than half those deaths; with them, in Germany and the Soviet Union both, had followed general ruination. In the end, out in the Pacific, two planes carrying two bombs had compelled the war's termination. The two atomic bombs, ferocious as minor suns, had given an emperor descended from a god reason to surrender. The war was over. It was hard to imagine that there might ever be another.
Luis Alvarez, an American experimental physicist, a tall, ruddy Californian with ice-blond hair, had understood the message of the bomb on his way back from Hiroshima. Alvarez collected adventures. He liked to be on hand when history was made. After he invented ground-controlled approach radar he had flown a prototype unit to wartime England and personally tested it talking down British bombers returning through fog. At the secret laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico where the atomic bombs were designed and built by hand, he had arranged to observe intensely radioactive test explosions up close in a lead-lined tank. He had invented a new electric detonation system for the Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb that fired its multiple detonators with microsecond simultaneity. As the time to deploy the revolutionary new weapons approached, Alvarez had found a way to justify flying the historic first mission.
The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, was a uranium gun. It used sixty-four kilograms of rare uranium 235, all of that dense, purple-black metal the United States had been able to accumulate up to the end of July 1945. The uranium gun was an extremely conservative design. “We were confident it would work,” Alvarez writes, but it had not been tested. To determine its efficiency, Los Alamos had needed to know its explosive yield. So Alvarez had invented a device for measuring that yield, a set of parachute-deployable pressure gauges to be dropped ahead of the bomb that would radio their readings to a backup plane. Riding in that backup plane, a B-29 named the
On the way back to Tinian, the island in the Marianas from which the atomic bombing had been staged, Alvarez had passed the time writing a letter to keep for his son Walter, then four years old. “This is the first grownup letter I have ever written to you,” the physicist began. He reminded his son that they had inspected a B-29 together in Albuquerque — “probably you will remember climbing thru the tunnel over the bomb bay,” he teased him, “as that really impressed you at the time.” Then Alvarez described “what has happened to aerial warfare” as a result of the
Last week the 20th Air Force… put over the biggest bombing raid in history, with 6,000 tons of bombs (about 3,000 tons of high explosives). Today, the lead plane in our formation dropped a single bomb which probably exploded with the force of 15,000 tons of high explosive. That means that the days of large bombing raids, with several hundred planes, are finished. A single plane disguised as a friendly transport can now wipe out a city…
What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect, by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel's dreams.
A second atomic bomb exploded three days later over Nagasaki reinforced the point and on August 14,1945, the Japanese had surrendered. After the surrender, Robert Serber, the theoretical physicist who had directed the design of the Little Boy bomb, a lean, gentle Philadelphian with a steel-trap mind, had walked the streets of the city his bomb had destroyed. With other scientists and physicians, Serber had been assigned to visit the two atomic- bombed cities to study the damage; from Tokyo his group had caught a ride down Honshu in the personal plane of Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the Antarctic explorer, who wanted to see the destruction at first hand. In Nagasaki and then Hiroshima, Serber and British hydrodynamicist William Penney had collected dented gas cans, concrete rubble, a charred crate, a beaverboard panel burned with the shadow of a window frame. They had talked to returning Australian and Dutch prisoners of war temporarily housed in Nagasaki, living skeletons whom the Japanese had brutally abused and starved. They had visited a Japanese civilian hospital and seen women and children ill with flash burns and radiation sickness, an experience Serber still characterized almost fifty years later as “really harrowing.” It had been easy to leave the United States during wartime. Returning now that the war was over was more complicated. “We had a little trouble in San Francisco,” Serber remembers. “Peacetime practices were now in effect. We had to go through Customs (squashed gas cans, hunks of concrete, charred crate) and Immigration and it turned out that Bill didn't have a passport. However, our other identifications so impressed the immigration official that he decided he could call Bill a British RAF [Royal Air Force] officer and let him in.” To a nation weary of war, the scientists who built the atomic bombs were heroes. Major General Curtis LeMay riddled a different oracle from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A swarthy, burly, taciturn thirty-eight-year-old Ohio-born engineer, LeMay commanded the B-29s that had firebombed Japan to destruction, lifting from the vast coral runways of Guam, Saipan and Tinian like the thousand silver throwing-stars of a warrior god. LeMay still remembered vividly — would remember all his life — how unprepared the United States had been at the beginning of the war. “We came into the war with practically nothing,” he told an interviewer in 1943- To an audience of fellow Ohio State alumni later in 1945 he would insist starkly:
We tottered on the brink of defeat for two years before we could strike back. I know the feeling of our men [besieged] on Bataan and Corregidor because I commanded a bomb group in England in the early days of the war where we found the same situation — 50 bombers against the entire German air forces. There came a time when we could see that at the existing loss rate with no reinforcements the last B-17 would take off to bomb Germany within 30 days. Fortunately, that unhappy day never arrived because the first trickle of help came just in time. It is quite an experience to see the reaction on people who have reconciled themselves to dying, [who] suddenly finish their combat tour and look forward to living again. I hope no American ever has to go through that experience in the future.
In England, LeMay had led his bombardment group's first combat mission. He had invented defensive formations that saved crew lives and bombing techniques that put twice and three times as many bombs on target as less imaginative commanding officers arranged. His byword was preparation. “Hit it right the first time,” he taught his men, “and we won't have to go back.” They called him Iron Ass because he trained them relentlessly, but they also called him “absolutely the best CO in the Army.” From England in 1944 he had moved to India to attempt the thankless task of bombing the Japanese from bases in China supplied by air from India over the Himalayas, the infamous Hump. The B-29, the first intercontinental bomber, was just then coming into production and the leaders of the Air Forces, still a branch of the Army,[1] needed to prove the value of the investment. LeMay's B-29s had to haul their own gasoline over the Hump; it took a half-dozen Hump flights with bomb bays tanked with fuel to support one combat mission over Japan. Japan's weather moved in through north China, which Mao Zedong's army controlled. LeMay traded the Communist guerrilla leader medical supplies for crew rescues and weather reports.
The four-engine B-29, half the size of a football field, with electric control systems and two capacious bomb bays, was supposed to be a high-altitude precision bombing machine, aiming bombs down chimneys with the famous Norden bombsight from thirty thousand feet. But the force assembling in the Marianas while LeMay's crews labored from China had the bad luck to discover the jet stream. From one mission to the next it blew the planes off their targets. The Norden bombsight had not been designed to compensate for such furious drift. Once, when the B-29s were supposed to be bombing an aircraft factory ten miles north of Tokyo, they discovered their bombs had exploded in Tokyo Bay; the Japanese joked that the Americans were trying to drown them. LeMay was called in to fix the problem early in 1945. While he worked on improving precision, he and his staff studied strike photos and flak reports. They realized the Japanese had no night fighters and noticed that Japanese anti-aircraft fire clustered high. “We couldn't find any low-altitude defense,” LeMay concludes.
Daylight precision bombing from low altitude would put LeMay's crews at risk. Advanced radar bombsights
