The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [216]
30. TIBBETS
The word came with little fanfare, the usual matter-of-fact reporting that every senior officer expected. That word was passed from the offices of General LeMay on Guam, directly to Tinian, first to General Tom Farrell, the ranking officer associated with the Manhattan Project, a man who, like Tibbets, answered only to Leslie Groves. The word had been passed quickly through the offices to Tibbets, who read the teletype dispatch with a hard knot tightening inside him. The report was as simple as every report of its kind. The weather over Japan had cleared, and there was minimal cloud cover over all of the three target cities. The time was now. The mission was a go.
NORTH TINIAN FIELD
AUGUST 5, 1945, NOON
They moved at an agonizing crawl, the trailer rolling down into the specially dug pit. It had been a requirement from the first time Tibbets had seen the size of the bomb, that a hole had to be dug, the bomb placed below the surface of the ground, so that the B-29 could then be rolled over the top of it. There was simply no other way to load the massive bomb into the plane’s bomb bay. Inside the bomb bay, the shackles that held a typical bomb load were long gone, replaced by a massive steel hook. He watched, moving closer as the bomb was rolled down into the pit. Only then, with the bomb hidden from any distant eyes, was the tarpaulin on the trailer removed. Tibbets stood close beside the pit, stared at the amazing sight, four tailfins encased in a thin steel box, attached at the rear of a massive gun-metal gray trunk, ten feet long, more than two feet wide. The bomb weighed nearly nine thousand pounds, far larger than any single weapon ever dropped by an airplane.
With the bomb now in place in the pit, the Enola Gay was towed over the hole, precisely in place, and immediately the technicians were at work, chaining the bomb to the hook in the bomb bay, the crew working in rhythm to raise the bomb slowly upward, until it disappeared into the great plane. Tibbets watched it all, felt frozen to the spot, numbers still running through his head, all of those specifics given him by Oppenheimer, the others. There had been a great deal of talk about just what this weapon would do, and Tibbets had heard often that the bomb carried the punch of twenty thousand tons of TNT. He marveled at that still, though the impact of just what that meant was no more than a fog. There was one piece of the math he could relate to, that this bomb was the equivalent of two hundred thousand of the bombs he had dropped over Europe and North Africa. But the numbers were just exercises now, dancing around the brains of the physicists. Tibbets brought himself back to the moment, watched as the bomb disappeared upward, the bomb bay doors closing, the Enola Gay just one more aircraft in a vast field of hundreds more. The plane’s mechanics were there, the specially picked men, seeing to the last details of the loading, the men who already knew the plane’s every screw. As soon as the bomb bay doors were closed, one more man came forward. He had given barely a nod to Tibbets, had boarded the plane holding a hard stare that told anyone around him to leave him be. Tibbets complied, knew that Deak Parsons was headed straight for the inside of the bomb bay, and in short minutes would begin practicing the arming of the cannon inside the bomb, a job that no one had ever attempted. Tibbets still watched the plane, the tractor’s empty trailer now up