Hiroshima Countdown.
An Oral History Interview with Cmdr. Paul Tibbets. 1985.
An Oral History Interview with Cmdr. Paul Tibbets. 1985.
Paul Tibbets dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I met him thirty-nine years later in Columbus Ohio where he ran the first corporate air charter company in the United States. After the “Good War”, Tibbets’ fame comprised cache and notoriety and business was prosperous
I’d conduced a telephone interview with Tibbets the previous year - in 1983 - for a 12-hour marathon radio production exploring Hiroshima on New York City Pacifica Foundation radio station, WBAI. I said at the beginning of this memoir that I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. This radio program was my chance to get to the heart of the matter.
At the time I was a volunteer producer. I brought audio and stories from my international travels with Australian Broadcasting to WBAI where I produced my own 90 minute weekly late-night radio program: Investigations: In Search of the Art in Radio. If one could get through the front door and volunteer, WBAI offered access to the weird and wonderful New York audience . After some years of weekend news and documentary specials I had the chance to produce an all-day broadcast about the atomic bomb and Hiroshima.
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| WBAI.99.5FM, NYC. |
Tibbets’ voice on the telephone becomes oral history, documentation and performance on live radio. As does Chaplain William Downey who says the prayer before the bomber crews takes off:
Almighty Father, Who wilt hear the prayer of
them that Love Thee, we pray Thee to be with those
who brave the heights of Thy Heaven and who carry
the battle to our enemies. Guard and protect them,
we pray Thee, as they fly their appointed rounds.
May they, as well as we, know Thy strength and power,
and armed with Thy might may bring this war to
a rapid end. We pray They that thy end of the war
may come soon, and that once more we may know peace
on earth. May the men who fly this night be kept
safe in Thy care, and may they be returned safely
to us. We shall go forward, trusting in Thee, knowing
that we are in Thy care now and forever. In the
name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Lutheran Chaplain William Downey scribbled on the bottom of the typed prayer: “… read by me for the crew of the Enola Gay prior to their take off on the atomic mission to Hiroshima. Signed on Tinian, 6 August 1945”.
The great CBS newsman, Edward R. Murrow, included the actual sound of this prayer in his black-and-white-sounding newsreel quality radio report following the atomic bombing. The authenticity of sound objects like this constitute acoustic artifacts, assemblies of magnetized iron particles on tape stuck in time and released on the radio; audio snap shots, frequencies frozen and resurrected. The 12-hour marathon broadcast became the staging ground for a more contained program, Hiroshima Countdown with Studs Terkel.
In 1984, I received a $20,000 grant from the Center for Defense Information, a think tank of retired military personnel and policy wonks providing invaluable alternate information on defense issues. The grant enabled me to research and travel for the radio program.
•
“The picture you’re looking at is not me or my crew”, Tibbets said as we sat, “that’s from the 1980 film they made called ‘Enola Gay’ starring the celebrity Buddhist, Patrick Duffy”.
Cmdr. Paul Tibbets led the 509th bomber group and he dropped the first atomic bomb used on human beings on Hiroshima, August 6th, 1945.
“Any regrets?” I asked. He leaned back in his black leather chair and looked me straight in the eye and the grandfather morphed into the wing commander:
“I must say that I have absolutely no regrets. But that has to be understood in the context of the thinking at the time. Regretfully, war is a terrible thing. Let’s just stop the regrets right there. Personally speaking, I did what I was supposed to do, I accomplished what I was convinced I would do which was to stop the war and save lives.”
Paul Tibbets was completely confident and seemed without doubt or remorse. I admired his resolve but was disturbed by his cocky sureness. He seemed devoid of empathy for the tens of thousands who died that day in a single blast – the blast still exploding slowly down through the years,
Enola Gay
The most famous B-29 airplane is the Enola Gay. I wondered about the name and asked Tibbets. “It was my mother’s name, Enola Gay Haggard. She wanted me to be a doctor so I went to medical school but I’d done some civilian flying while I was at school and I decided to leave and go into the flying business and I knew the only place I could really learn was in the military.
