Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [120]
Parsons inserted cordite charges into Little Boy’s back end, but he left a key circuit undone so the bomb was not yet armed. Tibbets tried to sleep, failed, and chose instead to disclose at last the full truth about their payload. The sky grew lighter, indicating fair weather ahead. Just before 6.00 (5.00 in Japan) they reached Iwo Jima, where Tibbets climbed to 9,000 feet and rendezvoused with the Great Artiste and No. 91, the instrument and photo planes. Parsons and his fellow weaponeer Morris Jeppson finished arming the bomb. ‘It won’t be long now,’ said Tibbets over the intercom. The Straight Flush, the B-29 that overflew Hiroshima, sent word that the skies over the primary target were largely clear, so Tibbets committed to his course and brought his plane to bombing altitude, 31,000 feet. The crew, though not their pilots, put on flak suits, and all drew on smoked-glass goggles to protect their eyes from they knew not what. Bombardier Ferebee spotted the target and took charge of the Enola Gay’s course for the bombing run. The other two planes slowed and let the Enola Gay run to the target alone. Ferebee saw the Aioi Bridge. ‘I’ve got it,’ he called. Then, just after 8.15 Hiroshima time, the bomb-bay doors opened and the bomb tumbled out. Ferebee later said he could see it turn its nose to the ground, as it was supposed to. Free of its load, the Enola Gay leaped up. Tibbets’s months of training took over, and he dived and sheared off, speeding frantically away from the blast area. The bomb’s proximity fuse was set for roughly 1,850 feet above the ground, which meant that the bomb should explode 43 seconds after it had left the bomb bay. Jeppson was counting it down. He got to 43—nothing. ‘It’s a dud,’ he thought. Then an intense light lit the plane, followed by a powerful jolt. It felt, recalled the navigator, Dutch Van Kirk, as though he had been sitting on a metal garbage can that someone had hit with a baseball bat. Tibbets first thought it was flak. Then came a second blast wave, and the pilot calmed down; he knew what it was, and that there would be no more.
They saw the fireball, then the mushroom cloud that Parsons had told them about during the briefing ages before. ‘The city was hidden by that awful cloud,’ Tibbets wrote later, ‘boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.’ ‘A column of smoke is rising fast,’ said the tailgunner, Robert Caron, into a voice recorder. ‘It has a fiery red core... Fires are springing up everywhere... there are too many to count.’ Tibbets radioed Tinian that the bomb had produced ‘good results’, which staggered Deke Parsons: ‘ “Good”? Hell, what did he expect?’ On his own, he wired Farrell that the visual effect of the bombing had been ‘greater than [at] Alamogordo’. Jake Beser, in charge of preventing Japanese jamming of the mission’s communications, likened the sight to sand stirred in shallow water at the beach; Robert Lewis thought the cloud resembled ‘a pot of boiling black oil’. Lewis gave silent thanks that his war would soon be over, but the displaced pilot of No. 82 had other thoughts too: ‘My God,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘what have we done?’ ‘If I live a hundred years,’ he added, ‘I’ll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind.’19
The Enola Gay and its escort planes headed for home. They lost sight of the mushroom cloud only after 363 nautical miles. Many of the men on Tibbets’s plane now slept, exhausted. Aboard the Great Artiste, the physicist Luis Alvarez, who had monitored the blast in part by dropping instrument-bearing parachutes simultaneously with Little Boy, grew pensive, and decided to write his ‘first grown-up letter’ to his 4-year-old son, Walter. ‘What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning’, he wrote, ‘are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars.’ As the planes approached