The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [232]
On August 7 and 8, as though to emphasize that the Americans had more on their minds than a single weapon, a force of nearly five hundred B-29s made bombing raids both day and night on a considerable number of Japanese targets. With maddening silence still from the Japanese, Truman exercised his authority, and gave final agreement to the requests from Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer, as well as the American military commanders who still faced the horrifying prospect of invading mainland Japan. The physicists and technicians of the Manhattan Project had thus far created a total of three atomic bombs. Little Boy, the bomb Colonel Tibbets had dropped on Hiroshima, had been a uranium device, fired with the least complicated form of ignition, the cannon projectile system. But both of the other bombs, including the test bomb exploded at Alamogordo, were altogether different. Those used plutonium, rather than uranium, and were ignited by an implosion method, where masses of plutonium would be fired simultaneously from multiple directions into a core of the material at the center of the bomb, causing the collision of a sufficient amount of nuclear material to create a nuclear explosion. Though more complicated than the Hiroshima weapon, the success at Alamogordo had convinced Groves and his teams that this plutonium bomb was just as reliable. The last remaining bomb was named Fat Man, its shape far more spherical than the bomb Tibbets had dropped. It was slightly larger and slightly more powerful than Little Boy, but its effects would be the same. On August 9, three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, and with no indication coming from the Japanese that they had any intention of accepting the Potsdam Declaration, Fat Man was loaded aboard the B-29 Bockscar. The plane was piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, who had piloted one of the support planes for Tibbets’s Hiroshima mission. After struggling through deteriorating weather conditions over Japan, the primary target of Kokura was abandoned, and Sweeney flew his plane to the secondary target, the city of Nagasaki. With weather conditions threatening to scrub the mission altogether, Sweeney used radar as well as a chance visual through thickening clouds, and at 11:01 A.M., the second atomic bomb was exploded over a Japanese city.
Throughout the early days of August, the Japanese had been making entreaties directly to the Soviets, requests of influence that Stalin might exercise to bring an end to the war that would help the Japanese save face, by ensuring that the Americans did not tamper with the existing structure of the Japanese government, and that the tone of the Potsdam Declaration be modified to allow for the emperor to remain the spiritual and political leader of his people. Though Truman had pushed hard for the Soviets to enter the war against Japan, Stalin had resisted any such pressure. With the dropping of the second bomb, Stalin had a sudden change of heart. To the shock of the Japanese diplomats in Moscow, on August 9, the same day the city of Nagasaki was destroyed, the Soviets declared war on Japan. In what seemed to be mere minutes, Soviet troops that were poised on the border with China swarmed into Manchuria and immediately began to engage the highly overmatched Japanese forces there, sweeping them away with the same dedicated viciousness the Allies had witnessed in Germany.
Truman received news of the second bomb with the same optimism he had felt after the success at Hiroshima. The next day, August 10, that optimism was justified, though not as directly or as succinctly as Truman had expected. A message emerged from the Japanese government, delivered through intermediaries, the Swiss and the Swedes:
In obedience to the gracious commands of His Majesty the Emperor, who, ever anxious to enhance