Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [119]
4. Mission No. 13
On the following day, having scanned the weather forecast, LeMay gave the word: the mission was on for the 6th. Little Boy was taken from the 509’s air-conditioned assembly hut and pulled gently, by a tractor, to a pit on the runway. Several of the men had written messages on the bomb with crayons. Some were obscene missives for the Japanese, but Major John E. Moynihan, the public-relations officer for the mission, wrote, ‘No white cross for Stevie’—his young son at home. The bomb was loaded into the pit, and the annointed bomber, No. 82, was towed over it. The bomb was winched into the plane’s forward bomb bay and secured with a central shackle and several braces. The loading went smoothly. Meanwhile, Tibbets had decided his plane needed a name. He summoned from a base softball game a sign painter and instructed that ‘Enola Gay’, his mother’s first and middle names, be painted on the fuselage. The bomber’s usual pilot, Robert Lewis, was unhappy to discover the change, but Tibbets was now in charge and anyway the paint had already dried. Lewis would serve as Tibbets’s co-pilot on the run to Hiroshima.
The plan called for Deke Parsons to ready the bomb while the plane remained on the ground, inserting into its rear end the explosive and the detonator that, once activated, would fire it off, sending the uranium bullet home. Parsons had wanted to perform this operation once the plane was in flight, but Groves, worried about turbulence and the tiny space in which Parsons would have to work, said no. Parsons had accepted the verdict— until he saw the alarming rate at which B-29s taking off from Tinian’s Runway A, the one to be used by the Enola Gay, had crashed short of liftoff. A crash with a nuclear bomb on board might obliterate Tinian. Now he confided in Farrell: he would do the final bit of assembly only after the plane was airborne. Farrell cautiously consented, and Parsons folded himself into the tiny space behind Little Boy and practiced inserting the charge until his hands bled. Farrell offered Parsons a pair of gloves, but Parsons refused; ‘I’ve got to feel the touch,’ he said. By the time Farrell did his duty and cabled Groves about the important change in procedure, there was nothing Groves could do but ratchet up an already serious case of nerves.
They would take off at 2.30 the next morning, 6 August. Men tried to sleep but mostly failed. The final briefing came at midnight, where Tibbets blandly repeated his description of the bomb they carried as ‘very powerful’, and the Lutheran chaplain on base prayed with the crew that ‘they bring this war to a rapid end’. The men had an early breakfast of eggs, sausage, and pineapple fritters, a favorite of Tibbets. They were driven to their B-29s at 2.00 and arrived to a cacophony of sound and harsh lights worthy of a Hollywood movie set (thought an unhappy Tibbets) or, as someone else put it, ‘a drugstore opening’. Photographs were taken of the Enola Gay’s crew, after which they climbed into their plane. The men all had pistols, and Tibbets secretly carried a metal box holding twelve cyanide capsules; if the plane went down over Japan, any crewman left alive would choose suicide by self-inflicted bullet or self-administered poison. ‘Let’s go,’ said Tibbets at 2.45, and he throttled his plane forward. It was heavy, some 15,000 pounds over spec with its weighty bomb and extra fuel, and Tibbets badly frightened co-pilot Lewis by using nearly all of Runway A to gain speed. At what seemed the last second Tibbets lifted the plane’s nose, and the Enola Gay rose over the night sea, flying northwest at low