The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [214]
“What about Groves?”
“He’ll need to be briefed, I understand that. But you make sure he’s briefed so close to takeoff, he won’t have time to respond.”
Tibbets tried to imagine the scene, Parsons sliding down into the bomb bay, perched on the bomb.
“You’ll have to sit on the damn thing.”
“Yep. Straddle it.”
“Like it’s a horse.”
“Or a torpedo. Done that a couple times in training. One thing about becoming an engineer, you get to do things most people think are completely nuts.”
Tibbets downed the bourbon, looked at Parsons, saw no smile, the man completely serious.
“This qualifies, Deak. But it’s your call.”
Parsons sipped at the bourbon, then downed it in one quick gulp. He shook his head, seemed to fight off the burn, said, “Ride ’em cowboy.”
The choice of target came from LeMay’s office. There had been considerable discussion between everyone who had the authority, communications between LeMay and Groves, Hap Arnold and George Marshall. The meetings had continued on both Tinian and Guam, the discussions involving LeMay and Tibbets, along with Parsons, Ferebee, and LeMay’s own high-ranking staff, including the much-humbled Butch Blanchard. The list of potential targets had been narrowed to three cities, but the final choice could only be made en route, once the weather conditions over each city were determined. Once Kyoto had been eliminated by the president, the most favored site had become Hiroshima. There were several reasons, but Tibbets understood that militarily that city held a number of important targets, installations and barracks for Japanese troops, as well as a network of smaller factories and plants that continued to provide assistance to the Japanese war effort. But there was one more reason why Hiroshima seemed ideal. The city was situated in something of a valley, mountains framing one edge, so that the blast would be contained, and not allowed to dissipate over a wider, flatter area. Though no one was certain just what the bomb would do, the geography of the city suggested that the blast would be more compact, and thus more effective.
Once the bomb left the bomb bay, the electronic connections would be severed, the bomb then controlled by automatic systems Parsons would be monitoring. The switches that would fire the cannon had to engage while the bomb was still in the air. A ground-impact explosion was out of the question, primarily because the delicate mechanisms that controlled the inner workings of the bomb would be shattered to rubble, making the entire system unpredictable. In the many tests and studies, the various calculations made by mathematicians and physicists, it had been decided that the bomb would be programmed to explode at an altitude of 1,890 feet. At that altitude, the explosion, if it occurred at all, would spread out in a pattern that would cause a wider devastation zone over the heart of the city. Certainly, detonating the bomb at such a precise altitude was an engineering feat all its own, but there was one nagging problem that had plagued the test runs of various dummy bombs from the first training exercises over Utah. No matter the expertise of the men like Parsons, the proximity fuse that would determine exactly when the bomb exploded had been notorious for its failures. During test runs, two of the electronic fuses had ignited immediately after the bomb left the bomb bay, an unnerving experience for a flight crew even with a bomb weighted with concrete and charged with nothing more than TNT. Occasionally the fuse had failed altogether, the dummy bombs never exploding at all. That was certainly better for the crew, but far worse for the entire mission, the “pumpkins” of TNT impacting the Utah desert without any ignition at all. Once the test runs began out of Tinian, the bugs with the proximity fuses seemed to work themselves out. That gave great comfort to the engineers, especially Parsons. But the crews knew that a failure on a training run was a frustrating annoyance. If the fuse failed during the actual