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By Root 1315 0

clear at the time. The tokkoo weapons terrified the Americans, and the threat of their lavish use in Ketsu-go deeply concerned them. Certainly there was commitment to these weapons on the part of their operators. Yokota Yutaka was a kaiten pilot whose missions were scrubbed because of malfunction or an absence of enemy targets. Ashamed of what he considered his own failure to fulfill his destiny, he was miserable (and disbelieving) when he heard the war had ended. His comrades had died, not him. ‘Tears sprang to my eyes,’ he remembered. ‘I cried bitterly. “I’ll never launch! The war is over...”’ During Ketsu-go Japanese command planned to target troop transports, slow, unarmed, and thus more vulnerable than warships. Shinyo would strike the anchored ships at night; kaiten would be deployed at close range; ‘Crouching Dragons’ (fukuryo), frogmen, submerged and holding mines at the ends of wooden poles, would ram US landing craft in the shallows off Kyushu. Five thousand kamikaze would strike during the first ten days of‘Olympic.’15

Such carnage as ‘Downfall’ would bring—10,000? 50,000? No one knew, and the guess hardly mattered—might be avoided altogether if atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, accompanied or not by Soviet entry into the war. ‘Think of the kids who won’t get killed,’ Truman wrote to his wife, Bess, on 18 July, having heard about the Trinity test and having got Stalin’s agreement to enter the war. On the same day, he wrote in his diary: ‘Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland.’ The uranium core of the Little Boy bomb was by then en route to Tinian. It arrived on the 26th. (Norman Ramsey, the chief scientist on the island, estimated the value of the uranium and accordingly signed a receipt for it, later wondering, with chagrin and amusement, how the government might dock his pay half a billion dollars if anything went wrong.)16

3. Preparing to drop Little Boy

The nuclear element of the bomb came into the hands of the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, the business end of the 509th Composite Group, which included support personnel for the 393rd’s pilots. The 509th had been constituted the previous October at Wendover Field, Utah, on the edge of the great salt flats that had long discouraged travelers to the American west but now provided a practice range for the unit’s fliers. The group was commanded by Paul W. Tibbets, a 29-year-old lieutenant colonel who had extensive experience as a bomber pilot in Europe. When given his command, Tibbets had been told about the Manhattan Project, the offspring ofwhich might win the war. He would be given the best pilots and crews, the new, state-of-the-art B-29 bomber (which would arrive in Utah that December), and access to whatever resources he needed to make his group work, though he was not to tell his men what kind of weapon they would be carrying. Tibbets would build the 509th to a strength of 1,800, 117 of whom were formed into thirteen B-29 crews and trained, unwittingly, to drop atomic bombs. They practiced over Utah, Nevada, and California through the winter of 1944-5. In clear daylight, they flew to 30,000 feet, took aim at circular targets inscribed for them on the desert floor or at a white raft in California’s Salton Sea, and released monstrously heavy bombs made of concrete and with high explosives lodged in their noses. These were painted orange and thus christened ‘pumpkins’. Tibbets instructed his men to turn sharply, at 155 degrees, just after they had released their pumpkins, and to fly away quickly once they had made their drops. In their off hours men blew off steam over the border in Nevada casinos, but they were closely monitored by security police. No one was to talk about what they were doing or the size or shape of the pumpkins. Transgressors were banished to a base in the Aleutian Islands for the rest of the war.17

Through the spring, as firebombs devastated Tokyo and officials chose other Japanese cities to be spared temporarily for subsequent atomic bombings, Tibbets continued