on Guam on the day he arrived, March 30, and found the commanding officers cooperative. LeMay personally flew Kirkpatrick to Tinian on April 3. The next day, he reported to Groves, he “covered most of the island [and] decided on our sites and the planning forces went to work on layouts.” Though there was no shortage of B-29's, he found that cement and buildings were scarce; “housing and life here is a little rugged for everyone except [general] officers & the Navy. Tents or open barracks.” Kirkpatrick flew back to Guam on April 5 “to dig up some materials some place” and “to get authority for the work I required,” threaded his way through the Air Force and Navy chains of command with his letters of authority from Washington and by the end of the day had seen a telex sent to Saipan “directing them to give me enough material to get the essential things done.” A Navy construction battalion — the SeaBees — would build the buildings and hardstands and dig the pits from which the bombs, too large for ground-level clearance, would be lifted up into the bomb bays of Tibbets' B-29's.
By early June, when Tibbets arrived to inspect the accommodations and confer with LeMay, Kirkpatrick could report that “progress has been very satisfactory and I have the feeling now that we can't miss.” He sat in on an evening meeting between Tibbets and LeMay and heard evidence that the Twentieth Air Force commander did not yet appreciate the power of an atomic bomb:
LeMay does not favor high altitude bombing. Work is not as accurate but, more important, visibility at such altitudes is extremely poor especially during the period June to November. Tibbets advised him that the weapon would destroy a plane using it at an altitude of less than 25,000 feet.
Kirkpatrick demonstrated his progress to Groves with an impressive list: five warehouses, an administration building, roads and parking areas and nine magazines completed; pits completed except for lifts; hardstands for parking the 509th aircraft completed except for asphalt paving; generator buildings and compressor shed completed; one air-conditioned building where the bombs would be assembled to be completed by July 1; two more assembly buildings to be completed by August 1 and August 15. Of the 509th's men more than 1,100 had already staged out by ship “and more [are] coming in every week.”
The first of Tibbets' combat crews arrived June 10, flying themselves to Tinian in advanced, specially modified new B-29's. The early-model aircraft delivered to the group the previous autumn had become obsolete, Tibbets explained to readers of the
Tests showed us that the B-29's we had weren't good enough for atom bombing. They were heavy, older types. Top cylinders were overheating and causing valve failures in the long climb to 30,000 feet at 80 per cent of full power…
I asked for new, light-weight B-29's and fuel-injection systems to replace carburetors.
He got those improvements and more: quick-closing pneumatic bomb doors, fuel flow meters, reversible electric propellers.
The new aircraft had been modified to accommodate the special bombs they would carry and the added crew. The cylindrical tunnel that connected the pressurized forward and waist sections of the plane had to be partly cut away and reworked so that the larger bomb, Fat Man, would fit in the forward bomb bay. Guide rails were installed to prevent the tail assemblies from hanging up during fallout. An extra table, chair, oxygen outlet and interphone station for the weaponeers responsible for monitoring a bomb during flight went in forward of the radio operator's station in the forward section. “The performance of these special B-29's was exceptional,” writes the engineer in charge of their procurement. “They were without doubt the finest B-29's in the theater.” By the end of June, eleven of the new bombers shone on their hardstands in the Pacific sun.
To men used to the blizzards and dust of Wendover, Utah, the 509th's historian claims, Tinian “looked like the Garden of Paradise.” The surrounding blue ocean and the palm groves may have occasioned that vision. Philip Morrison, who came out after Trinity to help assemble Fat Man, saw more reverberantly what the island had become, as he told a committee of U.S. Senators later in 1945:
Tinian is a miracle. Here, 6,000 miles from San Francisco, the United States armed forces have built the largest airport in the world. A great coral ridge was half-leveled to fill a rough plain, and to build six runways, each an excellent 10-lane highway, each almost two miles long. Beside these runways stood in long rows the great silvery airplanes. They were there not by the dozen but by the hundred. From the air this island, smaller than Manhattan, looked like a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers…
And all these gigantic preparations had a grand and terrible outcome. At sunset some day the field would be loud with the roar of motors. Down the great runways would roll the huge planes, seeming to move slowly because of their size, but far outspeeding the occasional racing jeep. One after another each runway would launch its planes. Once every 15 seconds another B-29 would become air-borne. For an hour and a half this would continue with precision and order. The sun would go below the sea, and the last planes could still be seen in the distance, with running lights still on. Often a plane would fail to make the take-off, and go skimming horribly into the sea, or into the beach to burn like a huge torch. We came often to sit on the top of the coral ridge and watch the combat strike of the 313th wing in real awe. Most of the planes would return the next morning, standing in a long single line, like beads on a chain, from just overhead to the horizon. You could see 10 or 12 planes at a time, spaced a couple of miles apart. As fast as the near plane would land, another would appear on the edge of the sky. There were always the same number of planes in sight. The empty field would fill up, and in an hour or two all the planes would have landed.
A resemblance in shape between Tinian and Manhattan had inspired the SeaBees to name the island's roads for New York City streets. The 509th happened to be lodged immediately west of North Field at 125th Street and Eighth Avenue, near Riverside Drive, in Manhattan, the environs of Columbia University where Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard had identified secondary neutrons from fission: the wheel had come full circle.
“The first half of July,” Norman Ramsey writes of 509th activity, “was occupied with establishing and installing all of the technical facilities needed for assembly and test work at Tinian.” In the meantime the group's flight crews practiced navigating to Iwo Jima and back and bombing with standard general-purpose bombs and then with Pumpkins such bypassed islands still nominally in Japanese hands as Rota and Truk.
Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes left suburban Potsdam in an open car to tour ravaged Berlin at about the same time on July 16, 1945, that Groves and Oppenheimer at Trinity were preparing their first report of the tower shot's success. The Potsdam Conference, appropriately coded terminal, was supposed to have begun that afternoon, but Joseph Stalin was late arriving by armored train from Moscow. (He apparently suffered a mild heart attack the previous day.) The Berlin tour gave Truman an opportunity to view at close hand the damage Allied bombing and Red Army shelling had done.
Byrnes was officially Secretary of State now, invested in a sweltering ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on July 3 attended by a crowd of his former House, Senate and Supreme Court colleagues. After Byrnes swore the oath of office Truman had kidded him: “Jimmy, kiss the Bible.” Byrnes complied, then gave as good as he got: passed the Bible to the President and bade him kiss it as well. Truman did so; understanding the byplay between the former Vice President and the man who had missed his turn, the crowd laughed. Four days later the two leaders boarded the cruiser
Though he had arrived before them in Potsdam, Henry Stimson did not accompany the President and his favorite adviser on their tour. The Secretary of War had consulted with Truman the day before Byrnes' swearing-in — proposing to give the Japanese “a warning of what is to come and definite opportunity to capitulate” — and as he was leaving had asked the President plaintively if he had not invited his Secretary of War to attend the forthcoming conference out of solicitude for his health. That was it, Truman had said quickly, and Stimson had replied that he could manage the trip and would like to go, that Truman ought to have advice “from the top civilians in our Department.” The next day, the day of Byrnes' investiture, Truman accorded the elderly statesman permission. But Stimson had traveled separately on the military transport
