It is Atomic Week, a bunch of anniversaries which are passing almost without comment. We ought to remember. Today is the day that the Russians cooked-off their first Hydrogen device in 1953. They didn’t have rockets then that could reach across continents. We used bombers, flown by men.

There are only 34 B-29 Superfortresses left. They made more than 3,000 of them. Only one is in flying condition. You can see it periodically on the air show circuit, operated by the Confederate Air Force, a chartered Texas organization. It is quite a sight. I saw it in Wisconsin a few years back at the big Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in. The aluminum gleamed as it roared by on a low pass in front of a huge crowd. It dropped a simulated atomic bomb. The simulated weapon went off and made a black cloud. It made me blink.

Two other aircraft are being restored to flying status. Three are in storage and twenty-eight are on static display at museums. Three of them are of particular note. Enola Gay is at the Smithsonian. Bock’s Car is at Dayton at the Air Force Museum. The Great Artiste is at Whitman Air Force Base, home of the 509th Bomb Wing that is flying the B-2 Stealth bombers.

In my dreams I see those three airplanes in formation on an endless concrete runway under a rich blue tropical sky. The formation should be approached by a long walk, something to make you understand the awful majesty of these machines. They were crewed by men just eligible to vote, and they made cities vanish in clouds of fire. It is a pity the aircraft will never be reunited, as they once were in the sky over Japan. I was thinking about that, since it is Atomic Week.

There are some activities that are uniquely reserved to the Government. Defense of the State is prime among them, regime survival, if you will in today’s parlance. In the run-up to World War Two, the country’s vast industrial complex began developing many weapons. The idea for an atomic bomb had been talked about in scientific circles for some time, but the actual attempt to make such a weapon originated in 1939. At that time Dr. Albert Einstein persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to provide seed money for technical development. After some preliminary work it seemed that it might just be feasible. After all, Einstein said so. August 13th is the anniversary of the formal commencement of the Manhattan Project in 1942. It was the most titanic project ever undertaken by the U.S. Government, and hence, the most titanic ever attempted by any entity in this world. For openers, It did things like confiscate 20% of the state of Oregon to create the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, though they did not call it that in those days. The whole shooting match is still out there, too. The reservation is a little smaller now, but the National Laboratories that supported it remain scattered all over the country. The Nevada Test site and the deserts of the southwest are still part of the sprawling Government enterprise.

The prime difference between then and now is that the Department of War doesn’t own them. The Department of Energy does. And Government has changed the mission. They too down the Manhattan Project shingle for bomb-making, and now they are running a hundred-year mission of nuclear remediation. Employment isn’t quite as high as it was in the go-go production years, but there still tens of thousands of Government employees on the job.

Now that is Government Work for you. Eternal. I have been to Hanford and to the Test site and seen the bleachers where they used to watch the atomic tests in the open. I’ve seen the foundations of the houses they built to examine the effects of the shock wave, and the strange ominous conical crater of the SEDAN Test, the last above-ground blast conducted there. There is a lot left of our atomic history, if you can get in to see it. The Guard Force is authorized deadly force.

Back in the day, the scientists didn’t know quite how it was going to work out, but under the leadership of pugnacious Gen Leslie Grove (no story of Atomic Week would be complete without his name) they were prepared by late 1943 to tell the Army Air Forces (AAF) to begin preparing for the bomb’s use. Colonel Paul Tibbets, a phlegmatic and decorated pilot from the North African campaign, was tapped to put together a special unit to train to deliver the weapon in the most advanced aircraft ever developed- the B-29. The new aircraft was another arrow being developed for the Nation’s quiver. It was designed in 1940 to replace the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, and flew for the first time on September 21, 1942. It was gigantic; almost a hundred feet long, thirty feet tall at the tail and able to fly at a weight of 134,000 pounds. Four Wright R-3350 engines drove roared the airplane to a maximum speed of 340 knots.

