The Making of the Atomic Bomb

or puns but his mother's given names, Enola Gay, because she had assured him he would not be killed flying when he fought out with his father his decision to become a pilot. “Through the years,” Tibbets told an interviewer once, “whenever I got in a tight spot in a plane I always remembered her calm assurance. It helped. In getting ready for the big one I rarely thought of what might happen, but when I did, those words of Mom's put an end to it.” He “wrote a note on a shp of paper,” located a sign painter among the service personnel — the man had to be dragged away from a Softball game — and told him to “paint that on the strike ship, nice and big.” Foot-high, squared brushstrokes went on at a 30-degree angle beneath the pilot's window of the bullet-nosed plane, the middle name flush-right below the first.

Lewis, a sturdy, combative two-hundred-pounder, had known for a day or two that Tibbets would pilot the mission, a disappointment, but still considered the special B-29 his own. When he dropped by late in the afternoon to inspect it and found enola gay painted on its fuselage he was furious. “What the hell is that doing on my plane?” one of his crew mates remembers him yelling. He found out that Tibbets had authorized the christening and marched off to confront him. The 509th commander told him coolly, rank having its privileges, that he didn't think the junior officer would mind. Lewis minded, but he could do no more than stow away his resentment for the war stories he would tell.

“By dinnertime on the fifth,” Tibbets narrates, “all [preparations were] completed. The atom bomb was ready, the planes were gassed and checked. Takeoff was set for [2:45] a.m. I tried to nap, but visitors kept me up. [Captain Theodore J.] Dutch [Van Kirk, the Enola Gay's navigator,] swallowed two sleeping tablets, then sat up wide awake all night playing poker.” The weapon waiting in the bomb bay took its toll on nerves.

“Final briefing was at 0000 of August 6,” Ramsey notes — midnight. Tibbets emphasized the power of the bomb, reminded the men to wear the polarized goggles they had been issued, cautioned them to obey orders and follow their protocols. A weather officer predicted moderate winds with clouds over the targets clearing at dawn. Tibbets called forward a Protestant chaplain who delivered a prayer composed for the occasion on the back of an envelope; it asked the Almighty Father “to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven and who carry the battle to our enemies.”

After the midnight briefing the crews ate an early breakfast of ham and eggs and Tibbets' favorite pineapple fritters. Trucks delivered them to their hardstands. At the Enola Gay's hardstand, writes Ramsey, “amid brilliant floodlights, pictures were taken and retaken by still and motion picture photographers (as though for a Hollywood premiere).” A photograph shows ten of the twelve members of the strike plane's crew posed in flight coveralls under the forward fuselage by the nose wheel: boyish Van Kirk in overseas cap with his coveralls unzipped down his chest to expose a white T-shirt; Major Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, a handsome Errol Flynn copy with an Errol Flynn mustache, resting a friendly hand on Van Kirk's shoulder; Tibbets standing at the center of it all easily smiling, belted and trim, his hands in his pockets; at Tibbets' left Robert Lewis, the only crew member wearing a weapon; small, wiry Lieutenant Jacob Beser beside Lewis awkwardly smiling, a Jewish technician from Baltimore added for the flight, responsible for electronic countermeasures to screen the Archie units from Japanese radar. In front of the officers kneel the slimmer, mostly younger enlisted men (though the entire flight crew was young, Tibbets now all of thirty years old): radar operator Sergeant Joseph Stiborik; tail gunner Staff Sergeant Robert Caron, Brooklyn-born, wearing a Dodgers baseball cap; radio operator Private Richard R. Nelson; assistant engineer Sergeant Robert H. Shumard; flight engineer Staff Sergeant Wyatt Duzenbury, thirty-two, a former Michigan tree surgeon who thought the bomb looked like a tree trunk. An eleventh member of the crew, 2nd Lieutenant Morris Jeppson, an ordnance expert, would assist Deke Parsons in arming and monitoring Little Boy. Parsons, the twelfth man, resisted photographing but was flying the mission as weaponeer.

The three weather planes and the Iwo Jima standby had already left. Tibbets ordered Wyatt Duzenbury to start engines at 0227 hours. Pilot and copilot sat side by side just back of the point where the cylindrical fuselage began to curve inward to form the bullet-shaped nose; Ferebee, the bombardier, sat a step down ahead of them within the nose itself, an exposed position but a good view. Almost everything inside the aircraft was painted a dull lime green. “It was just another mission,” Tibbets says, “if you didn't let imagination run away with your wits.” As Dimples Eight Two, the Enola Gay's unlikely designation that day, he reconstructs his dialogue with the Tinian control tower:

I forgot the atom bomb and concentrated on the cockpit check.

I called the tower. “Dimples Eight Two to North Tinian Tower. Taxi-out and take-off instructions.”

“Dimples Eight Two from North Tinian Tower. Take off to the east on Runway A for Able.”

At the end of the runway, another call to the tower and a quick response: “Dimples Eight Two cleared for take-off.”

Bob Lewis called off the time. Fifteen seconds to go. Ten seconds. Five seconds. Get ready.

At that moment the Enola Gay weighed 65 tons. It carried 7,000 gallons of fuel and a four-ton bomb. It was 15,000 pounds overweight. Confident the aircraft was maintained too well to falter, Tibbets decided to use as much of the two-mile runway as he needed to build RPM's and manifold pressure before roll-up.

He eased the brakes at 0245, the four fuel-injected Wright Cyclone engines pounding. “The B-29 has lots of torque in take-off,” he notes. “It wants to swerve off the runway to the left. The average mass-production pilot offsets torque by braking his right wheels. It's a rough ride, you lose ten miles an hour and you delay the take-off.” Nothing so crude for Tibbets. “Pilots of the 509th Group were taught to cancel torque by leading in with the left engines, advancing throttles ahead of the right engines. At eighty miles an hour, you get full rudder control, advance the right-hand engines to full power and, in a moment, you're airborne.” Takeoff needed longer than a moment for the Enola Gay's overloaded flight. As the runway disappeared beneath the big bomber Lewis fought the urge to pull back the yoke. At the last possible takeoff point he thought he did. Not he but Tib-bets did and abruptly they were flying, an old dream of men, climbing above a black sea.

Ten minutes later they crossed the northern tip of Saipan on a course northwest by north at 4,700 feet. The air temperature was a balmy 72°. They were flying low not to burn fuel lifting fuel and for the comfort of the two weaponeers, Parsons and Jeppson, who had to enter the unpressurized, unheated bomb bay to finish assembling the bomb.

That work began at 0300. It was demanding in the cramped confines of the loaded bomb bay but not dangerous; there was only minimal risk of explosion. The green plugs that blocked the firing signal and prevented accidental detonation were plugged into the weapon; Parsons confirmed that fact first of all. Next he removed a rear plate; removed an armor plate beneath, exposing the cannon breech; inserted a wrench into the breech plug and rotated the wrench about sixteen times to unscrew the plug; removed it and placed it carefully on a rubber pad. He inserted the four sections of cordite one at a time, red ends to breech. He replaced the breech plug and tightened it home, connected the firing line, reinstalled the two metal plates and with Jeppson's help removed and secured the tools and the catwalk. Little Boy was complete but not yet armed. The charge loading took fifteen minutes. They spent another fifteen minutes checking monitoring circuitry at the panel installed at the weaponeer's position in the forward section. Then, except for monitoring, their work was done until time to arm the bomb.

Robert Lewis kept a journal of the flight. William L. Lawrence, the New York Times science editor attached to the Manhattan Project, had traveled out to Tinian expecting to go along. When he learned to his bitter disappointment that his participation had been deleted he asked Lewis to take notes. The copilot imagined himself writing a letter to his mother and father but appears to have sensed that the world would be looking over his shoulder and styled his entries with regulation Air Force bonhomie. “At forty-five minutes out of our base,” he began self-consciously, “everyone is at work. Colonel Tibbets has been hard at work with the usual tasks that belong to the pilot of a B-29. Captain Van Kirk, navigator, and Sergeant Stiborik, radio operator, are in continuous conversation, as they are shooting bearings on the northern Marianas and making radar wind runs.” No mention of Parsons or Jeppson, oddly enough, though Lewis could have seen the bomb hanging in its bay through the round port below the tunnel opening straight back from his copilot's seat.

The automatic pilot, personified as George, was flying the plane, which Tibbets stationed below 5,000 feet. The commander realized he was tired, Lewis records: “The colonel, better known as ‘the Old Bull,’ shows signs of a tough day. With all he's had to do to get this mission off, he is deserving of a few winks, so I'll have a bite to eat and look after ‘George.’” Rather than sleep Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist