SHOCKWAVE EB

Stephen Walker

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008372552
• eBook ISBN: 9780008372569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read'

At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city's population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare: radiation.

In this riveting account, Stephen Walker follows the stories of real people in the extraordinary weeks leading up to the explosion and in its aftermath. From the atomic engineer who armed the bomb in mid-air to the Japanese doctors treating thousands of burnt bodies on the ground. From the flight crews and scientists to world leaders and civilian victims. With intimate testimony and remarkable stories, this is the startling narrative behind the dawn of the atomic age.

ACT III

DELIVERY

THE FINAL HOURS
AUGUST 4–6, 1945

The whole mission was perfect, it was a picture-perfect mission. You couldn’t have wanted a better mission.

DUTCH VAN KIRK, navigator of the Enola Gay,
interviewed by the author, May 2004

I knew what the Japs were in for, but I felt no particular emotion about it.

CAPTAIN DEAK PARSONS, Enola Gay’s weaponeer,
interviewed immediately after the attack, August 6, 1945

SEVENTEEN

Saturday, August 4, 4 P.M.
Operations Briefing Room, 509th Compound, Tinian Island

COLONEL PAUL TIBBETS mounted the platform and turned to face the eighty-odd men in the room. Their hushed murmurs instantly died to silence. They stared back at him expectantly. Behind him were two large blackboards. Both of them were draped in cloths. To one side was a portable movie screen. A projector stood on a table opposite. All the windows were curtained off, cutting off the bright afternoon sunshine outside. The silence hung thick and heavy in the room. Everybody’s attention was fixed on their commander. Then he spoke. “The moment,” he said, “has arrived. This is what we have all been working towards. Very recently the weapon we are about to deliver was successfully tested in the States. We have received orders to drop it on the enemy.”

Nobody breathed a sound. The tension in the room was electric. For almost eleven months these men had been training for this moment. Since that first mission on July 20, two weeks ago, they had carried their pumpkin bombs three further times to Japan. Over the past couple of days the strain had been building to breaking point. All kinds of rumors were shooting around every corner of the base. By lunchtime they had reached fever pitch. Then, out of nowhere, the call had come for this special 1600 hours briefing. Seven crews had been summoned. One of them was Bob Caron and the men from Victor 82. They had only just finished flying a check ride with the colonel that afternoon. That was an unusual event in itself. Normally Bob Lewis skippered their ship, but today he sat in the copilot’s seat. Tibbets had flown them up to Rota Island. At Rota they had dropped a practice bomb, slammed into one of those jawclenching sixty-degree banked turns, and returned to Tinian. Tibbets had taxied Victor 82 straight up to one of the fenced-off bomb-loading pits—again, very unusual. Caron was saying nothing, but it was obvious something big was up. Then he arrived at this briefing where the security was tighter than he had ever seen. Armed MPs stood out in the hot sun, rigorously checking and rechecking every man’s pass. Inside, the room was filled with all kinds of strange faces. There were navy personnel, there was a high-ranking general, there was a British flyer and a bunch of those “longhair” scientists who always kept to themselves. And of course there were those two big blackboards with the cloths hanging over them.

Tibbets motioned to two of his intelligence officers, Hazen Payette and Joseph Buscher. Quickly they drew the cloths off the blackboards to reveal the maps of three cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki. These, Tibbets said, were their targets. In order of priority: Hiroshima was the primary, Kokura the first alternate, Nagasaki the second alternate. One of these three cities would be hit with the new weapon. For the past three days air force meteorologists had reported typhoons battering southern Japan. The latest forecast predicted a break in the weather by late tomorrow night. The time of the attack had provisionally been set for the morning of August 6, less than forty hours from now.

“A chill went through me,” wrote Abe Spitzer, The Great Artiste’s thirty-five-year-old radio operator and diarist. “The make-believe was over.” Every man in the room strained his eyes on the three city maps pinned to the blackboards. Tibbets continued the briefing. Seven B-29s would fly the mission. Three would act as weather crews. Their job would be to fly one hour in advance of the strike force and radio back conditions over each of the three cities. The weather was critical: this bomb was too valuable and too special to lose by radar bombing through cloud. It had to be dropped visually. The bombardier must be able to see his target. If Hiroshima was overcast, then one of the other two cities would be bombed. If all of them were socked in, the bomb would be disarmed on board, flown all the way home, and landed—an option on which Tibbets did not choose to elaborate. The weather would determine the mission. Hence the three advance crews: Jabit III, skippered by Major John Wilson, would fly to Kokura. Major Ralph Taylor’s Full House would go to Nagasaki. Claude “Buck” Eatherly, the hell-raising, skirt-chasing, poker-playing captain of Straight Flush, would fly to Hiroshima. Eatherly had spent most of last night carousing with his handpicked harem of nurses, but his assistant engineer, Jack Bivans, could see his skipper was devastated. He had long been fantasizing about dropping the bomb himself. Now all he got was this lousy weather-watching deal. Maybe Tibbets was punishing him for that fracas over the emperor’s palace.

Next Tibbets delineated the other crews. Charles McKnight would take Top Secret to Iwo Jima, almost halfway along the route to Japan, and remain there as a spare. The final three B-29s would make up the strike force: George Marquardt in Victor 91—later renamed Necessary Evil—to carry photographic instruments; Chuck Sweeney, Abe Spitzer’s Irish-American cigar-smoking captain in The Great Artiste, to carry scientists and blast-measuring instruments. Tibbets himself would command Bob Caron’s crew in Victor 82. His job would be to drop the bomb.

Tibbets then introduced a tall, soft-spoken, balding naval officer who was sitting near the front. This was Deak Parsons, the ordnance expert who had watched the Trinity blast from the cockpit of a B-29. Groves had nominated him to babysit Little Boy all the way to its Japanese target. Abe Spitzer observed him closely. He noticed Parsons was sweating, although whether it was nerves or the high humidity he could not tell. Parsons came straight to the point. “The bomb you are going to drop,” he said, “is something new in the history of warfare. It is the most destructive weapon ever produced. We think it will knock out everything within a three-mile area.”

“The men,” wrote Tibbets later, “sat there in shocked disbelief.” Parsons elaborated: the size of the blast, he said, was equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. It would require two thousand fully loaded B-29s to deliver the same punch. It was incomprehensible, impossible, “unbelievable,” as Spitzer wrote later that day, “a weird dream conceived by one with too vivid an imagination.” Parsons went on to explain how the weapon had been tested in New Mexico, three weeks ago. Now he was going to show some actual footage of the test. He nodded to the projectionist, who switched on the machine. The film spluttered through the gate, then suddenly caught on a sprocket, jammed, and chewed itself into pieces. So much for modern technology. Parsons would have to improvise.

And he did. While his audience listened in stunned silence, he described exactly what the bomb could do. It could knock a man down at 10,000 yards. It could be heard a hundred miles away. Its light was ten times more brilliant than the sun and ten thousand times hotter than its surface. “I can only say,” he added, “that it is the brightest and hottest thing on this earth since Creation.” It was so bright, so dazzlingly brilliant, that it was essential all crews wear special American Optical Company tinted welder’s goggles, which he now proceeded to demonstrate. The knob on the nose bridge must be adjusted to its highest setting, otherwise the wearer might go blind. He did not tell his audience about the memorandum he had received from two of the Trinity scientists the day after the test. They too had been dazzled by the light, so much so that they argued it should be exploited to make the bomb even more effective. “It is our feeling,” they wrote, “that nobody within a radius of five miles could look directly at the gadget and retain his eyesight.” They recommended that “super-powerful” sirens be dropped at the same time as the bomb so that the populace below would look up, and be instantly blinded. “It is certain,” they concluded, “to have a tremendous morale effect on the troops.” As if being scorched and blasted were not enough. Parsons dismissed the idea.

While the two intelligence officers handed around the goggles, Parsons made his final, telling point. “No one,” he said, “knows what will happen when the bomb is dropped from the air.” He took a piece of chalk and drew a mushroom cloud on the blackboard. The cloud, he said, might look something like this. It should climb rapidly up to 60,000 feet into the sky, right up into the stratosphere. He warned the crews to stay well clear of it. But he did not specify why. He did not explain that the mushroom cloud would be composed of millions of tons of broiling radioactive dust. Not once did he or Tibbets ever mention the words radioactive or nuclear or atomic. Even now, in these last few hours, it was considered too dangerous to reveal the final secret in the chain.

Parsons stepped down from the platform, leaving a numbed silence in the room. An outstanding technocrat, he had performed his part well. Nobody who knew him would have expected any less. But he was not a technocrat only. A few days earlier, just before shipping out for Tinian, he had visited his much younger halfbrother Bob at San Diego’s naval hospital. Bob had been badly wounded in the terrible fighting for Iwo Jima back in March, along with 21,000 other American soldiers. As he was advancing along a sunken road, a Japanese mortar had exploded inches from his head, slamming red-hot shrapnel into his flesh. His jaw was ripped open, and he had lost his right eye. He was only nineteen years old. He had now been in the hospital for four months. Parsons was under appalling pressure with his Manhattan commitments, but he still made time to see his brother. What he saw must have shaken him. The boy was so young. His face was all smashed up. He wore a patch where his eye had been. Parsons was never a man to display outward emotion, but the experience left its own scars. He would remember them, no doubt, when the time came to drop the bomb.

Tibbets closed the briefing. Years afterward, the men sitting on the rows of wooden benches in that clammy, confined room would remember the force behind his final words. He spoke for all of them. He said that everything he or any of them had done up till then was small potatoes compared to what they were about to do. He was proud to be associated with them and proud of what they had achieved. He was personally honored to be taking part in this raid, and he was sure every man there felt as he did. The bomb, he said, would shorten the war by six months and save countless Allied lives. Then the men filed out of the room. Don Albury, copilot on The Great Artiste, never forgot their mood that afternoon. They were quiet, very quiet, quieter than he had ever seen.

LESS THAN HALF a mile from the 509th’s briefing room, in one of the three dust-free, air-conditioned bomb assembly buildings, Little Boy sat waiting on its cradle. At a first glance, it looked exactly like the test bomb Tibbets had dropped into the sea twelve days earlier. It had the same box fin, the same oversized trash can shape, the same dull gunmetal coat. On its left side, crudely painted in white, was the designation L11. To those who knew, the number provided a crucial clue. L11 was not a test unit. It was the “hot” bomb, the active, fully operational atomic weapon that would shortly be dropped on a Japanese city.

Over the past ten days, the Project Alberta scientists had been working at a frantic pace to finish assembling it. Things had been so hectic that at one point Parsons wrote to all personnel warning of the dangers of overcrowding in the assembly buildings. The risk of an accident was very real. Meanwhile, the drop tests continued apace: L1 on July 23 was followed in short order by L2 and L5. The final test, L6, was flown four days ago on July 31. It was a full dress rehearsal. Tibbets led a formation of three B-29s 600 miles up to Iwo Jima, landed, unloaded and reloaded the bomb, flew back to Tinian, and dropped it from 31,000 feet into the sea. The bomb was identical to the real thing except in one respect: it contained no uranium 235. Everything functioned exactly as it was supposed to: fusing, firing mechanisms, ballistics, accuracy, timings. The test worked perfectly. There would be no more rehearsals. The next drop would be for real.

By August 1, the day after Tibbets’s final test, the live unit was fully assembled and ready. While the men of the USS Indianapolis were dying in the Philippine Sea, the uranium 235 projectile they had delivered was carefully installed inside the bomb. The uranium 235 target couriered by Peer de Silva and his two cohorts on the big Douglas transport planes was also installed. The guts of the bomb were now complete: the 6.5-inch smooth bore Type B gun that ran down the bomb’s length, the fusing system, the battery, and the firing lines. The inside of the bomb was polished until it shone like a mirror. One of the last acts was to screw the massive two-and-a-half-ton steel target casing to the gun’s muzzle. This particular casing had already been used four times in firing tests in Los Alamos before being shipped across the Pacific to Tinian. It had survived each test unscathed. It was so tough and unbreakable, the scientists had given it a name. They called it “Old Faithful.” Everybody prayed Old Faithful would perform as efficiently one last time.

Unit L11, the live Little Boy, was now ready. Over those first four days of August, it sat inert in its cool bomb-assembly building, while the air-conditioning unit hummed away and the guards sweated outside under the fierce sun in their machine-gun emplacements overlooking the bluffs and the sea. On August 2, General Farrell cabled Groves in Washington. There is, he wrote, “nothing left undone there or here which is delaying initiation of first Little Boy operation. Waiting only for weather.”

EIGHTEEN

Sunday, August 5, Dawn
Hiroshima City

IN FACT, the weathermen had got it wrong. The typhoons had bypassed Japan entirely, tracking west over the empty Pacific before twisting northward to Korea. While the bomb makers, the scientists, the president, and the aviators waited, all three target cities were basking in calm, sunny skies. Without their realizing it, the meteorologists had granted more than 100,000 people a few extra days of life.

On this Sunday morning, most of them went to work as they did every other day of the week. The authorities had recently earmarked yet another batch of homes for destruction: 2,500 of them, entire city blocks and streets to be cleared away for the fire lanes. Like the student nurse Naoe Takeshima, everyone had witnessed the shower of leaflets that tumbled from the skies, carrying the text of the Potsdam Declaration. At any moment the American bombers could strike. The demolition work had to continue. In this morning’s edition of the Chugoku Shimbun, the mayor, Senkichi Awaya, thanked the citizens “from the bottom of my heart” for their cooperation in reducing great swaths of their own city to rubble. “There are no words,” he said, “to express the depths of my gratitude. I can only say to you: this is for Victory.”

Up in the hills near Itsukaichi, twenty kilometers west of Hiroshima, Taeko Nakamae woke yet again to the sunshine pouring through the windows of her uncle’s farmhouse where she and her family were living as evacuees. Next to her, shivering feverishly in bed, was her twelve-year-old sister, Emiko. For several months Emiko had worked with the rest of her classmates on the demolition teams, dragging down the old wooden houses with their ropes. But over the weekend she had fallen ill, and the village doctor had ordered her to stay at home. It was only two weeks since dysentery had killed her brother Fumio. Perhaps the doctor had decided not to take any chances with Emiko.

Everyone was so tired and sick these days. Even Taeko’s mother was thin and wan with exhaustion. She had never fully recovered since that day in March when the whole family had left their home in Hiroshima to come to this farmhouse up in the hills. Of course it was much safer out here. But something in her spirit had died in that long, slow journey out of the city, with a lifetime’s belongings and her six children piled on the cart, and her husband away in the army, and the locked front door of their home receding behind them. Every day since, she had grown thinner and weaker. Her world was collapsing in on itself. And then her little boy had walked out into the woods one morning and eaten the loquat fruit.

Taeko and Emiko made the best of it. Despite their two-year age difference, they were very close. They were also almost exactly the same height, and they often swapped dresses. They slept together in the same room, and night after night they would whisper to each other under the sheets, telling stories and sharing dreams. Taeko always believed Emiko was cleverer and prettier than she was. She was so delicate, and she studied so hard over her schoolbooks, even though neither of them had any sort of school to go to anymore. Emiko was also more ambitious. She wanted to become a nurse in the army, and in those whispered nighttime conversations she would paint her future tending to the wounded in the great battles against the enemy. Like millions of Japanese schoolchildren, both sisters had an unshakable sense of duty. They saw themselves as soldiers, just like troops on the battlefield, equally dedicated to the fight against the emperor’s enemies. But Emiko’s dedication was perhaps the stronger, and when the doctor saw her sweating and shivering in bed and ordered her not to work, she privately told her sister she would stay at home only until tomorrow. Nothing, not even illness, would stop her from going down to the city then.

In his boardinghouse near the city center, Sunao Tsuboi also woke to the sunshine. Ahead of him was another day in the university’s engineering department, where he worked seven days a week helping to design aeronautical parts. The job was long and there were very few rewards, apart from the fact that he was twenty years old and still alive. That was an increasing rarity these days. Sunao knew it could not last. He had already received his call-up papers. Within the next month he would be in the army. After that his life was statistically over. He had already waved off two of his brothers from Hiroshima’s port in Ujina. Bo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise for Shockwave
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the 2020 Edition
• Introduction
• A Note on Time
• Prologue: Twelve Hours Before Zero
• Act I: Three Weeks Earlier
• Act II: Decision
• Act III: Delivery
• Act IV: Impacty
• Epilogue
• Picture Section
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Permissions
• Also By Stephen Walker
• About the Publisher