“My father was violently opposed to two things, one was motorcycles and the other was airplanes. He told me the greatest fright he’d had in his life was riding a motorcycle sidecar as a dispatch rider in the first war and the other was air planes – both of them terrified him. He told me I was going to get killed in those fool machines but I was now a grown-up and on my own. My mother listened to all this talk and she looked at me for a long time then told me: ‘Paul, if that’s what you want, you go ahead and I know you’re going to be alright.’
“I realized that the airplane and the mission would go down in history. In those days fighting aircraft carried all kinds of names – cities, girlfriends and some of them were not the kind of thing you’d put in a newspaper. I was afraid of duplication of names and I could think of no more appropriate name to put on my airplane than her name, to honor the regard she had for me in making that step from medical school to aviation.”1
“Enola Gay” was a Boeing B-29 Super fortress was a four-engine heavy propeller aircraft flown by the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. The name “Super fortress” was derived from its well-known predecessor, the B-17 Flying Fortress.
The B-29 was one of the largest aircraft to see service and one of the most advanced bombers of its time with innovations such as a pressurized cabin and remote-controlled machine gun turrets. It was designed as a high-altitude daytime bomber but actually flew more low-altitude night incendiary bombing missions. It was the primary aircraft in the U.S. firebombing campaign against Japan in the final months of World War II. Unlike many other bombers, the B-29 remained in service long after the war ended. By the time it was retired in the 1960s, some 3,900 planes had been built. In wartime, the B-29 was capable of flights up to 40,000 feet at speeds of up to 350 mph. This was its best defense. Fighters of the day could barely get that high. Only the heaviest anti-aircraft weapons could.
“I was in the European Theater – England to North Africa - flying D-17’s and about to finish my tour of duty when I was called and advised I was to return to the United States and assigned to the B29 project.”
At the time, the aircraft was still in the test phase. It was an airplane that represented a quantum leap in avionics. It was important because of the long distance flying necessary in the Pacific Theater. It was a long-range bomber.
“In fact Boeing did not want to pursue the development of the aircraft because they considered it badly engineered and lacking sufficient power but the Air Force had to have a long-range bomber and decided to go ahead and took over responsibility for construction and testing the aircraft. I was assigned to that project.
“Before I got to the project there had been a few disasters and pilots had died testing the B29. By the end of 1944 I had more flying time and experience than any Air Force pilot with B29s. I had a reputation as an independent and innovative operator – there were no precedents for such an aircraft - no rules. I’d been the first to fly B-17 missions against the Germans when I was based in England. You could say I wrote the book and I was actually selected as senior officer in command over two more senior officers. I was really a test pilot.
The Hiroshima Project
“When the time came for the Hiroshima project I was testing B-29’s against fighter aircraft to see how they could survive a fighter attack. We were based in Alamogordo in New Mexico under the command of the Physics Department of the University of New Mexico.
“One day the telephone rings and it was the office of the Commander General of the Second Air Force. My instructions came from his Executive Officer and he wanted to see me next day. He told me to bring a suitcase because ‘you’re not going back’.
“So I went up there next day and met Lieutenant Colonel Jack Lansdale who was with the Army Corps of Engineers. He asked me three questions. This was unusual – to enter an Air Force General’s headquarters and find a Corps of Engineer guy asking the questions - but in wartime nothing is surprising.
The questions concerned my university days in Cincinnati and my relationship with a doctor’s family and I immediately understood this man knew exactly what he was asking. He was testing my integrity.
“He finally said: ‘Have you ever been arrested?’ and I said ‘Oh yeah, I have a heavy foot when I’m driving’. And he says, ‘that’s not what I’m asking about. Have you ever been arrested for anything more serious than that?’ And that caused me to think hard back to those earlier days.
“So I said ‘yes’ and he says, ‘Well what was it?’. So I told him: ‘Well embarrassing as it may seem, one night around midnight I’m in a place called South Side in North Miami Beach in a kind of compromising position in an automobile with a young lady. All of a sudden there’s a flashlight and I end up with this young lady down at the local police station’. And this guy from the Corps starts laughing and says ‘Yeah, that’s it’, and he says: ‘Then you call the judge down there in Miami’ – that’s where my folks were living at the time – ‘and the judge got you out of it’, and he was exactly right and he smiles and says: ‘come on, I’m satisfied.’
“So he takes me into another office and there’s two men, one wearing a Navy uniform and the other was a civilian. The man in uniform was Captain Parsons, U.S. Navy, assigned to the Manhattan Project and the other was Norman Ramsey, a scientist. That’s when the story unfolded.”
I listened to Tibbets telling his story, my microphone set-up on his tidy desk. The tape recorder can create a kind of magic and
when I open the microphone my head phones draw me into a kind of hyper-reality – a concentrated listening to form and content - whilst attending the volume levels and developing the next question. It was for this reason I was always well prepared with my note cards carefully notated. And note cards don’t rustle and are discreet. Tibbets’ memory was acute and I was pulled into his story as it unfolded with unswerving confidence - banal and heroic. We were reliving the prelude to a paradigm shift in history.
The Manhattan Project
“I really didn’t understand everything they were saying”, he said. “ I majored in physics in college so I understood the atomic structure but I didn’t understand splitting atoms. But I remembered reading some of Einstein’s theories at the time and I began to get the picture.
“They explained that they were part of the Manhattan Project and the General says: ‘Now you’re responsibility is to form an organization to carry this special weapon to Japan and Europe simultaneously – it’s your responsibility to figure out what you need and then train the people’”.
The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first nuclear weapon during World War Two by the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1941–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The project’s roots lay in scientist’s fears going back to the 1930s, that Nazi Germany was developing nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project quickly expanded from a small research group in 1939 to more than 130,000 people and nearly $2 billion in World War Two dollars. It operated in secret at multiple production and research sites.
The three primary research and production sites were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site in Washington State, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Project research took place at over thirty different sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Manhattan Project maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947, which later became the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulating the development of civilian nuclear energy. Moving the project from military to civilian control made it more difficult to trace the vast amounts of money and resources that would be spent on atomic bombs. In the early 1950’s, President Eisenhower was to shift the focus of nuclear energy calling for “Atoms for Peace”.2
The Manhattan Project detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945: The Trinity test near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, a test detonation of a plutonium implosion bomb; an enriched uranium bomb code-named “Little Boy” on August 6th over Hiroshima Japan; and a second plutonium bomb, code-named “Fat Man” on August 9th over Nagasaki.
“You know I’ve been asked many times up to this day why I accepted this assignment so easily and I tell everybody the same answer and I am not trying to brag but in those days I was so filled with confidence there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it. I knew I could do it. I was twenty-nine at the time.”
“You have to understand this was a very secret project and they told me I had to select an isolated location to put my outfit together. They told me they had selected three potential bases – one up in South Dakota and another over in Utah and the third in Nebraska and that’s where we started out – Hastings, Nebraska, the 393rd Bomb Squadron. They had B29’s there and it was the nucleus of my outfit.
“They gave me a code name because this was all very secret. They called me Silverplate and told me to use that name and I would get anything I wanted from the Air Force.
“There was another man in Washington D.C. at headquarters – Ben Wilson - and I was to contact him only if necessary, without attracting too much attention. We had the highest priority in the Air Force. When I wanted aircraft for transportation and training I got them so quick it would make your head swim.
“But they told me: ‘Paul be careful how you use than name Silverplate. If this thing’s a success you’ll be a hero but if it’s not you might go to prison and they meant it. All this was being done without authority from Congress, without anybody’s knowledge and if they needed a scapegoat it was going to be me.
“Ten and a half months later I was absolutely convinced there were no problems. Everything worked out just like I wanted, just like I planned. Now don’t ask me why the good Lord gave me all those good luck charms on the way through but that’s just the way it worked out. I had a group of people who were absolutely fantastic. I talked to them and told them not to ask too many questions because it was not good for them to know what this was all about. But I told them I wouldn’t ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do and I never got a challenge on that. There were 1,400 men and twenty-three airplanes in the organization.
“In May, 1944 we moved to Wendover Army Air Field in Utah, a training base for bomber pilots. We even went down to Havana, Cuba to practice over-water flying and navigation by the stars. The bomb was to be dropped visually meaning we had to use the new Norden bombsight. In those days radar was primitive and we didn’t have computers like today. Our computers were mechanical and ran with gears.”
The Norden Bombsight.
The Norden bombsight was used by the United States Army Air Force during World War Two the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. It was designed by Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer educated in Switzerland, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1904 and worked on bombsights at the Sperry Corporation before starting his own company.
The Norden bombsight was initially built in New York City before the start of the war. The device used a mechanical analog computer comprising electric motors, gyros, mirrors, bubble levels, gears and a small telescope. The bombardier inputs the necessary information, such as airspeed and altitude, and the bombsight calculates the trajectory of the bomb being dropped.
Near the target the aircraft flies on autopilot to a precise position calculated by the bombsight and releases the ordnance. Using this device, bombardiers could, in theory, drop their bombs within a 100-foot circle from an altitude of well over 20,000 feet.
In combat, this accuracy was never achieved because the Norden had been tested in the absence of anti-aircraft fire or adverse weather and therefore under artificial conditions. An additional factor was the shape and even the paint of the bomb mantle – it greatly changed the aerodynamic properties of the weapon and nobody knew how to calculate the trajectory of bombs that reached supersonic speeds during fall.
Under perfect conditions only about fifty percent of American bombs fell within a quarter of a mile of the target, and American flyers estimated that as many as ninety percent of bombs missed their targets.
Tinian Island
Although Tinian will forever be linked to “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” and the infamous U.S.S. Indianapolis incident, the island holds another lesser known distinction in the annals of modern war. As part of the 13-day naval bombardment of Tinian leading up to its invasion, U.S. forces utilized napalm bombs against the Japanese. It was the first time napalm was used during warfare.
A U.S. Marine Landing Force overran the numerically superior Japanese forces on Tinian in what is considered the best-executed amphibious operation of the war. Marine casualties were 328 dead and 1,571 wounded. Many Japanese not killed by U.S. military forces opted to commit suicide by jumping off the island cliffs rather than be caught.
Tinian’s greatest distinction would come during World War II, in the Pacific theater, when the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were loaded onto airplanes that carried out one of humankind’s most terrible missions.
“We sent the airplanes out there in the first part of July 1945. I stayed back in the States in order to observe the first atomic weapons test at Alamogordo in New Mexico. I wanted to see it first hand and suggested I could fly an aircraft in the vicinity when the thing exploded but they wouldn’t let me. They figured they could do their own calculations on the ground.
“The first test was postponed because of bad weather and right about that time I got word from Tinian from my people that I’d better get out there because there was some kind of trouble. The 20th Air Force wanted to split up my outfit and use some of my people in other outfits so I flew out there as soon as I could and missed the bomb test.”
General Curtis LeMay
“I went to headquarters before I left and spoke with General LeMay who didn’t know about our project. After our meeting he issued orders that the 509th was not to be split and in essence told them to keep hands off and after that we were never bothered again.”
Major General Curtis E. LeMay is credited with designing and implementing the effective systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. After the war, he headed the Berlin airlift, and then reorganized the Strategic Air Command into an effective means of conducting nuclear war.
Critics have characterized him as a bellicose warmonger nicknaming him “Bombs Away LeMay”, whose aggressiveness threatened to inflame tense Cold War situations (such as the Cuban Missile Crisis), into open war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
LeMay is perhaps most famous for suggesting in a 1965 book, that the United States should escalate its bombing of North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”
Upon receiving his fourth star at age 44, LeMay became the youngest full general in American history since Ulysses S. Grant.
A LeMay Bombing Leaflet from the war warned Japanese civilians that: “unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.”
Precise figures are not available, but the fire bombing and atomic bombing campaign against Japan, directed by LeMay, between March 1945 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945, may have killed more than one million Japanese civilians. Official estimates from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey put the figures at 330,000 people killed, 476,000 injured, 8.5 million people made homeless and 2.5 million buildings destroyed. Nearly half the built-up areas of sixty-four cities were destroyed, including much of Japan’s war industry.
LeMay referred to his nighttime incendiary attacks as “fire jobs.” The Japanese nicknamed him “Demon LeMay”. Downed allied aircrews were frequently tortured and executed when captured by both Japanese civilians and military. Also, the remaining Allied prisoners of war in Japan who had survived imprisonment to that time were frequently subjected to additional reprisals and torture after an air raid.
LeMay was quite aware of both the brutality of his actions and the Japanese opinion of him — he once remarked that had the U.S. lost the war he fully expected to be tried for war crimes, especially in view of Japanese executions of uniformed American flight crews during the 1942 Doolittle raid. However, he argued that it was his duty to carry out the attacks in order to end the war as quickly as possible, sparing further loss of life.
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman justified these tactics by referring to an estimate that one million American troops would be killed if Japan had to be invaded. Additionally, the Japanese had intentionally decentralized ninety percent of their war-related production into small subcontractor workshops in civilian districts, making remaining Japanese war industry largely immune to conventional precision bombing with high explosives.
As the fire bombing campaign took effect, Japanese war planners were forced to expend significant resources to relocate vital war industries to remote caves and mountain bunkers, further reducing production of war materiel.
The Battleship Indianapolis
On July 26th, 1945 after a daring, top-secret voyage across the Pacific from San Francisco, the world’s first operational atomic bomb was delivered, by the battleship Indianapolis to Tinian Island. The battleship anchored 1,000 yards off -shore and delivered the radioactive components of the newly created bombs.
The Indianapolis then reported to CINCPAC (Commander-In-Chief, Pacific) Headquarters in Guam for further orders. She was directed to join the battleship USS Idaho at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines to prepare for the invasion of Japan. The Indianapolis, unescorted, departed Guam making about 17 knots for the rendezvous.
At fourteen minutes past midnight, on 30 July 1945, midway between Guam and Leyte Gulf, the Indianapolis was hit by two Japanese torpedoes The first blew away the bow. The second struck near mid-ships on the starboard side adjacent to a fuel tank and a powder magazine. The resulting explosion split the ship to the keel.
Rolling to starboard and within minutes the Indianapolis went down rapidly by the bow, Of the 1,196 sailors aboard that night, about 900 made it into the water in the twelve minutes before she sank. Few life rafts were released. Most survivors wore puffy standard kapok life jackets
As the sun rose and glinted on the oily flat Pacifica next day, the heads of hundreds of sailors and yellow life jackets, swayed and bobbed on the surface as far as the eye could see. And dorsal fins of many sharks slid into view and circled for the inevitable attack that began as the sun rose higher. The attack lasted five days and nights.
After constant shark attacks, starvation, terrible thirst, suffering from exposure and their wounds, the remaining sailors of the Indianapolis were rescued from the sea. Of the 900 who made it into the water that night, 317 survived. 3
The Targets
In May 1945 possible targets for the first atomic bombs were discussed. Tibbets told me the 20th Air Force was ordered not to attack any of the potential atomic bomb targets under any circumstances. It would be the first time in history that weapons of such devastating power would be used and it was important to understand the effects of the weapon. It was to be a test of grand proportions. And though the targets were ostensibly military, in fact many civilians lay in the path of the weapons.4
“Well the selection of the targets in the month of May, 1945 was actually done by the intelligence community in headquarters at the U.S. Air Force. The requirements given were that you will select cities that are military targets.
“And they also selected the types of terrain they wanted – they didn’t want too may hills and that sort of thing. They were also interested in the type of constructions because in reality, not only was this a military mission but it was also of extreme scientific importance because they wanted to know what a weapon of this type would do against reinforced concrete and against steel, what it would do against all kinds of buildings.
”And they wanted to find out what fires would do and the wind and pressure when the bomb exploded – the force of it was unbelievable in the circle of a mile of so – it goes out and then comes back – they wanted to know how much can you destroy with wind.
"The targets had to be something that had not been attacked before – call it virgin targets, undamaged, unhurt by other types of explosives. These were the requirements. They used Honshu because that’s the main island and they selected five targets.
”Nobody in their right mind believed that it would be necessary to use five bombs. They really thought one would do it. But when one wasn’t enough they used a second one to convince the Japanese that this was not just a laboratory experiment and we had more weapons.
“The weapon I used on Hiroshima had two code names and we used them interchangeably – ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Thin Man’ because it was dimensionally smaller than the Nagasaki type bomb. It got the name ‘Thin Man’ because it had a much smaller diameter than the Nagasaki Bomb – it was a more conventional looking bomb but ‘Fat Man’, the Nagasaki bomb was a perfect sphere. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb whilst that used on Hiroshima had uranium at its core.”
Tibbets described the Nagasaki weapon: “It was a sphere encased in metal and it had a nose on it which housed the sensing mechanism for the barometric fusing system and contained batteries and it had a kind of box kite tail fin to give it stability.”
