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B-29 Superfortress History:
This picture shows the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay landing after completion of the Hiroshima bombing mission, August 6, 1945.

 

Inroduction

 

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Hiroshima

Perhaps no other aspect of World War II is as controversial as the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. One thing that should be made clear is the international and open nature of scientific inquiry on atomic physics right up to the start of World War II. This is because no one was trying to make an atomic bomb, even though many scientists were aware of the tremendous energy trapped inside the atomic nucleus. Work was underway in numerous countries to better understand the atom and perhaps find ways to harness its energy.

In this desperate new war governments became aware of this potential source of immense power. Germany, Japan, Britain with America all had active programs during World War II to develop atomic weapons. As the theoretical underpinnings of atomic energy came into focus so did the staggering complexity of the industrial effort required to make an atomic bomb. This is where Germany and Japan were left behind as the United States spent $2 billion to design, test and manufacture the atom bomb under the Manhattan project.

The U.S. military was doing its best to defeat Japan even as work on the atomic bomb was coming to a successful conclusion. By the summer of 1945 fire-bombing raids by B-29 bombers were methodically incinerating Japanese cities while a naval blockade essentially isolated Japan from what was left of its empire. Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands was well into its preparation phase as hundreds of ships gathered at Okinawa.

From a political stand point it would have been unthinkable not to use the bomb. All the money and effort going into building a super powerful weapon that is left on the shelf as American troops die by the thousands trying to take Japan and end the war. This is where the debate begins and has never ended over the morality of using such a terrible weapon.

 

The Trinity Test

 

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The Device at Timinie  New Mexico

 

Ground Zero
3,400 yards northwest of McDonald Ranch Kenneth T. Bainbridge marked out ground zero. From the center at compass points roughly north, west and south at 10000-yard distances the Corps of Engineers built earth-sheltered bunkers with concrete slab roofs supported by oak beams thicker than railroad ties.
N-10000 recording instruments and searchlights 5.7 miles from ground zero
W-10000 searchlights and high-speed cameras
S-10000 command center
5 miles south of S-10000 was a base camp with tents and barracks
A hill named Compañia 20 miles northwest of ground zero was a VIP senic overlook.

The Towers
800 yards from zero bolted together 20 ft high in trestles of heavy wooden beams topped by a wide platform. at the top. 100 tons of high-explosive in wooden boxes on May 7, 1945

100 ft tall tower at zero. four legs spaced 35 feet apart braced with crossed struts sheltered on three sides with sheets of corrugated iron.

Countdown
0525 green Very rocket goes up; siren at Base camp gives a short wail.
0527 green Very rocket goes up; siren at Base camp gives a long wail.
0529 green Very rocket goes up
0529 automatic timer engaged
0529:15 X-unit fully charged
0529:35 gong sounds in control bunker (S-10000)
0529:45 detonation of atomic bomb

Yield: 18.6 KT

 

Little Boy and Fat Man

 

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Little Boy (L)  and  Fat Man (R)

Little Boy was the first nuclear weapon used in warfare. It exploded approximately 1,800 feet over Hiroshima, Japan, on the morning of August 6, 1945, with a force equal to 13,000 tons of TNT. Immediate deaths were between 70,000 to 130,000.

Little Boy was dropped from a B-29 bomber piloted by U.S. Army Air Force Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Tibbets had named the plane Enola Gay after his mother the night before the atomic attack.

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Little Boy (L)  and  Fat Man (R)

Fat Man was the second nuclear weapon used in warfare. Dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, Fat Man devastated more than two square miles of the city and caused approximately 45,000 immediate deaths.

Major Charles W. Sweeney piloted the B-29, #77 that dropped Fat Man. After the nuclear mission, #77 was christened Bockscar after its regular Command Pilot, Fred Bock.

While Little Boy was a uranium gun-type device, Fat Man was a more complicated and powerful plutonium implosion weapon that exploded with a force equal to 20 kilotons of TNT.

 

 

The Atomic Bomb Attacks

 

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The Pit Areas For Loading Both The Little Boy and Fat Man Bombs

The decision to drop the atomic bomb was not a group decision, in the end president Harry S. Truman made it. Among the president's senior military commanders most felt that a massive invasion of Japan would probably be necessary to end the war, although each service still wanted to claim ultimate victory for itself. The Navy proposed that its ongoing blockade of Japan would eventually force surrender. Likewise, the Army Air Force saw victory in continuing the fire bombing raids by B-29 bombers now numbering close to a 1,000 that were currently laying waste to huge areas of Japanese cities. Of course the Army felt strongly that only an invasion and occupation by troops would secure complete victory.

Truman in fact approved the invasion of Japan code-named DOWNFALL before he later decided to authorize the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. No one knew exactly how the Japanese leaders would respond to an atomic bomb blast on one or even several of their cities. Excellent code breaking by the Americans did reveal however the steps Japanese were taking and planning to take in defending their country. The likely number of casualties the armed forces of the United States would suffer invading Japan was given as 200,000 to a million men, depending on the source. But everyone realized including President Truman, who fought in the first World War, that the number of casualties was more of a guess than a fact. The atomic bomb was seen as a potentially war winning weapon and in that hope it was used but no one alive then truly comprehended its horrifying power.