There had never been anything like her in the skies. Sleek. Pressurized. No bulging cockpit or open gun bays. A silver cigar, almost Buck Rogers in design. It was able to fly at 33,000FT, above the flak, serene and long-legged. Perfect for the long distance mission requirements of the Pacific War. Tibbets asked the the engineers if they could get more juice out of the Superfortress if you stripped off the armor plate and defensive weapons. They told him you might get another six or seven thousand feet o service ceiling, making them invulnerable. The only weapons they retained were two remotely operated guns on the tail, just in case a Zero zoomed to altitude, hanging on the prop, and tried to get a shot off.

Enola Gay was Paul Tibbets’ mom. He had her name painted on the nose of the bomber literally the night before the mission and all the flashbulbs. The big Government secret was about to be revealed and there was no need for anonymity. Not now, not at the end of things. Up to them, none of the B-29s had the nose art we remember them by. Tibbets for a painter to brush “ENOLA GAY” in bold black capitals just below the pilot’s window on the port side of aircraft 44-86292. The other crews had names for their airplanes. This mission took seven. Three to fly the weather, one as a backup, one to drop the instruments, one to shoot the photographic record, and one to carry the Bomb. The squadron commander, Major Charles W. Sweeney, accompanied the Enola Gay on the mission, piloting The Great Artiste, specially configured to drop instrumentation devices to measure the effects of the new weapon.

It had only been tested once, at Trinity Flats in New Mexico. This was an ultimate demonstration of Government Work. The scientists were pretty sure that the bomb would not cause a chain reaction that would end the world. The lead scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, quoted Shiva from the Bhagavad Gita after the event. He said “Now I have become the destroyer of Worlds.”

He was guilty of an overstatement. The first bombs could barely take out a city center. But Oppenheimer was a visionary and he was right, of course. He became an opponent of the development of the hydrogen bomb, but that is a different story.

They would have flown the second atomic mission today, but there was a call for a hurry-up second punch against the Home Islands. Something dramatic. And in any-hurry up mission things went wrong. I’ll get to that in a minute.

B-29 number 44-27297 was built by the Martin Corporation at Omaha, Nebraska, at a cost of $639,000. It was accepted by the USAAF on April 19, 1945 and was delivered to the 393rd Bomb Squadron at Wendover Field in Utah. The crews of the 509th Composite Group were engaged in intensive training under intense secrecy. In June the group prepared for overseas movement and flew to Tinian Island in the Marianas Islands. Number 44-27297 was renamed in honor of its pilot, Captain Fred Bock. From Tinian, Bockscar, flew five bombing missions. On four of these, a 10,000 pound bomb loaded with high explosives was dropped. The crews called them “pumpkins” because of their shape and orange color. They were filled with Torpex explosive intended to mimic the aerodynamic characteristics of the actual “fat man” atomic bomb dropped at Nagasaki. There is a dummy of Fat Man out in front of the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha. It is rotund, a cartoon bomb.

The parts of the bombs got to Tinian two ways. Some of the heaviest went on the USS Indianapolis. There were elements of three weapons transported to the atoll. Indy carried the projectile assembly of active and inert parts for the Little Boy, Special tools and scientific instruments and half the available fissionable material in the United States. The Uranium-235, was valued in dollars of the time at $300 million, or all the money in the world. It was flown from Kirkland Air Force base in Albuquerque to San Francisco, where it was loaded on the cruiser at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. Leaving nothing to a single point of failure, a C-54 Transport departed Kirkland Air Force Base on July 26th with the three separate pieces of the Little Boy Target assembly. Two additional C-54’s departed with Fat Man’s initiator and plutonium core for aerial delivery to Tinian. In the inventory forward was complete material for Little Boy and one complete Fat Man, There were enough parts for the casing of a third bomb, another Fat Man, though the fissile material was retained in the United States. Scientific crews based on Tinian assembled the two complete bombs for delivery to their respective targets.

Little Boy was shaped like a conventional bomb, with a long cylindrical body to accommodate the “gun” that brought the atomic material to critical mass. Little Boy was twelve 12 feet long, 28 inches in diameter, weighed 9,000 pounds, and was painted a dull gun metal gray. It used all the U-235 there was, and it would have taken months to make enough for another. Fat Man was of different construction and used the non-naturally occurring element plutonium as the nuclear material. Little Boy was one-of-a-kind. Fat Man was the prototype for all its ugly sisters to come, even the ones that became elegantly slim, designed to penetrate the atmosphere from an intercontinental parabola. Plutonium had to be manufactured from Uranium 238 in giant nuclear reactors in a huge new plant built for the Manhattan Project by the Army Corps of Engineers at Hanford, Washington. By August 1945, Hanford was producing enough for two or three bombs a month. It was the future of bomb-building, and some of the waste pits there remain from the days of frantic activity. The pits bubble slowly, like something primeval. Government workers there call them the peanut butter pits, and everyone hopes they don’t ever get washed down in to the Columbia River. The Reservation features radioactive tumbleweeds.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is where the uranium was enriched for Little Boy is much smaller than Hanford, only 55 square miles. At the height of production, the reservation consumed 20% more power than New York City on a given day. The full flower of the most advanced industrial and intellectual power on earth had resulted in these weapons. Had they been ready, there is no doubt they would have been used on Berlin. There were many scientists on the Project who had relatives in the camps. But the Fuhrer was nearly three months in his grave, and only Tojo and his generals stood between the world and peace. And that meant Operation Olympic, the American invasion of the Home Islands, was going to be the concluding act. The nightmare of the conquest of Okinawa was only six weeks past, and the Congress was inquiring into the conduct of the military commanders.

Okinawa was a bloodbath. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, and more naval guns fired against the shore than any other operation in the Pacific. hirty-four allied ships had been sunk, mostly by kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft damaged. The fleet lost 763 aircraft. In the battle for the island, the rate of combat losses due to combat fatigue- or what we now call post-traumatic shock syndrome- was nearly half of all casualties. There were more than 38,000 Americans wounded, and more than 12,000 killed or missing. More than 100,000 Japanese troops and Okinawan conscripts were killed. Estimates of civilians who died there are estimated to be at least equal to the military casualties. At the end, some Japanese soldiers embraced grenades rather than surrender, and others forced women and children to leap to their deaths with them from the cliffs on the Southern end of the island. The stories of the end of that campaign were still as fresh as the MovieTone newsreels in the theaters back Stateside.

There is no doubt in my mind that the carnage of Okinawa was a critical factor in the decision to use the atom weapons against Japan six weeks later. Enola Gay Launched for Hiroshima in the early hours of the 6th of August. The pre-flight was lit by flashbulbs as Manhattan Project officials sought to document each stage of the evolution. Next to the image of the mushroom cloud itself, there is no more famous picture of the nuclear age than Colonel Tibbets leaning out the pilot’s window over his mother’s maiden name. The three weather aircraft left before him, as did the backup. Then, at two minute intervals, Enola Gay, The Great Artiste and the un-named “Number 91” rolled down the runway in the darkness. The third airplane would later be named Necessary Evil.

Considering the uncertainty involved, the mission went off virtually without a hitch. Navy Captain Deke Parsons armed the bomb in flight. Straight Flush, the advance weather observer at Hiroshima, reported weather over the primary target was 3/10ths cloud cover, fine for visual bombing. The three minute target run was smooth and the weapons released and Tibbets jerked Enola Gay right in a 155 degree turn right after the bomb went away and Sweeney in The Great Artist released three instrumentation packages and jerked 155 degrees to the left. Number 91 was behind and above, there to watch what was going to happen.

It did.

Tibbets recovered on Tinian as scheduled. It was a scene of Bedlam on the airfield. He was presented the Distinguished Service Medal on the spot, and the crew each got a Silver Star.

It is easy to imagine a sort of pregnant pause in the Pacific Theater as the world waited with awed reverence at what had happened, and waited for the Japanese to react. But nothing happened. Conventional bombing went on, submarines patrolled with fish of steel and Navy long-range Privateers continued to shoot up anything they could find moving on the surface. The War was still on and the Japanese junta remained convinced that a climacteric battle would be necessary for the Emperor’s honor. The Manhattan Project Preservation people say the second bomb was used to indicate that we had an endless supply of the new weapon. There were components and fissile material available for a third weapon, but although the casing was on Tinian, the plutonium was still in New Mexico. Weather forced the timeline to be moved up. The original schedule would have had the Fat Man in the loading pit at Tinian on the 11th of August. It was ordered that the mission be conducted on the 9th. Tibbets decided he would not go on the second mission and delegated command authority to Maj. Sweeney, who commanded the 393rd Squadron. He normally flew The Great Artiste, but it was configured to drop the scientific instrument packages. He decided to fly Fred Bock’s airplane, Bock’s Car. Maj. James Hopkins, a pusillanimous little jerk would be flying Big Stink with the photographic observers.

“Hurry-up” can cause problems in any military operation. God knows it has in several operations I have been associated with, and I used to think of myself as fairly reliable. On one operation I forgot about the report that had to go to Higher Authority when we crossed the Line of Death off Libya. We were busy, after all, and it just slipped my mind. Don’t get me wrong and don’t take me as criticizing these young men. Just imagine handing over the most powerful weapon in the history of mankind to a twenty-five year old in command of a plane filled with kids who just made the legal age of drinking. It is an astonishing bit of government business.

Fat Man almost did not make it to its Aug. 9 date. Richard Rhodes, in The Making Of The Atomic Bomb begins with the amazing list of gremlins that plagued the Nagasaki mission. On the night of Aug. 7, a Navy Navy Commander Ashworth and Army technician B. J. O’Keefe discovered to their horror they could not connect a firing unit on Fat Man’s front to a cable threaded through the bomb’s innards to a radar unit on its tail. They found a “female” plug in the firing unit and another “female” plug on the cable. The cable had been threaded through the bomb backward. Disassembling the bomb to reverse the cable would take a day, and they would miss the Aug. 9 deadline. Without telling anyone, the two got a soldering iron and extension cords. They secretly removed the two plugs on the cable of the most expensive weapon ever built. Then they swapped them so everything fit.

On August 9th, almost at launch time, a fuel transfer problem was discovered on Bock’s Car. Six hundred gallons of fuel would not transfer from a reserve tank in the aft fuselage. The crew deplaned and discussed the matter. Then they climbed back in and launched. Sweeney was at the controls Bockscar took off before dawn, en route the primary target of Kokura. The weather observer Up and Atom reported the weather at target was acceptable, but deteriorating. Which brings me to the unlikely savior of Korkura, Lt Colonel James Hopkins.

In Sweeney’s book “War’s End,” he describes the Group Operations Officer as a conspiracy-prone little fascist. There was no question in Sweeney’s mind that Hopkins wanted command of the atomic mission, and if he couldn’t have it, nothing was going to interfere with his execution of the mission as he saw it. In the last mission brief, Tibbets directed that the bomber should not wait any longer than fifteen minutes to rendezvous over Yakushima Island. Hopkins had rudely told Sweeney when he tried to discuss the rendezvous procedures: “Look Major, I know all about that. I know how to make a rendezvous. You don’t have to tell me how to make a rendezvous.” Maybe Hopkins was rankled that he was stuck on the Group staff and not in command himself, with someone junior to him getting the glory. Or maybe he was just a twenty-five year old jerk. Whatever it was, the conversation ended there.

Hopkins was on a roll. As the three planes were taxiing out to take off, he discovered that the scientist (Scientists!) who had been brought on board to record the bomb’s performance had neglected to bring a parachute. Since the mission crew was larger than normal, there were not enough to go around. Hopkins ordered the scientist off the plane, undoubtedly in accordance some Air Corps Instruction. He strikes me as one of those military guys we all know. The problem with the command decision in accordance with The Book was that the scientist was the only one who knew how to operate the advanced camera system. So, by ordering him off, Hopkins defeated the entire purpose of his mission, which was to take pictures.

Sweeney launched first, way heavy, overweight. If he lost it, it would not be the first B-29 to crash at the end of the Tinian’s active runway. But Bock’s Car lurched successfully into the night sky, followed by The Great Artiste. Hopkins followed, but blew the rendezvous. To this day no one knows where he was. Wrong altitude maybe, big sky, lot of islands and many clouds. I’m sure Hopkins thought he was right and Sweeney and Bock were the ones who were lost. But they joined up right away. They waited far beyond the fifteen minutes they were directed. Finally, as fuel began to loom as a critical factor. At forty minutes, Sweeney made the command decision to press on to Kokura. In the half hour they had circled the weather had closed down at the target. There would be no visual bombing of Kokura on this day, and the city was saved. And Nagasaki was doomed.

Hopkins was hopelessly lost .He broke radio silence, calling Tinian to ask “Has Sweeney aborted?” This predictably led the Group to believe that Sweeney indeed had aborted. As a result, the Dumbo and Superdumbo rescue aircraft and ships were released from their stations on the path back to the atoll. Hopkins had problems with his radio discipline, starting to panic that he might miss the event. While Bock’s Car was over Kukora looking for a hole in the clouds Hopkins called out on the radio, “Where are you, Chuck?” The nature of radio being what it is, of course the Japanese could hear it, too.

Sweeney ignored him. After circling the for some time over Kokura, Sweeney realized he had to go for the alternate target and made a course for Nagasaki ninety-five miles to the south on the island of Kyushu. Laggin’ Dragon reported heavy clouds at the target but some breaks. That is what Sweeney found, and through a break, was able to drop the bomb. Fred Bock dropped the instrumentation packages and the aircraft peeling left and right in a desperate maneuver to put distance between themselves and the three shock-waves that would overtake them, pummeling the airplanes like great fists.

The news of the second atomic bomb in the New York Times on August 9th had this text after the headline:

“A second atomic bomb had been dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki, and that crew members reported “good results.” The second use of the new and terrifying secret weapon which wiped out more than 60 percent of the city of Hiroshima and, according to the Japanese radio, killed nearly every resident of that town, occurred at noon today, Japanese time. The target today was an important industrial and shipping area with a population of about 258,000. “

Radio Tokyo said “The destructive power of these bomb is indescribable and the cruel sight resulting from the attack is so impressive that one cannot distinguish between men and women killed by the fire. The corpses are too numerous to be counted.”

The Tokyo announcer used the French phrase “villes demilitarises,” or “open towns,” to describe the target cities, making a case immediately that the Americans had committed crimes against humanity.

Fumiko Miura was a 16 year old girl who was working at the Army depot Tokyo denied existed when the bomb fell. She later wrote about the strike in her book Pages from the Seasons:

“At about 11 o’clock, I thought I heard the throbs of a B-29 circling over the two-story army headquarters building. I wondered why an American bomber was flying around above us when we had been given the all-clear. There was no noise of anti-aircraft fire. We were working in our shirt sleeves; and all the windows and doors were wide open because it was so stiflingly hot and humid in our two-story building.

At that moment, a horrible flash, thousands of times as powerful as lightning, hit me. I felt that it almost rooted out my eyes. Thinking that a huge bomb had exploded above our building, I jumped up from my seat and was hit by a tremendous wind, which smashed down windows, doors, ceilings and walls, and shook the whole building. I remember trying to run for the stairs before being knocked to the floor and losing consciousness. It was a hot blast, carrying splinters of glass and concrete debris…I was nearly a (mile away)…”

Bock’s Car and The Great Artiste, now low on fuel, cannot make it all the way to Tinian. They headed for Okinawa with the real possibility they are going to ditch. Thanks to the radio call by Hopkins, there is no air/sea rescue. Sweeney sweated bullets about the six hundred pounds of gas stuck in the aft of his airplane that he cannot use. Finally, engines leaned back as far as they will go, Okinawa came in sight. But the field did not expect them and failed to answer a call for emergency landing. There are other planes landing on the only active runway. Finally, Sweeney ordered flares to be fired and Bock’s Car heads in. They landed at 150 MPH, thirty miles faster than the normal 120 MPH. His number 2 engine ran out of fuel as they rolled down the runway. Just past lunchtime all three mission aircraft are on deck at Okinawa. As it turned out, Big Stink made its way to Nagasaki and arrived in time to take photographs. And Hopkins didn’t get court marshaled, not that I know of. I don’t know if he had a career in the real Air Force after the war.

Sweeney kept his peace about the missions for nearly fifty years out of deference to Colonel Tibbets. Then he wrote his book. He was the only guy who went on both atomic strikes, and is correctly advertised as the commander of the last nuclear mission. He got our of the Air Force after the war but stayed in the Air Guard and made Major General. Meanwhile, Colonel Tibbits made Brigadier General in the new Air Force as a tribute to his efforts, but he advanced no further. He is still alive, and he has his own web site. ON the merchandise page you can buy a realistic model of the Little Boy bomb, with a plaque signed by the General.

General Tibbets had a burst of notoriety when the Smithsonian tried to stage one of those commemorative exhibits on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic missions. They were prepared to have the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay as a centerpiece, and interpretive text that tried to be even-handed about the past. Like maybe the Japanese warmongers had a point, and that there were excesses on both sides. The Museum should have waited for another fifty years before they tried that approach. There were too many veterans still alive, Sweeney and Tibbets among them.

Tibbets was outraged. He wrote: “Those of us who gained that victory have nothing to be ashamed of neither do we offer any apology. Some suffered, some died. The million or so of us remaining will die believing that we made the world a better place as a result of our efforts to secure peace that has held for almost 50 years. Many of us believe peace will prevail through the strength and resolve of the United States of America.”

The Smithsonian wound up firing the guy who approved the exhibit, but the hard feelings remain. I think they should just let the airplanes and the pictures speak for themselves. Sweeney toured Nagasaki after the war ended and was convinced what he had done was right. When I was stationed in Japan there was a controversy about a t-shirt that was sold in the Philippines that said “Made in USA, Tested in Japan” with a little mushroom cloud on it. The Command banned them as insensitive and there was muttering about free speech and the Constitution. We visited Nagasaki in 1979 and I remember a very solemn van-load of fighter pilots as we drove away. The mater of the offending shirt did not come up again. Sometimes I think the past does just fine shifting for itself.

Postrscript

After Japan surrendered, Tibbets’ 509th Group and Sweeney’s 393rd Bomb Squadron was reassigned to Roswell Field, New Mexico. Because of its expertise with the atomic bombs, the unit became the core organization for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) when it was created on March 21, 1946. It is still in business, still doing government work. Paul Tibbets’ grandson flies the B-2 bomber for the 509th.

In error, The Great Artiste was named in some official reports as the Superfort that dropped the atomic bomb at Nagasaki. This mistake was discovered when preparations were being made to preserve the aircraft for later museum display. When the discrepancy was found, it was Bockscar that was retired in September 1946 to the desert storage facility at Davis-Monthan field near Tucson, Arizona. It stayed there until September 1961 when it made one more flight, to Wright-Patterson AFB, to become part of the collection of display aircraft at the U.S. Air Force Museum.

I talked to an old fighter pilot the other day. He said he would like to see it brought to Washington and have it displayed with the Enola Gay. I told him that if they grabbed The Great Artiste they would have the atomic hat trick.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra