ruled Hiroshima fief within that alliance for the next two and a half centuries.2599 Across those centuries the town prospered. The Asanos saw to its progressive enlargement by filling in the estuarial shallows to connect its islands. Divided then into long, narrow districts by the ta’s seven distributaries, Hiroshima assumed the form of an open, extended hand.
The restoration of the Meiji emperor in 1868 and the abolition of the feudal clan system transformed Hiroshima fief into Hiroshima Prefecture and the town, like the country, began vigorously to modernize. A physician was appointed its first mayor in 1889 when it officially became a city; the population that celebrated the change numbered 83,387. Five years of expensive landfill and construction culminated that year in the opening of Ujina harbor, a reclamation project that established Hiroshima as a major commercial port. Railroads came through at the turn of the century.
By then Hiroshima and its castle had found further service as an army base and the Imperial Army Fifth Division was quartered in barracks within and around the castle grounds. The Fifth Division was the first to be shipped to battle when Japan and China initiated hostilities in 1894; Ujina harbor served as a major point of embarkation and would continue in that role for the next fifty years. The Meiji emperor moved his headquarters to the castle in Hiroshima in September, the better to direct the war, and the Diet met in extraordinary session in a provisional Diet building there. Until the following April, when the limited mainland war ended with a Japanese victory that included the acquisition of Formosa and the southern part of Manchuria, Hiroshima was de facto the capital of Japan. Then the emperor returned to Tokyo and the city consolidated its gains.
It acquired further military and industrial investments in the first three decades of the twentieth century as Japan turned to increasing international adventure. By the Second World War, an American study noted in the autumn of 1945, “Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communication center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, ‘Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of “Banzai” the troops leaving from the harbor.’ ”2600 From Hiroshima in 1945 the Japanese Army general staff prepared to direct the defense of Kyushu against the impending American invasion.
Earlier in the war the city’s population had approached 400,000, but the threat of strategic bombing, so ominously delayed, had led the authorities to order a series of evacuations; on August 6 the resident population numbered some 280,000 to 290,000 civilians plus about 43,000 soldiers. Given that proportion of civilian to military—more than six to one—Hiroshima was not, as Truman had promised in his Potsdam diary, a “purely military” target. It was not without responsibility, however, in serving the ends of war.
“The hour was early, the morning still, warm, and beautiful,” a Hiroshima physician, Michihiko Hachiya, the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, begins a diary of the events Little Boy entrained on August 6. “Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden.”2601 The temperature at eight o’clock was 80 degrees, the humidity 80 percent, the wind calm. The seven branches of the ta flowed past crowds of citizens walking and bicycling to work. The streetcars that clanged outside Fukuya department store two blocks north of Aioi Bridge were packed. Thousands of soldiers, bare to the waist, exercised at morning calesthenics on the east and west parade grounds that flanked Hiroshima Castle a long block west of the T-shaped bridge. More than eight thousand schoolgirls, ordered to duty the day before, worked outdoors in the central city helping to raze houses to clear firebreaks against the possibility of an incendiary attack. An air raid alert at 7:09—the 509th weather
plane—had been called off at 7:31 when the B-29 left the area. Three more B-sans approaching just before 8:15 sent hardly anyone to cover, though many raised their eyes to the high silver instruments to watch.
“Just as I looked up at the sky,” remembers a girl who was five years old at the time and safely at home in the suburbs, “there was a flash of white light and the green in the plants looked in that light like the color of dry leaves.”2602
Closer was more brutal illumination. A young woman helping to clear firebreaks, a junior-college student at the time, recalls: “Shortly after the voice of our teacher, saying ‘Oh, there’s a B!’ made us look up at the sky, we felt a tremendous flash of lightning. In an instant we were blinded and everything was just a frenzy of delirium.”2603
Closer still, in the heart of the city, no one survived to report the coming of the light; the constrained witness of investigative groups must serve instead for testimony. A Yale Medical School pathologist working with a joint American-Japanese study commission a few months after the war, Averill A. Liebow, observes:
Accompanying the flash of light was an instantaneous flash of heat . . . Its duration was probably less than one tenth of a second and its intensity was sufficient to cause nearby flammable objects . . . to burst into flame and to char poles as far as 4,000 yards away from the hypocenter [i.e., the point on the ground directly below the fireball]. . . . At 600–700 yards it was sufficient to chip and roughen granite. . . . The heat also produced bubbling of tile to about 1,300 yards. It has been found by experiment that to produce this effect a temperature of [3,000° F] acting for four seconds is necessary, but under these conditions the effect is deeper, which indicates that the temperature was higher and the duration less during the Hiroshima explosion.2604
“Because the heat in [the] flash comes in such a short time,” adds a Manhattan Project study, “there is no time for any cooling to take place, and the temperature of a person’s skin can be raised [120° F] . . . in the first millisecond at a distance of [2.3 miles].”2605