The Bomb Run
Back on Tinean Island, atomic bomb pits, slightly larger than graves were prepared for loading the world’s first atomic bombs to be detonated on humans. The aircraft were rolled over the pit until the bomb bay was directly above the bomb. Then, the bomb was hoisted into the weapon bay.
On the afternoon of August 5, 1945 at Number One Bomb Loading Pit, “Little Boy” was loaded aboard Enola Gay. At nearby Number Two Bomb Loading Pit “Fat Man was loaded three days later for Nagasaki. Kokura an ancient castle town was the original target for the second atomic bomb on the afternoon of August 9th 1945. But Kokura was clouded in that day and the pilots needed to see the target. Nagasaki, the secondary target was blasted into history.
”We had a third weapon back in Utah and I had an airplane there ready to carry it. When the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on the 9th of August and we didn’t get an immediate response, Lemay asked if we had another one and I said ‘I’ve got one at Windover’ and he said ‘get it out here.’
”So I sent the code word back there to fly that airplane out here to Tinian and they took off. But they stopped in California at Moffat Field because the Japanese surrendered by the time they got there.
“Now Truman is going to Potsdam where he meets Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill to discuss peace. Truman is quite aware and knows he’s going to have to make a decision about dropping the bomb. Truman returns to the U.S. on a cruiser and sends word to Washington, which is then relayed to us because he knows we’re ready – it’s probably around August 4th. He sends the message to go ahead which allowed us to select the day, August 6th as the day we wanted to go to Hiroshima.
Things go exactly like we had preplanned and we took off from Tinean Island with the bomb on board at approximately two am, Tinian time on the morning of sixth day of August.”
Colonel Paul Tibbets took the controls of “Enola Gay” and lumbered into the air. Once safely airborne, Navy Captain William Parsons climbed into the cramped bomb bay and armed their special cargo—the 10,000-pound atomic bomb.
“I had sent three airplanes ahead of us – one to observe the weather over Hiroshima, one to observe the weather over Nagasaki and the other over Kukura. As I approached the Japanese coastline I could go to any one of those three targets depending on weather. Hiroshima was the preferred target and Nagasaki was the secondary.
“Hiroshima was clear, visibility unlimited, no clouds at all. Well I didn’t even listen to the rest of it coming in by radio code, I didn’t pay attention to the radio operator after he gave me the primary target. I told the navigator Tom Ferebee, we’re going to Hiroshima, that’s our target.
“We proceeded on our flight plan for the city and came over the coast of Japan at a point about 70 miles to the east of the city. It was very distinctive. You couldn’t really mistake it.
“Now I had to have more than one person’s opinion on everything we’re doing -from then on - so it was agreed that as we went in and turned westerly towards the city of Hiroshima, as soon as the bombardier Tom Ferebee sees the target through his Norden bombsight, he’ll tell me ‘I have the city in sight’. The navigator would come up there and look over the bombardier’s shoulder and confirm it and this we did.
“There was such good visibility. We had hardly gotten the airplane on course and steadied for the bombardier, he says ‘I’ve got the city.” The navigator wandered up there and he looked over his shoulder and he could see it up there in front, he looked through the Norden telescope optics and says: ‘that’s it, there’s no question about it.’
“It was distinctive in the way it just sat there on a plateau right on the shoreline of the Sea of Japan, with the rivers that ran through it – just like kind of putting your fingers on the top of a table, each finger a river, you could identify it so clearly.
“Now we have two aircraft escorting us and those aircraft are carrying scientific instruments that would be dropped at the same time the bomb left my airplane. The purpose was to record the blast effect and send it by radio transmitter. One of the men flying one of those airplanes was a squadron commander of the B-29’s in my organization and he had worked with me a long time previous to the assignment and was going to have him drop the second one.
“The plan was that as we went in we’d converse cryptically speaking, over the radio – just using a few words with no descriptions because I said:’ Chuck if I make a mistake – it was Chuck Sweeney – if I make a mistake I don’t want you to make the same one.’
“We went in on the bomb run. Now we were three minutes away and the bombardier was to activate the radio tone signal – all he had to do was press a switch and close a circuit that brought up a steady tone. As soon as that started it told the two other airplanes we’re three minutes away from bomb release and they had certain things they had to do.
“Meanwhile inside our cockpit Ferebee had to have the aiming point and Van Kirk, the navigator had to confirm it. By that time we’re close enough that I can look out the nose of the airplane and see everything that they’re talking about and I could readily agree that it was the city, there’s no mistaking, as Tom Ferebee says ‘I’ve got the aiming point’, I knew we had it, there was no question in my mind.
“Now, the signal was that Ferebee would give us two minutes away and next, one minute. He got it down to thirty seconds. Then fifteen. But from fifteen he counted backwards down to the time that the bomb left the airplane. That gave everybody in the air plan listening, an opportunity to know two things: one, how close we were and how quick, it would tell the man in the rear of the airplane - you better put your welder’s type goggles on because when I make this turn, it’ll expose you to the flash of that bomb. It advised everybody on board, not only those men but everybody listening, all of a sudden the air plane will lurch as it releases the 10,000 pound bomb and the air plane is going to jump and simultaneously I’m rolling the airplane into this tight turn and that meant that the bomb was on its way to the target and all’s we could do is just wait for the explosion to take place.
“As we did this and the bomb left the airplane, the tone quit and the other two aircraft, by manual release, dropped their instruments which were attached to parachutes and we all started our turns.
“There was a falling time of approximately fifty seconds – I think forty-seven to be exact. We made our turn the way we were supposed to and about that time I rolled out of that turn the man in the tail who’s looking directly at the city with his welder’s goggles says: ‘Explosion’. Just that one word. Right!
”I saw nothing but a terrible mass of boiling – I called it a boiling tar barrel - it was the debris in the atmosphere from the explosion and the fire and it was rolling and tumbling. I told you that as we went in the city was perfectly visible, no clouds. No nothing. After the bomb had been released, - remember we did more than three and a half square miles of damage and that covered most of the city so with the smoke and congestion - the city as such was not there. You couldn’t see it. The city was gone.
“After that, he said: ‘Here she comes.’ Well that meant the shock wave is coming and that’s what we’re waiting for. The intensity of the shock wave hit us. And he didn’t much more than say; ‘Here she is,’ then ‘Bang!’! it hit the airplane.
“It was a force of 2.5 G’s and the airplane recorded that. There was another wave right behind it and a third one we could see. Later I said: ‘How in the world did you see those things?’ and he said: ‘It’s just like a mirage going across the desert, its just as plain as it could be, they were coming right at us’. And I said, fine, that’s just swell.
“When the second wave hit us I started turning ‘cause it was less intense that the first one and I knew the third one would be nothing. And I started the airplane back towards the city again because each of the three airplanes had four or five cameras – hand-held cameras - with instructions that we were to take as many pictures as we could for posterity and for evaluation back at the 20th Air Force headquarters and at the scientific groups place on Tinean Island.
“We had a wire recorder attached to the intercom system with instructions that nobody say anything until they were asked to say something. At the right time they would be asked to give their impressions. Now we controlled the wire recorder and I didn’t turn it on until all the picture taking was over with and all of the preliminary comments made by the crew.
“Now the mushroom cloud. I had no intention of staying there and having finished the picture taking I had the wire recorder on and I advised everybody that it was going on and said; ‘Now one at a time, I’ll call your names. I’ll ask you to say what you saw. I don’t want anybody to say they say something different.
“In the meantime we have to compose a message to be sent by radio code back to Tinean Island to let them know that the bomb has been dropped and whether it had been successful or not.
“Now we’re supposed to do this by selecting certain phrases off a hand-written code agreement and we were trying to figure out what words to put in. And I told the radio operator, I don’t care about the code, I don’t care about anything. By this time there’s no more secret. I said just send it back that the results were greater than expected and these were the words that went back. I said: ‘send it in clear text’. And that’s the way the message went.
“Now it’s an anti-climax really. Most of us had been up for many hours. I had been on my feet for about thirty hours and I was tired. The let-down had come and I told my co-pilot, Bob Lewis, I said: ‘Bob, you watch it’, the airplane was flying on autopilot, ‘I’ve got to take a nap so I fixed a parachute bag which was the best pillow I could come up with and I fixed that thing so that I could lean my head back and get some rest. I probably didn’t sleep more than two hours and the trip home was uneventful and we went back into Tinean and landed. We were met by quite a crowd of people, which we didn’t expect.”
”When we landed we followed the normal procedures and they escorted us into a parking area with a ‘follow me’ jeep and I noticed that we were not returning to our normal parking space. I knew they wanted the airplane isolated in order to check the Geiger counter so I accepted that. It was not until I pulled into this open area that I saw a crowd of people and I thought ‘my gosh what are they all doing here?’
”As we came up, looking through the glass nose, I recognized General Le May and General Spottswood and I was taken aback by them being there. We got out of the airplane and everybody stood their ground and of course there were cameras and they were busy with their pictures, some of them were movie cameras and there were photographers running’ around taken’ pictures of each of the people that got out of the airplane and I was the last one to get out which is the normal procedure.
“Well I got out of the aircraft and as I did there was a man waiting for me and he kind of took me by the arm and said ‘come over here’ and he took me over and stopped me and General Spotterswood walked up to me and I saluted and stood still and didn’t say anything because there was another man standing beside him and he says: ‘Attention to orders!’
”Well it was General Spottswood and he was giving me a decoration. Other people assembled, officers who had come up from Guam and had an interest in this thing. They wanted to sit in on the crew debriefing. They wanted to learn what happened.
”The other group was our own men from the 509th and they were curious. They didn’t know the full story and they wanted to hear everything and they wanted to talk to their buddies. This went on for a few minutes and then we were asked to get into a vehicle and go back to headquarters for debriefing. They want to debrief quickly before the mind became cluttered. It lasted quite a while and I said what I had to say and I was excused and was pulled off to the side to talk with several officers who were wing commanders like myself and some of the staff from General LeMay’s office.
”After that it was time to go to the mess hall for chow and the mess officer had a big feast for the whole outfit. We even had ice cream. How do you like that? Out there on that island it was a hard thing to do – it was quite a homecoming”
Two days later Tibbets and his crew were flown to Guam for the news media interviews and there had to be more than fifty correspondents there.
”General LeMay was there and he said: ‘ These are the people that did it’ and he identified each of us and we were bombarded with questions for a long time. We still had security requirements and could not answer all the questions and discuss it as freely as we can today. I had security restrictions placed on me for ten years after the war.”
Radiation
“Well radiation was something that the scientists understood but at that time it didn’t mean much to the average military personnel. But they said radiation on the aircraft was negligible and nobody in my organization had any problem with radiation.
”But they were aware of radiation - no question about it - and they made us aware of the fact. One of the things they said was ‘Don’t fly through the cloud on the way back but I didn’t give much thought to it and nobody that I know talked of the after affects of radiation burns and so on. At the time it wasn’t a question. I think the bomb would still have been used if we knew it and I think the President and hierarchy in the army would have gone ahead anyway. War is hell. People are going to get hurt and the idea is to win a war quick as you can. Clausewitz said ‘ with all the means at your disposal’”
”World War One used gas. Mustard gas burned people just as badly and had just as bad affects as radiation burns. Okay?
”It was generally agreed at the Geneva Convention that those kinds of gases would not be used. But look at what the Russians have done in Afghanistan and the places they’ve occupied. They used it without thinking about it. Heck you drop fire bombs with phosphorous and you burn ‘em up. What’s the difference?”
In the official Air Force archive interview I noted Tibbets indicated some disappointment by the way he was treated by the military after the war and there was sense of abandonment.
”People would confront me because of the anti-bomb sentiment at the time and they would confront me and demand I explain why I did it. I told them that I was told to do it. It’s just that simple.
”And the other side asks - 'why didn’t you refuse to do it?' And I say: 'because in a time of war refusing means you’ll be standing in front or a firing squad- if they want to get rough - and they shoot you. I told them I wanted to do it because I was convinced it would stop the war and stop the carnage'. I was convinced."
This is excellent, Andrew. My mother, Blanche Maxine Lee (Richardson)was a secretary to Captain Parsons, who armed the bomb. She told me that the women at Oak Ridge cried when they heard how many had been killed. None knew what they had been working on, and they called Capt. Parsons, "Colonel Sargent." She is on the far left of the dust jacket photo of the book, "The Girls Of Atomic City," with her sister and my maternal grandmother.
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