crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. “A chemist's nightmare,” the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then “a physicist's nightmare.” “Not exactly,” Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together:
[Tibbets] stayed… a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else, and just as the last of the Old Man was disappearing, I sort of tugged at his foot, which was still showing. He came sliding back in a hurry, thinking maybe something was wrong. “What's the matter?”
I looked at him and said, “Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?”
This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, “That's about it.”
Caron's third try, which he styles “a lucky guess,” apparently decided Tibbets to complete the crew's briefing; back in his seat he switched on the interphone, called “Attention!” and remembers saying something like “Well, boys, here's the last piece of the puzzle.” They carried an atomic bomb, he told them, the first to be dropped from an airplane. They were not physicists; they understood at least that the weapon was different from any other ever used in war.
Lewis took control from George to weave his way through a mass of towering cumuli, clouds black in the darkness that swept aside to reveal a sky shot with stars. “At 4:30,” he jotted, “we saw signs of a late moon in the east. I think everyone will feel relieved when we have left our bomb with the Japs and get halfway home. Or, better still, all the way home.” Ferebee in the nose was quiet; Lewis suspected he was thinking of home, “in the midwest part of old U.S.A.” The bombardier was in fact from Mocksville, North Carolina, close enough to the Midwest for a native of New York. Dawn lightening a little past 0500 cheered them; “it looks at this time,” Lewis wrote coming out of the clouds, “that we will have clear sailing for a long spell.”
At 0552 they approached Iwo Jima and Tibbets began climbing to 9,-300 feet to rendezvous with the observation and photography planes. The
“After leaving Iwo we began to pick up some low stratus,” Lewis resumes his narrative, “and before long we were flying on top of an under-cast. At 07:10 the undercast began to break up a little bit. Outside of a high thin cirrus and the low stuff it's a very beautiful day. We are now about two hours from Bombs Away.” They flew into history through a middle world, suspended between sky and sea, drinking coffee and eating ham sandwiches, engines droning, the smell of hot electronics in the air.
At 0730 Parsons visited the bomb bay for the last time to arm Little Boy, exchanging its green plugs for red and activating its internal batteries. Tibbets was about to begin the 45-minute climb to altitude. Jeppson worked his console. Parsons told Tibbets that Little Boy was “final.” Lewis overheard:
The bomb was now independent of the plane. It was a peculiar sensation. I had a feeling the bomb had a life of its own now that had nothing to do with us. I wished it were over and we were at this same position on the way back to Tinian.
“Well, folks, it won't be long now,” the copilot added as Tibbets increased power to climb.
The weather plane at Hiroshima reported in at 0815 (0715 Hiroshima time). It found two-tenths cloud cover lower and middle and two-tenths at 15,000 feet. The other two target weather reports followed. “Our primary is the best target,” Lewis wrote enthusiastically, “so, with everything going well so far, we will make a bomb run on Hiroshima.” “It's Hiroshima,” Tibbets announced to the crew.
They leveled at 31,000 feet at 0840. They had pressurized the aircraft and heated it against an outside temperature of –10° F. Ten minutes later they achieved landfall over Shikoku, the smaller home island east of Hiroshima, a city which looks southeastward from the coast of Honshu into the Inland Sea. “As we are approaching our target, Ferebee, Van Kirk and Stiborik are coming into their own, while the colonel and I are standing by and giving the boys what they need.” Correcting course, Lewis means, aligning the plane. He got excited then or busy: “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.” But bombing the target was the main event.
The crew pulled on heavy flak suits, cumbersome protection the pilots disdained. No Japanese fighters came up to meet them, nor were they bothered by flak.
The two escort planes dropped back to give the
They carried no maps. They had studied aerial photographs and knew the target city well. It was distinctive in any case, sited on a delta divided by the channels of seven distributaries. “Twelve miles from the target,” Tibbets remembers, “Ferebee called, ‘I see it!’ He clutched in his bombsight and took control of the plane from me for a visual run. Dutch [Van Kirk] kept giving me radar course corrections. He was working with the radar operator… I couldn't raise them on the interphone to tell them Ferebee had the plane.” The bombardier flew the plane through his bombsight, the knurled knobs he adjusted instructing the automatic pilot to make minor corrections in course. They crossed the Inland Sea on a heading only five degrees south of due west. Van Kirk noticed eight large ships south of them in Hiroshima harbor. The
Above a fork in the Ota River in central Hiroshima a T-shaped bridge spanned the river and connected to the island formed by the two distributaries. The Aioi Bridge, not a war plant surrounded by workers' houses, was Ferebee's chosen aiming point. Second Army headquarters was based nearby. Tibbets had called the bridge the most perfect AP he'd seen in the whole damn war:
Ferebee had the drift well killed but the rate was off a little. He made two slight corrections. A loud “blip” on the radio notified the escort B-29's that the bomb would drop in two minutes. After that, Tom looked up from his bomb-sight and nodded to me; it was going to be okay.
He motioned to the radio operator to give the final warning. A continuous tone signal went out, telling [the escorts]: “In fifteen seconds she goes.”
The distant weather planes also heard the radio signal. So did the spare B-29 parked on Iwo Jima. It alerted Luis Alvarez in the observation plane to prepare to film the oscilloscopes he had installed there; the radio-linked parachute gauges he had designed to measure Little Boy's explosive yield hung in the bomb bay waiting to drop with the bomb and float down toward the city.
Hiroshima unrolled east to west in the cross hairs of Thomas Ferebee's Norden bombsight. The bomb-bay doors were open. Ferebee had flown sixty-three combat missions in Europe before returning to the United States to instruct and then to join the 509th. Before the war he had wanted to be a baseball player and had got as far as spring tryouts with a major-league team. He was twenty-four years old.
“The radio tone ended,” Tibbets says tersely, “the bomb dropped, Ferebee unclutched his sight.” The arming wires pulled out to start Little Boy's clocks. The first combat atomic bomb fell away from the plane, then nosed down. It was inscribed with autographs and messages, some of them obscene. “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the
Four tons lighter, the B-29 jumped. Tibbets dove away:
I threw off the automatic pilot and hauled
I pulled antiglare goggles over my eyes. I couldn't see through them; I was blind. I threw them to the floor.
A bright light filled the plane. The first shock wave hit us.
We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion, but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast. I yelled “Flak!” thinking a heavy gun battery had found us.
The tail gunner had seen the first wave coming, a visible shimmer in the atmosphere, but he didn't know what it was until it hit. When the second wave came, he called out a warning.
We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud… boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.
No one spoke for a moment; then everyone was talking. I remember Lewis pounding my shoulder, saying,