 

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This is an aerial view of Tinian Island.  Note the four parallel 8,500 foot runways that allowed the heavily loaded B-29 Superfortresses to take off.

 

 

Hiroshima

 

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Hiroshima

 

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Hiroshima

The atomic bomb dropped on the city of Hiroshima was code named Little Boy. The design is relatively simple using a gun type arrangement to explosively force a sub-critical mass of uranium-235 and three U235 target rings together at high velocity causing a chain reaction.

Well before dawn on the 6th of August three special reconnaissance F-13As took off to report the weather over the primary and secondary targets. Colonel Tibbets lifted the Enola Gay off the runway at 2:45 A.M. shortly followed by two other B-29 bombers.

Navy weapons expert Captain William Parsons armed the bomb in flight, as it had been deemed too risky to arm before take off in case of accident, possibly wiping out the entire base.

At 7:42 came the coded message from the Hiroshima weather scout recommending bombing the primary target. Enola Gay was now at 26,000 ft and in a slight climb at a little less than 200 miles an hour. For the first time, his crew was told that they were about to deliver an entirely new type of weapon of staggering destructive power.

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Hiroshima

At 8:05 Enola Gay was coming in at 30,800 ft, followed by the observer planes, and less than 50 miles from Hiroshima. Major Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, took up position in the Plexiglas nose to fix the crosswire of his sight on the city's T-shaped Aioi Bridge.

Through the shimmering haze, Ferebee made out the bridge and locked the cross hairs of his bombsight. The final fifteen seconds to bomb drop were automatic. At seventeen seconds past 8:15, the bomb bay doors opened and "Little Boy" plummeted free.

At 1,800 ft, the barometric pressure device triggered the detonating mechanism. In a few milliseconds a brief flash had become an engulfing ball of light and destructive energy.

Name: Little Boy Type: Uranium gun-type fission Weight: 9,700lb (4400 kg) Length: 10 ft, 6 in (3.2m) Diameter: 29 in (0.737m) Explosive Yield: 15,000 tons of TNT

With this release of apocalyptic power 75,000 people were killed and 48,000 buildings destroyed. Strategic air power reached a terrifying new level of destruction in the smoldering ashes of Hiroshima.

 

 

The July 24, 1995 issue of Newsweek writes:

"A bright light filled the plane," wrote Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up, mushrooming." For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. "Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!" exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis, pounding on Tibbets's shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal. "My God," he asked himself, "what have we done?" (special report, "Hiroshima: August 6, 1945")

note: Paul Tibbets was Colonel, not "Lt. Colonel," when he was the pilot of the Enola Gay.

 

Production of Enriched Uranium

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

gaseous diffusion
thermal-diffusion
centrifuge separation

 

Delivery of the Atomic Bomb

Little Boy

July 26 USS Indianapolis arrives at Tinian, delivers the Little Boy gun and bullet.
Air Transport Command (ATC)   Three C-54s left Kirtland AFB with the three separate pieces of the Little Boy's target assembly.

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Left: Commander A. Birch numbers the bomb. Physicist Norman Ramsey. This is one of the rare photos where the inside of the bomb can be seen.	Little Boy, before being loaded into the plane's cargo hold (a part of the hatch can be seen on the top right)
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Taken at Tinian Island on the afternoon of August 5, 1945, this shows the tail of the Enola Gay being edged over the pit and into position to load "Little Boy" into the bomb bay. The weapon is in the pit covered with canvas.
This shows the "Little Boy" weapon in the pit ready for loading into the bomb bay of Enola Gay	This shows "Little Boy" being raised for loading into the Enola Gay's bomb bay.
	Various personnel and guards are standing around the loading area.

 

Data from the US Strategic Bombing Survey, Japanese official counts, and U.S. government / military documents assessing the damage caused by these weapons.
 

Target	Hiroshima	Nagasaki	Tokyo Fire Raid	Average of 93 Attacks on Cities
Dead/Missing	70,000-80,000	35,000-40,000	83,000	1,850
Wounded	70,000	40,000	102,000	1,830
Population Density	35,000 per sq mile	65,000 per sq mile	130,000 per sq mile	?
Total Casualties	140,000-150,000	75,000-80,000	185,000	3,680
Area Destroyed	4.7 sq mile	1.8 sq mile	15.8 sq mile	1.8 sq mile
Attacking Platform	1 B-29	1 B-29	334 B-29s	B-29s
Weapon(s)	'Tall Boy' 15 kT (15,000 tons of TNT)	'Fat Man' 21 kT (21,000 tons of TNT)	1,667 tons	1,129 tons

Notes:
Many of the wounded in the atom bomb attacks would die in the coming days, months and even years due to radiation exposure and burns.

The terrain and spread-out nature of Nagasaki reduced destruction of life and property somewhat despite Fat Man's greater destructive power.

 

Nagasaki

 

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Nagasaki

The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was code named Fat Man and used plutonium as the fissionable material. Plutonium is a man-made element that is more efficient than uranium as a fission source. The design is also more complicated than the Little Boy atomic device. It relies on a rapid and simultaneous implosion of a fissionable shell into a critical mass.

A B-29 bomber named "Bock's Car" took off on August 9, 1945 to drop another atomic bomb. This 10,000 lb weapon was known as "Fat Man" and promised by its design to be even more destructive than "Little Boy." Fat Man detonated 1,650 ft (500 m) over Nagasaki with the force of 21 thousand tons of TNT at 11:06 am.

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	Name: Fat Man Type: Plutonium fission Weight: 10,000lb (4535 kg) Length: 10 ft, 8 in (3.25 m) Diameter: 5 ft (1.52 m) Explosive Yield: 21,000 tons of TNT

The explosion over Nagasaki was more powerful but the terrain and layout of the city resulted in fewer deaths. Still, 40,000 were killed instantly and 45,000 more would die later from burns and radiation. The previous day Russia had declared war on Japan and launched a huge offensive involving thousands of tanks and self propelled guns.

 

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Nagasaki

Production of Plutonium

Hanford, Washington

 

Delivery of the Atomic Bomb

Fat Man

Two C-54s departed with the Fat Man's initiator and plutonium core.
August 2 three B-29s arrive at Tinian from Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico each carrying a Fat Man high-explosive preassembly.

Composition B (TNT + RDX)
Baratol (Barium nitrate + aluminum powder + TNT + straroxyacetic acid + nitrocellulose)

 

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Fat Man

 

 

The Third Bomb

 

The question often arises: did the United States have a third bomb ready to drop on Japan, following the Little Boy uranium device that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6 and the Fat Man Plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki three days later?

In the Spaatz Papers at the Library of Congress manuscript section, there is much radio traffic generated on Tinian in the second week of August. The U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces wanted the third bomb to be dropped on Tokyo as a wakeup call for the Japanese government, which was stalling on agreeing to the United Nations surrender terms. (That this could have been seriously proposed is an indication of how woefully uninformed USASTAF was about the destructive power of the weapons it had delivered to the Empire.) Back came a message, presumably from Hap Arnold, saying that the decision had already been made that the target would be Sapporo in the northern island of Hokkaido. (I read this material while researching a magazine article in 1995.)

In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May-June 1998, Stanley Goldberg notes that on the morning of August 10, 1945, Robert Bacher of the Environmental Physics Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory was supervising the loading of a plutonium core onto a truck. The core (presumably the casing and other "works" were already on Tinian or en route) was to be flown to San Francisco, thence to Tinian, to finish its journey over the city of Kokura about August 20. Robert Oppenheimer then appeared and told Balcher to stop loading the core. No further shipments were to be made, Oppenheimer said, without an explicit order from President Truman.

(In what seems to me to be a logical leap, Goldberg concludes: "Since Truman could have given such an order at any time between July 24 and August 9, it strongly suggests that the bombing of Nagasaki came as a surprise to him." Goldberg suggests that Major General Leslie Groves alone had directed the bomb's use on Nagasaki, as a bureaucrat anxious to justify the money that had gone into its development, and also as a military man who wanted to hasten the end of the war.)

Al Christman's book, Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and the Creation of the Atomic Bomb (Naval Institute 1998), notes that the operational plan in February 1945 "called for the military use in the summer [of 1945] of Little Boy and one or two Fat Man bombs, followed by more if necessary." In July, following the Trinity test of the plutonium bomb, General Groves remarked: "The war is over as soon as we drop two of these on Japan." The cruiser Indianapolis brought Little Boy to Tinian on July 26; Christman makes no mention of Fat Man. On July 28 and 29, four "Green Hornet" transports flew in from the U.S. with the plutonium pieces for Fat Man and the uranium inserts for Little Boy.

Elsewhere, Christman notes that "Parsons had planned and organized the Tinian assembly facilities to handle a steady stream of bombs [after Little Boy devastated Hiroshima]. The plutonium production facilities at Hanford continued to work at capacity ... everything needed for the second bomb was present at Tinian, and essential materials for a third bomb would soon be on their way." When the B-29 stand-down went into place, Parsons was about to go home, but Groves stopped him "in order to assure complete readiness to assemble and deliver additional atomic bombs in the event that negotiations with the Japanese broke down."

Charles Sweeney published his memoirs as War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission (Avon, 1997). During the party following the successful Hiroshima drop, he recalled that Paul Tibbets took him aside and told him that he was to command the second atomic mission, with Kokura as the primary and Nagasaki as the secondary target. Timing was important, Tibbets said: "It was vital that [the Japanese] believed we had an unlimited supply of atomic bombs and that we would continue to use them. Of course, the truth was that we only had one more bomb on Tinian. Delivery of the third bomb was several weeks away."

Major Sweeney flew one of eight 509th Composite Group B-29s that took part in the war's final mission, the "thousand-plane raid" of August 14-15. Enola Gay and Bock's Car were excused "for obvious reasons," as was The Great Artiste, which because it contained the scientific instruments that would be needed if there were a third atomic mission. The group's two remaining B-29s, he noted, were Spook and Jabett III--and they "were in route to the United States to take delivery of components for more Fat Man bombs."

In an August 2002 interview with Studs Terkel published in the British Guardian newspaper, Paul Tibbetts recalled something similar: "Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said, 'You got another one of those damn things?' I said, 'Yessir.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'Over in Utah.' He said, 'Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.' I said, 'Yessir.' I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."

In Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, Richard Frank says it was General Marshall and General Grove who delayed the transport of the third bomb, sufficient that it couldn't have been deployed until August 21 or thereabouts.

Chuck Hansen's great book U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History doesn't explicitly go into this question, but it does note that at the end of 1945 the U.S. owned a total of two atomic bombs, both Fat Man plutonium bombs. (This design became the standard U.S. nuclear weapon until into the 1950s.) He also notes that the weapons were short-lived, so it is possible that  A) there were more than two bombs in the inventory when the war ended and even that  B) the bombs on hand on December 31 had been assembled after August 15.

"One Hell Of A Big Bang"

 

The Last Raid

Originally published in Air & Space/Smithsonian, August/September 1995.

by Daniel Ford

When word reached the island airfields that a uranium bomb had destroyed Hiroshima, the men in the conventional-bombing squadrons were upset--not by the death of a Japanese city, which after all was the work they did, but by the degree to which the new weapon seemed to diminish the effect of the bombs they carried to "the Empire."

War correspondent Charles J.V. Murphy was visiting Tinian when the Enola Gay returned from her 3,000-mile round trip into the atomic age. At a pre-dawn breakfast the next morning--Tuesday, August 7, 1945--he heard Harry Truman's taped announcement blare across the volcanic-and-coral Pacific island, one of three in the Marianas that had been transformed into monster airfields for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The United States had harnessed "the basic power of the universe," the president said. (Truman himself was shipboard, returning from the conference in Potsdam, Germany, that had settled the terms Japan must meet.) Surrender, Truman warned the Japanese, or face "a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth."

Murphy walked over to the packed-coral hardstand where a B-29 was taking on conventional explosives destined for Toyokawa, a small city near the Japanese capital. "With a wry smile," as Murphy recalled, the young loading officer admitted that he had trouble focusing "on a process which the atomic bomb ... had rendered humdrum and obsolete."

Troubled or not, the bomb-loaders went on with the job. A few hours later, 131 of the long silver planes with even longer wings set out for Toyokawa; 37 others went to mine the Shimonoseki Straits. ("I have listened to intelligence officers briefing pilots on how to approach Japanese cities whose names they could scarcely pronounce," Murphy mused. "In the morning those cities were gone.") On Wednesday, August 8, 412 Superforts voyaged to Yawata, Fukuyama, and Tokyo. On Thursday, 95 bombed an oil refinery at Amagasaki, and Bock's Car dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.

By now, the morale problem was nagging Carl Spaatz, newly arrived in the Marianas to command the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces. (USASTAF itself was new, created that August as an umbrella for the 20th Air Force in the Marianas, the Seventh Fighter Command on Iwo Jima, and the Eighth Air Force just establishing itself on Okinawa.) The newfangled bombs, Spaatz radioed, disturbed the men who had to fly "the prosaic type of operation." Would Henry "Hap" Arnold, the air force chief, please reassure them that their work was still important to the war effort?

Guided by the ferocious genius of Curtis LeMay, the Marianas-based B-29s had "scorched and boiled and baked to death" more than 200,000 Japanese, left millions homeless, and turned their cities into ash heaps. (The words are the general's, used in Mission with LeMay: My Story to describe the first and most terrible of the fire-bombing raids he launched against the Empire.) Aerially laid mines and submarine-launched torpedoes had starved them of raw materials. By August 1945, the Japanese army had a grand total of 13 million gallons of aviation gasoline on the home islands, and most of that was reserved for Ketsu-go, the operation intended to fling 10,000 suicide aircraft at the expected U.S. invasion fleet. Trainers and transports were modified to run on alcohol and pine-root oil. To conserve fuel, combat pilots were ordered to ignore enemy fighters and small formations of bombers--a policy that enabled the Enola Gay and Bock's Car to come and go without challenge. USASTAF, by contrast, had 15 million gallons of aviation gasoline on Tinian alone, an island smaller than Manhattan.

The two enemies had one quality in common though. They were both war machines, tightly wound and immensely difficult to stop. The Japanese soldier believed in fighting to the death, and even if it had been otherwise, the communications systems necessary for a quick surrender had been severely damaged. As late as Thursday evening, August 9, the government ministers in Tokyo, unable to communicate with Hiroshima by telephone or radio, were not entirely convinced that the United States had developed an atomic bomb. Such a bomb was certainly possible, and Hiroshima was certainly in ruins. But the "new type" weapon had exploded at 8:15 a.m.; perhaps it had caused breakfast cooking fires to ignite thousands of homes, causing a holocaust like the one that destroyed Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake. As for Nagasaki, they only knew that it had suffered a "severe attack of Hiroshima type," according to a bulletin handed to them that afternoon.

The ministers argued until midnight, then took the unprecedented step of asking the emperor, who was considered to be a god, for guidance. In a bomb shelter 100 feet below the Imperial Palace, they bowed their heads and listened to "the Voice of the Crane," whose family had ruled Japan for 124 generations. In his oblique fashion, Hirohito urged them to "bear the unbearable." The ministers dutifully ratified that advice, and at 7 a.m. on Friday, August 10, sent an equally oblique message to the neutral capitals of Stockholm and Bern: "The Japanese Government is ready to accept the terms enumerated in the joint declaration" of the Allied leaders at Potsdam, but no change could be permitted in "the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler."

On Guam, the largest of the Marianas islands and the first to be bulldozed into an airfield, Spaatz heard the news in the Quonset hut that served as his war room. Since B-29s were already loading for another voyage to the Empire, he hastily teletyped Henry Arnold's deputy, Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, who told him "to carry on with scheduled mission tonight."

Instead, Spaatz canceled the raid. Though citing unfavorable weather, Spaatz, an intelligent man, probably didn't want to risk sending bombers he might have to recall or, worse, be unable to recall in the face of a presidential order.

The New York Times featured the stand-down on its front page: "JAPAN OFFERS TO SURRENDER; B-29's, NAVY HALT ATTACKS." This posed a dilemma: If Spaatz resumed the bombing, the headline writers would conclude that negotiations had collapsed. The stand-down was therefore formalized. "All strategic air operations of USASTAF will cease at once," radioed a somewhat annoyed Arnold, "and any missions which may now be in the air en route to targets will be recalled."

As for the diplomatic response, it was delayed by hardliners in the United States, Australia, and especially the Soviet Union; the latter had just declared war on Japan and was sending armored divisions racing through Manchuria and Korea at the rate of 100 miles a day. When the telegram did go out, it conceded nothing: "the Emperor [will] be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers." Worse, the telegram seemed to imply that the god would have to stand for election, a notion even more astonishing than expecting him to take orders from a foreign general.

The ministers spent Sunday, August 12, agonizing over this latest humiliation. Meanwhile, other Japanese exacted a blood price for the raids that had destroyed their cities. In Fukuoka, a truck drove up to Army headquarters, collected B-29 crewmen who had been shot down over Japan, and drove them to a lonely field, where, one by one, a lieutenant chopped off their heads with his sword.

They were not the first to die in this manner. The Japanese had beheaded dozens of airmen and used others for bayonet and archery practice. They'd locked them in animal cages and tied them to posts for passersby to torment. They'd burned them alive, buried them alive, dissected them alive, and cooked and eaten their body parts. Such atrocities were not confined to the war's end, nor even to military prisoners. From the very first day of its 14-year war, wherever it went on the continent of Asia or in the Pacific, Imperial Japan had worked and starved and tortured its captives to death.

"We discussed it a lot," recalled Warren Morris, then a B-29 pilot in the 313th Wing on Tinian. "We wondered whether to bail out or not, because the word we had was that they were executing our fliers.... Oh, we talked about that. We knew that they were killing prisoners." Morris was 21 years old, just off the farm in Eldorado, Kansas.

President Truman spent that Sunday in his office, waiting for word from Tokyo, while crowds danced in Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, and along the Champs-Elysees. A more solemn crowd gathered outside the White House in Lafayette Park, mostly enlisted men and women in summer uniforms.

At the War Department, victory seemed so near that the generals became concerned about who would get the credit. There was the usual rivalry between Army and Navy, but in addition, Arnold wanted to justify the creation of an independent air force, answerable only to him and the president, and Lauris Norstad was particularly keen on getting that message through. "The surrender of Japan comes after the severest and most concentrated bombing campaign in history," he lectured Spaatz, who was drafting a press release. "It would be inconsistent with AAF dignity and restraint to make these statements boldly and brazenly." Still, the facts could be "woven into the piece so that no reader can fail to draw the ... inference that air power was the outstanding factor in our victory."

Though an Allied victory had come to appear increasingly inevitable, Spaatz' cable book for August suggests otherwise. It is chockablock with plans to rush 720 B-29s to Okinawa, along with British and Canadian Lancasters; to put wing racks on the Superfort so it could carry 22,000-pound "Tall Boy" bombs; to improve its performance and step up its production; and to bring in new air crews on a schedule extending to March 1946. These messages are mixed with pleas for transport aircraft to fly a U.S. occupation army to Japan. And all the while, the generals argued over which city to destroy with the next atomic bomb. Spaatz nominated Tokyo for the "psychological effect on the government officials," while the War Department favored Sapporo.

This was not the White Queen, believing six impossible things before breakfast; it was just the bureaucratic looking-glass, reflecting all possible outcomes. Indeed, Carl Spaatz had been installed over Curtis LeMay largely because of his administrative talents, more useful now than combat genius.

The USASTAF B-29 stand-down lasted through Monday, August 13. But even before it had ended, Navy aircraft and Army tactical bombers were on the prowl. And in Spaatz' war room on Guam, planners were at work in rumpled khakis, studying a wall-size map of the Empire and laying out what would be the last strategic air raid of World War II. When no word came from Japan agreeing to the Allies' demands, the raid was set in motion.

This was to be a "maximum effort" that would deploy every airworthy B-29 in the Marianas, and such a large mission raised a long list of concerns. The planners pondered the weather forecast and the lack of targets still intact enough to bomb. They worried about timing the launch of so many aircraft, about providing them with reliable radar images, about avoiding collisions over the target, and about bringing them home after 15 hours in the air. Out and back, each crew would be traveling a distance equal to that between New York and London.

In the end, the planners chose eight primary and secondary targets, along with some last-resort targets to give every formation at least one objective it could find by radar alone. Then they went to work with their slide rules. Depending on the likely anti-aircraft fire, a formation might be told to bomb as low as 10,000 feet or as high as 20,000 feet. Depending on whether its task was to burn a city or demolish a factory, it might carry incendiaries or explosives--and if the latter, the bombs could be anywhere from 100 to 2,000 pounds. The fuse might be the kind that produces an instantaneous explosion, so as to riddle pipes and storage tanks at an oil refinery, or a delayed explosion so the bomb would go off in the second story of a three-story building.

Lastly, each B-29 was given a fuel ration depending on its bomb load, distance to target, and place in the formation--anywhere from 6,300 to 7,000 gallons of gasoline. (Not every pilot agreed with these calculations, of course. "To hell with that!" George Bertagnoli, 26, of the 313th would tell his engineer. "Give me as much gasoline as you can. I don't want to come back here in the soup and have to circle and run out of gas.")

When historians mention the last raid of World War II, they treat it as an abomination, like the beheadings in the field outside Fukuoka. The Japanese murdered prisoners; the Americans destroyed cities. In War Without Mercy John Dower argues that Arnold "was desperately attempting to arrange 'as big a finale as possible' to end the war."

Arnold wanted to put 1,000 strategic bombers over Japan, as he had often done over Germany. He even authorized Spaatz to hurry the Eighth Air Force into combat, adding perhaps 200 Okinawa-based B-29s to the 800 available in the Marianas. ("Thank God," Spaatz replied.) Nevertheless, the image I get from the cable books, diaries, and mission reports is not one of bloodlust but of a machine gearing up for one final revolution, as it had revolved so often since the Marianas-based B-29s first bombed Tokyo in November 1944. In the bland language of the Tactical Mission Report: "At the time these missions were planned, peace negotiations were under way with Japan. The Commanding General gave orders for all Wings to be prepared to dispatch maximum effort forces on minimum time notice. Because it appeared that negotiations were being delayed by the enemy, these missions were ordered for 14-15 August."

In Tokyo, the government ministers had wasted Sunday, August 12, in argument; now Monday was following it. The civilians were ready to quit on any terms, but three military men--General Korechika Anami, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Admiral Soemu Toyoda--wanted to fight on, believing they could make a U.S. invasion of Japan so bloody that the Americans would have to soften their terms. As Monday night wore on, Anami even considered joining a plot to seize the Imperial Palace, to save the emperor from himself.

At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, August 14, the first airplane of the 313th Wing taxied onto Tinian's North Field. (I use Tokyo time throughout. It was 5 a.m. in the Marianas; in Washington, the staff officers were still sweltering through the previous afternoon.) The pilot ran his four 2,200-horsepower Wright engines to the red line, then released the brakes. The Superfort rolled along the asphalt for a mile and a half--picking up speed, lifting off, and settling down several times--before finally struggling into the air.

Empty, the Superfort weighed 37 tons, to which had been added 20 tons of gasoline, seven tons of bombs, and three tons of "miscellaneous weight," which included 11 young Americans with flak vests and steel helmets. The B-29 was desperately underpowered for its burden, and the pilot let it skim the blue-black Pacific while the engineer attempted to lessen drag by closing the cowl flaps with a haste never imagined by the designers at Wright, a move that carried the risk of overheating the engine. ("Let the son of a bitch burn!" George Bertagnoli once yelled when an engine burst into flame. Sweet Sue couldn't climb or return on three engines, but if the crew kept the flaming engine at full power, the fire might blow out. It did, and they flew the mission.)

Other airplanes followed at 40-second intervals for more than an hour, using the two runways alternately while a molten orange sun rose over the Pacific. "As one would leave, engines groaning under the heavy load, a tornado of coral dust whirled wildly over the runway," Charlie Murphy wrote in Fortune after the war. "Then as the commotion subsided, the tall stately tail of another B-29 would come gliding through the gray obscurity, like the dorsal fin of a huge fish, while on the far side of the field, on the taxiway leading to the head of the runway, other tails moved into position."

The formation was a long, loose line, with the bombers in front flying slower than those in the rear, allowing the stragglers to catch up and "thicken the stream" as they moved north. In most cockpits, the commander turned on the autopilot and the crew settled back to talk, eat, read, or write letters. "That was a millionaire's airplane," Bertagnoli said of Sweet Sue, bound for Iwakuni in western Honshu. "It was quiet, and you sat in a big chair, and it was totally comfortable."

So ordinary had these missions become that the press release had already left the mimeograph machine. At 7 a.m., Spaatz telephoned Norstad in Washington and read from communiqué number 11: "More than 800 Marianas-based B-29 Superfortresses dropped 5,900 tons of demolition and incendiary bombs on Japan on 14 August and in the early hours of 15 August." He named the primary targets, adding that "173 fighter airplanes [7th Fighter Command] from Iwo Jima escorted the bombers over Osaka, and struck airfields in the Nagoya area."

Norstad saw a way to improve the language. It was true that Arnold hadn't succeeded in mounting a 1,000-bomber raid (the 200 Okinawa-based B-29s didn't participate), but he had succeeded in launching more than 1,000 aircraft. So Norstad suggested that Spaatz start the communiqué to the effect that "more than 1,000 aircraft of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces operated against Japan in the last 24 hours."

"Good idea and will change," Spaatz replied.

At mid-morning, the first B-29 passed Iwo Jima. The low hump of Mt. Suribachi was a welcome beacon to the crew: outbound, their last sight of friendly territory; returning, their first chance to make an emergency landing. In Tokyo, the government ministers were again appealing to the emperor in what would be the first full-blown Imperial conference since the one that in September 1941 had authorized attacks on Hawaii, the Philippines, Malaya, Java, and Borneo. Without time to change to formal dress, some borrowed neckties for the event, and others had to attend in the high-necked kokuminfuki fatigues worn by civilians during the war. Perhaps to spare them embarrassment, Hirohito himself wore an army uniform. Following custom, the arguments on both sides were carefully laid out, with the diehards pleading for a chance to fight on.

Five hundred miles to the west, the 313th Wing made landfall at 11:31 a.m. Twenty minutes later, through gaps in the cumulus clouds, the crews were rewarded with a perfect view of the railroad yards at Iwakuni. "It was kind of a minor target," recalled pilot Warren Morris, then 21 and on his 34th voyage to the Empire. "We usually had bigger targets than that."

The wind was a scant 16 knots, and the only flak "two inaccurate, heavy bursts over the target." Of 115 Superforts setting out from Tinian, 108 actually released their bombs over Iwakuni, in clusters looking rather like confetti but weighing 776 tons.

In the Imperial bomb shelter, the ministers groaned and wept as the emperor again told them to "bear the unbearable." Himself sobbing, Hirohito volunteered to do what had never been done before: He would go on the radio to announce the surrender in his own voice, which no one outside the court and government had ever heard. When the emperor left the hot, mosquito-ridden shelter, some ministers were so stricken that they dropped to their knees.

After making his breakaway turn from Iwakuni, Morris told his navigator to plot the heading for Hiroshima, 25 miles northeast. The young pilot wanted to see the desolation for himself. "So he did," Morris said, "and we dropped down to about 3,000 feet and flew all around Hiroshima and [that part of] Japan. I didn't think I'd ever be back, and I never have." (Of all the pilots I talked to, Morris was the only one who actually remembered the August 14 mission. It was that routine, and it fell among some of the most momentous events of the war.)

Meanwhile, mine-layers from the 313th splashed their silent cargo into the Shimonoseki Straits and other watery chokepoints. The 58th Wing rained 982 tons of explosives on Hikari Naval Arsenal in western Honshu, and the 73rd Wing--escorted by fighters from Iwo Jima and flying high to avoid flak--salvoes one-ton bombs onto Osaka Army Arsenal. "Almost all the small machine shops and laboratories in central sections of arsenal were destroyed," concluded the Osaka mission report. "The large assembly type buildings and storage buildings in central and southern sections of plant were severely damaged or destroyed. Many direct hits visible on heavy machine shops at northern edge of arsenal." Nearly 95 percent of the bombs burst within 3,000 feet of the aiming point--something less than pinpoint accuracy--in Japan's second-largest city.

In its heyday, Osaka Army Arsenal had employed 60,000 workers, but with factory relocations, military conscription, and a false alarm that had delayed the commuter trains, only about 5,000 were on the job that noon, assembling cannon, anti-aircraft guns, shells, and suicide submarines for the navy. (The workers included schoolchildren and Korean conscripts, recalled Ishimura Torataro, a welder. Unskilled and using old machinery, they produced generally shoddy materiel.) The Superforts demolished the arsenal and killed about 1,000 people within and without its high circular walls.

As expected, the flak was heavy, damaging 28 Superforts over Osaka. ("The Japanese Army made a brilliant success in hitting these planes," boasted a Japanese war communiqué, while admitting that the bombers had done great damage to the arsenal "and civilian residences.") At 2:30 p.m., the last B-29 closed its yawning bomb bay doors, made a right turn, and took up its course for Iwo Jima.

The world, at this moment, was again swept by a rumor of peace. At 2:49 p.m. a radio operator on Okinawa logged an English-language news flash from the Domei news agency: "An Imperial message accepting the Potsdam proclamation is forthcoming soon." Though under military control like all institutions in Imperial Japan, the news agency had been a generally trustworthy source throughout the war. On Guam, the armed forces radio broadcast the report at 3 p.m., setting off riotous parties among the service personnel not otherwise occupied.

They did not include the B-29 crews that would be flying the three night missions. The first Superfort of the 315th Wing took off at 3:42 p.m., bound for Tsuchizakiminato in northern Honshu. Since they would be bombing individually, they set out in leisurely fashion over the course of four hours. (For a while, the 313th Wing on Tinian had bombers both coming and going. The first B-29 returning from Iwakuni touched down at 6:04 p.m., the crew stubbled, stinking, and weary from 15 hours in the air; 12 minutes later, the first of the night raiders took off.)

In Tokyo, the government ministers labored over the words that would end not just the war but the history of Japan as they knew it. General Anami choked on one phrase: "the war situation grows more unfavorable to us every day." If that were true, he cried, the army communiqués had all been lies, and how could the emperor say such a thing? The words were changed to "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage," perhaps the most forlorn understatement of the war.

Scribes then translated the document into the language and script used at court, so arcane that two hours were needed to brush the characters onto parchment. Not until 10 p.m. did it reach the emperor, who signed it, affixed his seal, and returned it to his ministers to be ratified.

As they understood the matter, the surrender went into effect at 11 p.m., when the last of them--the transportation minister, as it happened--brushed his signature onto the document. They dispatched coded telegrams to Bern and Stockholm but otherwise told no one. (The leak to Domei had been unofficial, by a lower-ranking official afraid that the next atomic bomb would destroy Tokyo and therefore the country's ability to surrender.) More than the bomb, the ministers feared revolt by their own army and navy. Thus it was in the utmost secrecy that the emperor sat down to record his decision for broadcast the next day.

At that moment the night raiders flew past Tokyo: the 73rd Wing bound for Isesaki, the 314th Wing bound for Kumagaya, along with some B-29s from the busy 313th. They carried white-phosphorus bombs and incendiary clusters--bomb-lets filled with magnesium and jellied gasoline. These were to be seeded at the rate of 225 tons to the square mile, the density that Curtis LeMay had found to yield the most destructive fires for the least expenditure. (In this respect, Japan, whose buildings were mostly made of wood, was much less costly than the sturdily built cities of Germany.)

The bombers passed close enough to set off air raid sirens in Tokyo, causing the electric supply to be shut off. The emperor's recording session was put off until midnight. It was still Tuesday morning, August 14, in the United States, and commuters were reading this headline in the New York Times, which was based on the Domei flash: "JAPAN DECIDES TO SURRENDER."

According to the men who wrote the history of the Army Air Forces in World War II, the night raiders reduced 45 percent of Kumagaya to ashes, and 17 percent of Isesaki. The job took a bit more than an hour, with the lead bombardiers using the radar return from the Tonegawa River to locate the cities--towns, really, each with fewer than 50,000 residents--while latecomers simply navigated by the flames.

Japanese accounts say that in Kumagaya 3,600 houses were burned, 234 people were killed, 3,000 injured, and 15,000 left homeless or otherwise bereft. The latter included Ozaki Kei, who to escape the heat jumped into the Tonegawa with her three-year-old daughter strapped to her back. So many burning houses fell into the river, she recalled, that even the water was hot.

The eighth "primary" was the Nippon Oil refinery at Tsuchizakiminato, and the last B-29 did not turn away from this area until 2:21 a.m. Wednesday morning. Its crew brought to 10,000 the number of USASTAF airmen who had flown to the Empire in the last 15 hours. Of those, only one failed to return: a fighter pilot shot down by flak. And the last B-29's bombs brought to 6,000 tons the weight of the explosives dropped in the last raid of World War II--a stupendous total, even by the standards of the war in Europe. Still, their destructive power equaled only half that of the bomb that vaporized Hiroshima.

In Tokyo, rebel officers murdered the commander of the Imperial Guards Division, surrounded the palace, disarmed its police, and seized technicians from the Nippon Broadcasting Company--but not the precious recordings, which were concealed in an office used by a lady-in-waiting to the empress.

In Switzerland, the Japanese envoy delivered the surrender message at 4:10 a.m. Tokyo time. Three hours passed before the Swiss got word to Washington: among other delays, their messenger was stopped by D.C. police for making a U-turn on Connecticut Avenue. In Tokyo, the sun was now rising on Wednesday, August 15, and the radio began periodic announcements that all listeners must stand by for a historic broadcast at noon, when they would hear their emperor's voice for the first time. "This is a most gracious act," the announcer reminded them.

On Guam, the news was logged at 8 a.m.: "You are hereby officially notified of Japanese capitulation." Half of Spaatz' night raiders were still in the air, strung out for 750 miles from Iwo Jima to the Marianas.

At noon, virtually every Japanese on the home islands listened to the emperor's high, metallic voice, broadcast from radios and public address systems. Some reacted violently: Military policeman chopped off the heads of American prisoners in Osaka and Fukuoka, an admiral led 11 navy aircraft in a suicide flight to Okinawa, soldiers tried to kill the prime minister, and perhaps 1,000 officers, including General Anami, cut open their bellies in the ritual of seppuku. But the vast majority only knelt and wept. The war was over, not quite four years after Japan had struck Pearl Harbor, eight years after invading South China, and 14 years after occupying Manchuria--steps on a journey that brought the Empire to such ruin as no other nation has ever suffered.

by Daniel Ford

Originally published in Air & Space/Smithsonian, August/September 1995.

 

 

Epilogue

General Curtis LeMay notified Bomber Command and Gen. Norstad that every Japanese City was severely damaged, that Japan had no supplies, no fuel, no aircraft defense system, and it would be only a matter of time if the firebombing continued before Japan would surrender. He had no voice in the dropping of the bomb. The argument will go on forever, was it really necessary? It should not be forgotten that the word "surrender" was not in the Japanese vocabulary. They were still a fanatical nation, willing to commit suicide before surrender. How many Americans would have been killed had we invaded Japan? Some put the figure at half a million, maybe more. There was a solution to stop the killing and we took it. The Enola Gay, Smithsonian controversy is a prime example of the erratic feelings of many Americans, Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Demonstrations and dissent have increased alarmingly. There is the great possibility that someday we will just "self destruct".

 

 

Winston Churchill's Address To The House Of Commons,

AUGUST 16, 1945

"There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. Six years of total war have convinced most people that, had the Germans or the Japanese discovered this new weapon, they would have used it upon us to complete destruction with utmost alacrity. I am surprised that very worthy people, but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves, should have sacrificed a million Americans and a quarter million British lives in the desperate battles and massacres of an invasion of Japan. Future generations will judge these dire decisions, and I believe if they find themselves dwelling in a happier world from which war has been banished, and where freedom reigns, they will not condemn those who struggle for their benefit amid the horrors and the miseries of this gruesome and ferocious epoch."

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL