Background: Before he died in 2005, retired Navy man Frederick L.
Ashworth revealed some little-known information about the dropping of the
Nagasaki atomic bomb to his friend and neighbour, Ellen Bradbury, who
subsequently wrote it down. Ashworth had been the operations officer in charge
of the final testing and assembly of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb components, and
he was in command of the device while aboard the plane that actually dropped
the weapon on Nagasaki. Years later, New York Times science reporter Sandra Blakeslee
worked closely with Bradbury to craft the article below from Ashworth’s
recollections, and to locate corroborating accounts, interviews, and other
support materials. Ashworth’s detailed, in-depth account—recounted here in full —provides a different view of the Nagasaki mission in place of much
of what was written previously.
The Story: Seventy-five years ago, on August 9, at approximately
3:47 a.m. local time on the island of Tinian, a massive B-29 Superfortress
aircraft roared down a tropical airport runway, carrying 13 men and what was
then the world’s most destructive weapon—an atomic bomb called Fat Man. It was
the second atomic bomb in existence (not counting the test in the New Mexico
desert about 3 weeks earlier). And it was far more powerful than the first
atomic bomb to be used in warfare, which was called “Little Boy” and had been
dropped on Hiroshima just three days earlier.
For nearly eight hours, the crew of the plane carrying
Fat Man sped toward mainland Japan, each man hunkered in a cramped workspace
with no access to external radio communication. Outside, monsoon winds, rain,
and lightning lashed at them. Inside, they experienced moments of terror, such
as when the bomb began to arm itself—a red light blinking with increasing
rapidity—midway to their destination. One of them, bearing the newly minted
title “weaponeer,” grabbed the Bomb’s blueprints and raced to figure out what
was wrong.
The story of what transpired inside the plane carrying
Fat Man to Nagasaki, Japan, has not really been told in detail to this extent,
although some excellent overall renditions have been written of the atomic bomb
program as a whole. Bits and pieces of the story have appeared in the diaries
of the men who flew the mission—although sometimes the diaries appeared years
after the event, or were based on hurriedly scribbled, hand-written notes
jotted down during the flight. Scrubbed versions have been published in
military archives. A couple of accounts differ, suggesting false memories or
outright lies, making the whole tale reminiscent of the famous Japanese film
Rashomon.
It is a story of astonishing screw-ups that easily
could have plunged the plane, the men, and the bomb into the Pacific Ocean.
That the mission succeeded is genuinely miraculous.
Fat
Man
vs Little Boy. The Little Boy bomb
dropped on Hiroshima continues to garner the most publicity, because it was the
first-ever atomic weapon to be used in an attack. But compared to the Fat Man
implosion assembly design, Little Boy’s output was puny, even though “little”
is hardly the adjective that springs to mind for a bomb that was 10 feet long,
28 inches wide, and weighed 9,000 pounds. Despite its size, Little Boy was
“crude,” wrote physicist Frank Barnaby of the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute more than three decades later; a modern 8-inch nuclear
artillery shell has about the same yield as the first atomic bomb. The Little
Boy design was never built or used again.
Fat Man became the basis for US domination in the nuclear age. Its design became the model for all atom bombs that followed—including the kinds of things that North Korea and all new atomic
powers seek to accomplish today, according to William J. Broad, science
reporter for the New York Times. An implosion bomb that used plutonium, Fat Man
produced far more bang for the buck: the explosive power of 22 kilotons of TNT
from Fat Man, versus the 12.5 kilotons of Little Boy.
There is another difference as well: Fat Man almost
didn’t reach its target. Unlike the Hiroshima mission, which was nearly
flawless, almost nothing during the Nagasaki mission went according to plan,
atomic historians say. Its failure might have changed the course of history,
discrediting the utility of this new bomb design and possibly affecting the
course of subsequent nuclear weapons use. The mission was a game changer, yet
the military has been loathe to talk about it for reasons of national security
and, perhaps, embarrassment.
Ellen learned harrowing new details of this historic
flight from the weaponeer, Vice Admiral Frederick Lincoln “Dick” Ashworth, a
few months before he died in 2005, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ashworth had been a
Navy commander who helped to select Tinian as the base for the atomic mission.
He then became the operations officer in charge of the final testing and
assembly of the bomb components on the island and was ultimately the person in
charge of the atomic bomb while aboard the plane that dropped the bomb on
Nagasaki.
And he was Ellen’s neighbour. She grew up in Los
Alamos, where her father had been hired by Norris Bradbury to work on the
implosion detonator for the Fat Man bomb. Which is partly why Ashworth opened up
to her. (Full disclosure: Los Alamos in those days was a small, tight-knit
community, much more so than today. Back then, it seemed that everyone knew
everyone else. And Norris Bradbury was to eventually become my father-in-law.)
Maybe it was because of these facts that Ashworth—normally a buttoned-up kind
of guy, averse to any whiff of disloyalty—spoke candidly about the conflicts
that occurred before the bomb was dropped. Luckily, Ellen wrote down his
recollections and saved all his emails. He stressed that he didn’t have the
energy, time, or inclination to tell the story in “a big way” to national
media. (Although Ashworth did give an account to the Los Alamos Historical
Society).
While it may not be found in official histories, what
Ashworth had to say contains the ring of truth. A leading civilian expert on
the bombing missions, John Coster-Mullen—whose self-published research is
considered by prominent atomic historians such as Robert Norris to be the
ultimate authority on what happened—corroborated Ashworth’s version. (In his
review of Coster-Mullen’s book Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of
Little Boy and Fat Man, Norris said: “Nothing else in the Manhattan Project
literature comes close to his exacting breakdown of the bomb’s parts.
Coster-Mullen describes the size, weight, and composition of many of Little
Boy’s components, including the nose section and its target case; the
uranium-235 target rings and tamper; the arming and fuzing system; the forged
steel 6.5-inch-in-diameter gun barrel through which the uranium-235 projectile
was fired at the target rings; and the tail section—to cite just a few.”)
And what does Coster-Mullen have to say about the
flight of Bockscar? “That mission was a sorry mess from the get-go,” he said
recently. “And ramifications have carried on through many decades.”
Ashworth was in charge of the nuclear part of the
mission, where, in his words, “We had tons of stuff out there to assemble into
bombs … 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.” Even though Fat Man had been
pre-assembled by the experts at Los Alamos in peace and quiet, a few key
components of the bomb then had to be taken apart in order to safely ship Fat
Man halfway around the globe. “This saved the people on Tinian of a lot of
heavy handling work, and their job was only to remove the two explosive blocks,
insert the pit and close it up,” Ashworth said.
Still, this approach meant that the atomic bomb needed
to be reassembled, in a remote part of the Pacific, during war-time, thousands
of miles away from where it had first been conceived. (The active materials,
such as each bomb’s all-important plutonium “pit”—the critical core
component—were shipped separately and hand-carried.) Because it was all so complex
and intricate, Ashworth flew on board the plane with the finished product. To
my mind, he had no reason to alter the facts. This is his account of those
final hours on the plane with Fat Man, as Ashworth told them to me over 15
hours of face-to-face interviews.
Prologue to the flight. The heart of Fat Man was a
grapefruit-sized core of plutonium—a newly manufactured, radioactive element
that is more stable than most isotopes of uranium and more powerful. It was
shiny, slightly warm, and weighed about 14.1 pounds. And someone had to carry
it to the tiny Pacific Island of Tinian, where the bomb would be assembled and
loaded on to a B-29 bomber.
The task fell to a young scientist—he drew the short
straw—named Raemer Schreiber, whose story is recounted here for the first time.
His unpublished diary (shared with me by his daughter, Paula) recounts how on
July 26, at Los Alamos, colleagues handed him the plutonium core, nicknamed
“Rufus,” which he placed in a little, open-wire carrying case that resembled a milk
crate. They also asked him to transport a huge wheel of cheese, presumably for
the nuclear scientists waiting on Tinian. With the core in his lap, Schreiber
bounced over dirt roads on the way to Albuquerque where he boarded an empty
C-54 aircraft. He knew the core could not explode without a detonator.
As described in his diary, Schreiber sat on a hard
wooden chair strapped inside the big plane all the way to Tinian. Like everyone
working on the Bomb, he was exhausted. So he slept sitting up, sometimes
holding the bomb case in his lap. At one point, over the Pacific, he went up to
the cockpit to get a better view of what was causing turbulence. One of the
crew came up behind and tapped him on the shoulder: “Whatever that thing is you
got, it’s rolling around the back of the plane. Maybe you want to corral it.”
The wire container had tipped over, the first in a
series of mishaps. Schreiber quickly fetched the nation’s most technologically
advanced wartime treasure, tied it to the leg of his chair, and went back to
sleep.
Schreiber landed on Tinian on July 28, local time.
Located in the Marianas archipelago, on the other side of the International
Date Line, the island was hot and muggy; it rained almost constantly. No one
had thought about where to put the plutonium carrier, so the Los Alamos
scientists already on Tinian stuck it in the back of the Quonset hut where they
slept. Then they took snapshots of themselves holding all the plutonium there
was in the world.
The person in charge of assembling the bomb, and
overseeing it while on board the plane—Bockscar—that dropped the weapon was
Commander Frederick L. Ashworth, seen here in front of a Quonset hunt on
Tinian. Ashworth was a Navy man, while the plane’s pilot, Charles W. Sweeney,
was with the Army—which added to the confusion of just who was in charge while
they were in flight and waiting at their rendezvous point for their two
accompanying planes. When the photo plane never showed up, Ashworth wanted
Bockscar to proceed directly to the target anyway, while Sweeney wanted to
wait. Bockscar waited 45 minutes, during which it consumed precious fuel; the
photo plane never did show up. So much fuel was wasted that the plane barely
had enough to drop the bomb and land at the nearest base afterward. (In fact,
at one point it looked like Bockscar would crash into the ocean well before
getting to the runway. One crewmember remembers wondering how cold the Pacific
would be when they ditched the plane.
Scientists holding the container with the plutonium
core that was to be the heart of the Fat Man atomic bomb. Image taken on the
island of Tinian, August 1945. At right is physicist Harold M. Agnew, later to
become the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The portion of the image
showing the container itself had been scratched out by the FBI in 1946, in an
effort at secrecy. Now, of course, this photo is declassified, as are all the
materials published here. (Agnew also managed to sneak a camera onto Bockscar
which was used by one of the crew to take the photos of bomb damage. No one on
the plane knew how to operate the official camera because the official
cameraman was not on the plane, due to a mishap.)
In February, Ashworth selected Tinian because it was
one of the first liberated islands that had a runway long enough for a heavily
loaded B-29 to take off and was close enough to the Japanese mainland for the
planes to make round trips. But B-29s were notoriously unreliable flying
machines, especially in the early days, when they had been rushed into service
without complete testing. Until the designs improved, many engines overheated,
caught on fire, and caused the planes—full of bombs and fuel—to crash on
takeoff. The end of Tinian’s runway was littered with a pile of wrecked B-29s.
(The planes used for the atomic bomb runs had been modified and upgraded, which
was reflected in the planes’ official designation: “Silverplate.”)
The men waited. The weather remained dreadful. The crew
talked about the possibility of the Japanese surrendering but the Hiroshima
bomb did not make that happen. The scientists wanted the enemy to think they
had an endless supply of atomic bombs but there was only one more immediately
available: Fat Man, whose core lay in the back of the hut. (There were other
cores in various stages of completion.)
Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, who had piloted the plane
carrying Little Boy to Hiroshima, was one of the people involved with deciding
when to drop the second bomb, scheduled for August 11. The primary target was
Kokura, site of one of Japan’s largest munitions plants. Nagasaki was the
backup target. When five days of bad weather was forecast (including a
typhoon), the mission was moved up to August 9. The change meant that corners
inevitably had to be cut to get the bomb airborne in time.
These shortcuts imperilled the mission several times.
For example, late in the evening of August 8, a young nuclear engineer, Bernard
O’Keefe, and an assistant worked to fit a casing over the core, setting fuses
and turning screws. They crouched in the only air-conditioned room on Tinian
with a bare electric light bulb. Sometime before midnight, O’Keefe stepped back
to make a last check.
As elaborated in Ellen's conversations with Ashworth,
O’Keefe tried to plug a cable into the firing unit. It didn’t fit. He told
himself he must have been doing something wrong. He was too tired, not thinking
straight. O’Keefe realized he was trying to fit a female plug to another female
plug on the end of the cable. He walked around the weapon and on the other side
saw two male plugs in the same position. That wasn’t right. But they were
soldered on that way.
He called his assistant and asked him to look at the
plugs. He confirmed that they were put together wrong. O’Keefe fumed. He
couldn’t call the whole show off because of some stupid mistake. He’d just have
to fix it, unsolder and re-solder the damn thing. He asked where there was an
electrical outlet. They finally located one two rooms away, so O’Keefe had to
find extension cords. Then he strung two cords together and heated up his
soldering iron. He recalled that sweat was pouring off his body and the
assistant was terrified.
“Sir, that is dangerous.”
“Right,” said O’Keefe. “Then go hide somewhere,
although if this blows up it won’t make much difference where you hide.”
O’Keefe carefully unsoldered two connectors, switched
them, re-soldered them, and stood up. Then he sank down to the floor. It was
midnight. Fat Man was now ready to be fully armed, but with green safety plugs
engaged. Soldiers came to roll the bomb out and hoist it into the belly of a
B-29 named Bockscar(sometimes spelled as Bock’s Car).
Army Major Charles W. Sweeney piloted Bockscar. Major
James I. Hopkins piloted a second plane, Big Stink, there to observe the strike
and take photos. Captain Frederick C. Bock—who was normally in command of the
Bockscarnamed after him—piloted a third plane, The Great Artiste, which carried
blast measurement instruments and observers. Two weather reconnaissance planes
had taken off an hour earlier.
To accommodate the 10,800-pound Fat Man, Bockscar was
stripped of all its guns. It had to carry enough fuel for the long trip to the
Japanese mainland. On takeoff, it was seriously over its designated weight for
safety.
Before the crew boarded the plane, Tibbets held a
briefing where he announced last-minute changes. According to Ashworth, Tibbets
announced that his good buddy Sweeney would pilot Bockscar instead of Bock.
There would be glory in it for his friend. Second, due to bad monsoon weather,
the rendezvous point for the three planes was changed from Iwo Jima to
Yakushima, an island off the southern tip of Japan. Third, Bockscar was to fly
at altitudes higher than its normal 9,000 feet if it encountered foul weather
over the Pacific. This meant greater fuel consumption.
Finally, Tibbets gave two clear instructions. Wait no
more than 15 minutes at the rendezvous point before proceeding to the Japanese
mainland. And drop Fat Man visually instead of using radar. The target must be
photographed. The head of the scientific project that developed the atomic
bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, wanted a clear demonstration of the power of the
new weapon. He had told the US Secretary of War, Harry Stimson, that “the
visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous” and “we should seek to
make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible,”
as was duly noted on pages 13 and 14 of the minutes of their July 31, 1945
meeting and then stamped “Top Secret” (and now declassified).
As the men prepared to board the plane, Raymond
Gallagher, the assistant flight engineer, said: “The feeling in our hearts,
when we heard about the briefing, was very, very low.” Following standard
procedures, the men all dropped their wallets into a barracks bag near the
door. “Truthfully, I think I will never pick it up,” he said.
On the plane. Once on board, at 2:15 a.m., the crew
went through a final pre-flight check. It went well until Sweeney’s flight
engineer, Master Sergeant John D. Kuharek, tried to access 640 gallons of fuel
in Bockscar’s reserve tank in the tail of the aircraft. It provided ballast as
well as a margin of safety for getting back to Tinian. Kuharek flipped a
switch. The fuel did not move. He tried again and again. No dice. There was no
time to replace the fuel pump. Another mishap.
Regulations required that the flight be cancelled.
Sweeney ordered everyone off the plane. The men got off, stood around nervously
and looked to Tibbets and base commander Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell
for a decision.
According to Ashworth, Tibbets said that they were fast
losing the weather. And the Hiroshima flight had been a milk run, with no
problems—they’d got back to Tinian and never touched that fuel in the reserve
tank.
“I say, ‘Go.’ ”
Farrell, somewhat more reluctantly, agreed. It was a
go.
The men on the runway looked at each other, then
climbed back into the plane.
Like all B-29s, Bockscar was temperamental. According
to Ashworth, Fred Bock probably could have twiddled and fiddled the controls to
make the pump work. But Charles Sweeney was in charge. Although a good pilot,
he was not as familiar with the plane’s quirks.
Here is where Dick Ashworth’s story begins to get
personal and diverge from conventional accounts. He told Ellen that Sweeney was
an Army man, accustomed to following orders. Ashworth, on the other hand, was a
Navy man, accustomed to getting a mission accomplished no matter what came his
way. In other words, the Navy gets things done. The Army follows orders. And
that is where the conflict, which nearly caused the mission to fail, began.
Such conflict between operating systems is a military
classic—called a “purple operation,” from the mixture of Army red and Navy
blue. It even had a code: JANCFU for “joint army navy combined foul up” which
was a cousin of “SNAFU,” military vernacular for “situation normal, all f***ed
up.”
Bockscar lifted off at 3:47 a.m., using the whole
length of an 8,500-foot runway. Palm trees below bent down as the plane pulled
up, as if the Earth were reluctant to let it go.
Two minutes later Sweeney turned the controls over to
his co-pilot, 1st Lt. Charles Donald Albury, and took a nap. Back in the belly
of the plane, Ashworth removed the green safety plugs and replaced them with
red arming plugs. Then Ashworth told me that he dozed for a few minutes with
his head resting on the Bomb, which hung from a grappling hook, swaying
slightly. It was several hours to the rendezvous point.
At 7:00 a.m., after about three hours in the air,
Ashworth told me that his assistant weaponeer, Lt. Philip M. Barnes, awakened
him. We don’t know to a 100 percent certainty what was said next, but Ashworth
recalls the following exchange. What happened does not seem to have appeared in
any official histories, but Ashworth swore to me it was true.
“Hey, Commander, Ashworth, Dick.” Barnes called him
first by rank, then last name, then first name, with increasing terror. “Hey,
we got something wrong here. We got a red light going off like the bomb is
going to explode right now. Armed, it’s armed. Fully armed, look at this. Can
you take a look, what is going on with this?”
A red light that had been blinking steadily suddenly
sped up, flashing a dire warming.
Ashworth said he shook himself awake. “Are you sure? Oh
my God.” He saw the red light. “There is something … do you have the
blueprints? This bomb can pre-detonate if we drop below a predetermined level.
What’s our altitude? Where are the blueprints?”
Barnes and Ashworth unrolled the blueprints and started
checking. They took the casing off the bomb, and scrutinized the switches.
After 10 tense minutes, they saw the problem. Two switches had been reversed, a
mistake in the arming process. Barnes flipped the two tiny switches into their
proper positions and the red light stopped blinking.
Ashworth went back to sleep.
Barnes sat on a small stool in front of the bomb and
never took his eyes off the light.
The bad weather continued. Their wings were occasionally
bathed in St. Elmo’s fire—a non-threatening electrical phenomenon that was
nevertheless scary under the circumstances. Shortly after the incident with the
red light—which no one on the plane other than Barnes and Ashworth knew
about—they slowly climbed to 30,000 feet to arrive at the rendezvous point at
roughly 9 a.m. Ten minutes later, they spotted the instrument plane. But the
third, with the photographic equipment, did not appear.
Sweeney began to circle the island, waiting for the
third plane. He circled for 15 minutes, then 30 minutes, then for 45
fuel-guzzling minutes.
Sweeney turned to his co-pilot. “Where the hell is
Hoppy?”
James “Hoppy” Hopkins, piloting The Big Stink—another
modified Silverplate B-29, able to fly at higher altitudes than earlier
models—was circling above them at 39,000 feet, looking anxiously for the other
two planes.
Sweeney later told his superiors that Ashworth
commanded him to keep circling. But Ashworth told me a very different story. He
said that if he had been able to see which plane was with them (it was The
Great Artiste with the instruments), he would have argued to immediately
proceed onward. But from his small window, Ashworth could not readily see all
that was going on. He wanted that instrument plane, but the photo plane was not
much of a priority to him—especially if waiting for it meant endangering the
entire mission. But Ashworth could not make his concerns known, even though he
was not far from the pilots’ seats. Although the crew all had headsets, Ashworth
did not, so they and he had to make themselves heard over the engine noise to
communicate. This was normally OK, but this was not a normal situation. Adding
to the tension, Kuharek made it clear they were beginning to be critically
short of fuel.
“We waited and waited for the last plane,” Ashworth
told her. “Sweeney had in mind that we were supposed to have three airplanes
going to target. I think he wanted a perfect operation. The net result was we
wasted 45 minutes of precious gasoline. Finally I said to Sweeney, proceed to
first target.” Once again, the mission was imperilled by multiple mishaps.
Above them, at 39,000 feet, Hopkins hovered,
desperately looking for the other planes, at the wrong altitude. At last,
frantic, he broke radio silence and radioed back to Tinian.
He said, in code, “Is Bockscar down?”
But on Tinian the first word of the transmission was
dropped. They heard: “Bockscar down.”
Commander Ferrell was having breakfast. When he heard
the news, he ran outside his tent and threw up. He then cancelled a contingent
air-to-sea rescue operation. Despair settled on the island. They believed that
they had lost one of the weapons that was to finally end the war.
But Bockscar was not down. It
flew on toward Kokura, followed by The Great Artiste, as The Big Stink
continued searching for it at the wrong altitude.
They arrived at 10:44 a.m. to find Kokura blanketed in
thick smoke. On the ground, three employees of the Yawata Steel Works had been
burning drums of coal tar to lay down a smoke screen, on the orders of their
supervisor. And steelworker Satoru Miyashiro and his co-workers had heard about
Hiroshima.
Bockscar began a bombing run but the bombardier, Kermit
Beahan, could not see enough to do a visual drop. As the B-29 pulled away in
futility, flak began bursting all around them. Kokura was one of the most
heavily armed cities in Japan because of its munitions factories and
steelworks. Bockscar had no guns to defend itself, and in any case, guns would
have been no protection against flak.
Sweeney announced he would do a second run over Kokura.
Ashworth told me he was steaming. Tension in the plane mounted. Meanwhile, the
men were calculating the amount of remaining fuel. Second Lieutenant Fred
Olivi, wrote in his diary, “Our gas is going fast at this altitude, and we
can’t wait any longer.”
Again Sweeney began to circle for another run. At this
point Ashworth went to talk with Sweeney.
They heard a worried voice from the tail gunner,
Sergeant Albert T. ‘Pappy’ Dehart. “Major, flak is closer.”
“Roger,” said Sweeney.
Pappy’s voice was a squeak: “Major, flak right on our
tail and coming closer.”
Then Second Lieutenant Jacob Beser, who was in charge
of radar counter-measures, began to pick up signals near Japanese control
frequencies. Japanese fighters were darting up fast.
Then Staff Sgt. Edward K. Buckly, the radar operator,
broke in: “Skipper, Jap Zeros coming up at us. Looks like about 10.”
“Let’s try from another angle,” Sweeney said.
Telling the tale all these years later, Ashworth says
that he was effectively stuck, in what he called “the bilge”
(a Navy reference to the bowels of the craft)—unable to see or hear all that
was going on, with his fate in the hands of someone else, and more than dubious
about the choices the skipper was making. He knew that Sweeney had never flown
in combat, and that changes decision-making, whatever the orders are. At this
point they were on their own, alone, in the air, and carrying an atomic bomb.
Ashworth had been in combat, and knew that at some point you scrap orders and
do the best and only thing you can. You complete your mission. You save your
men if you can.
It was not clear who was in charge. Sweeney, the Army
guy, piloted the plane. Ashworth, the Navy guy, was in charge of the bomb. As
the weaponeer, Ashworth wanted to get to the target and make the visual drop as
specified. In retrospect, he was in charge but the mishandling of their orders
led to the plane nearly falling out of the sky.
They didn’t have enough fuel to make any more runs.
Sergeant Abraham Spitzer, the radio operator, later
said: “I could see Commander (Ashworth) was struggling within. He seemed
perplexed. What to do? Disregard orders, risk a return to Okinawa and the lives
of the men aboard, perhaps the loss of the bomb in the ocean to save our own
necks? All that weighed heavily on his mind. Desperately, he made up his mind.
Casting aside all consideration he told the major it was Nagasaki—radar or
visually, but drop we will. We cheered. Nagasaki, here we come.”
Nagasaki. At 11:32, Bockscar banked and turned south.
Sweeney tipped the aircraft wings to indicate that The Great Artiste should
follow. Ashworth told me that the two B-29s nearly collided midair—a detail
often overlooked in subsequent accounts.
They flew the shortest route overland to reach
Nagasaki, 95 miles away. They did not have enough fuel to make it back to any
US base. Ashworth told me that, at this point in the mission, he was prepared
to take all responsibility, even if it meant a court martial. If the target
could not be seen visually, he would use radar. It wouldn’t be what the brass
wanted but would get the job done.
He also told me that he did not think any of them would
survive the mission. There was a very slim chance they might make it to the
recently liberated island of Okinawa. But he did not count on it.
The navigator, Fred Olivi, recounted how he wondered if
the Pacific Ocean would be cold when they ditched.
At 11:50 a.m., Bockscar arrived over Nagasaki.
Big fluffy clouds drifted over the city. Ashworth said
that, given the fuel situation, he had only had one chance to drop the bomb. “I
felt it was my responsibility to try a radar approach. The only alternative was
to ditch the plane with the bomb.”
Bockscar began a five-minute bombing run. When the
bomb-bay doors opened, Ashworth spoke to Beahan, the bombardier. “Use the
radar.”
As large holes pooled through the puffy clouds, Beahan
shouted: “I see it! I see it! I got it!”
Sweeney said, “Okay, you own the plane.”
Beahan had about 45 seconds to set up the bombsight, to
kill the drift, and to kill the rate of closure on the target. Then: “Bombs
away!”
Fat Man fell from the plane for 20 seconds and, at
12:02 p.m., exploded at an altitude of 1,840 feet with a force of 22,000 tons
of TNT.
The bomb-bay doors snapped shut. Inside the plane, men
were thrown down by several shock waves. Beser was pinned to the floor and
thought the plane was going to be torn apart.
Olivi described the mushroom cloud: “It was bright
bluish color. It took about 45 or 50 seconds to get up to our altitude and then
continued on up. We could see the bottom of the mushroom stem. It was a boiling
cauldron. Salmon pink was the predominant color. We couldn’t see anything down
there because it was smoke and fire all over the area where the city was.
Everybody was concentrating down there and I remember the mushroom cloud was on
our left. Somebody hollered in the back: ‘The mushroom cloud is coming toward
us.’ This is where Sweeney took the aircraft and dove it down to the right,
full throttle, and I remember looking at the damn thing on our left, and I
couldn’t tell for a while whether it was gaining on us or we were gaining on
it.”
At 12:05 p.m., Sweeney kicked the plane over into
another dive just in time to avoid running into a cloud of atomic ash and
smoke, which was still climbing up.
When Bockscar finally made it to the target site—the
city of Nokumura—it was covered by fog, haze, and possibly a smokescreen
created by the Japanese burning of coal tar. The crew had to make a visual
drop; they tried three times, then gave up and went to their alternate target:
Nagasaki. That, too, was covered by cloud, until a gap suddenly appeared. The
bombardier released the Fat Man atomic bomb over Nagasaki, and at 12:02 pm on
August 9, 1945, it exploded at an altitude of 1,840 feet with a force equal to
about 22,000 tons of TNT.
Somebody hollered in the back: ‘The mushroom cloud is
coming toward us.’ This is where Sweeney took the aircraft and dove it down to
the right, full throttle, and I remember looking at the damn thing on our left
and I couldn't tell for a while whether it was gaining on us or we were gaining
on it.” They were still 457 miles from the nearest landing strip, on Okinawa,
and sent out a May Day cry for help. The plane did make it, gliding much of the
way, although one engine died and the plane bounced 25 feet in the air before
settling down. It barely missed hitting a row of parked planes that were fully
loaded with incendiary bombs and fueled up. Bockscar had made it. Just barely.
They were 457 miles from Okinawa. The Great Artiste,
which had dropped a suite of instruments right after the bomb exploded, was on
their tail. Both planes were low on fuel but Bockscar was running on hope.
Because of radio silence, they could not talk to each other.
Ashworth said he told the crew to say goodbye to one
other and put on their Mae West life jackets. They would probably have to
crash-land in the ocean. There was a very small chance of a rescue. Except for
The Great Artiste, no one else knew they were in the air. And although they
didn’t know it, as far as the military was concerned, their plane had been lost
many hours earlier.
As they left the Japanese shore, Sweeney sent an
international distress signal. “May Day. May Day. May Day.” There was no
response.
They were at 30,000 feet and could descend, almost in a
glide, with minimum fuel consumption. About five minutes out of Okinawa, with
heavy air traffic moving to and from the runways, all fuel tanks read empty.
Sweeney frantically tried to call the busy control tower on Okinawa but got no
response. They had only once chance at landing. He yelled, “Fire every goddamn
flare in the airplane.”
Olivi later wrote: “I took out the flare gun, stuck it
out of the porthole at the top of the fuselage and fired all the flares we had,
one after another. There were about eight or ten of them. Each color indicated
a specific condition onboard the aircraft.”
As far as the tower was concerned, Bockscar was out of
fuel, on fire, had wounded men, and every other crisis a plane could have.
Still firing flares, Bockscar touched down at 1:51 p.m.
going 140 miles per hour—about 30 mph too fast. It bounced 25 feet in the air
before settling down. At touchdown, the number two inboard engine died. This
actually made the plane easier to handle. Sweeney and Albury both stood hard on
the brakes and reversed the propellers to slow down the plane. They passed rows
of parked B-24 Liberator heavy bombers that were fueled up and loaded with
incendiary bombs, but didn’t smack into any. At the end of the runway, they
made a full 180-degree turn and headed to a paved area for parking heavy
vehicles, rolling on fumes.
Then stopped.
Ambulances, fire trucks, and jeeps pulled up. Sweeney
told the men not to tell anyone about the mission. Ashworth and Sweeney jumped
into a jeep that took them to headquarters.
Okinawa base commander and aviation pioneer James
Harold “Jimmy” Doolittle had been there two weeks. He looked at Ashworth and
said, “Who the hell are you?” Ashworth bristled and said, “What the hell is
wrong with your control tower? We are the 509, Bockscar. We dropped an atomic
bomb on Nagasaki. Sir, I think we were a little off target.” He stopped.
“Bockscar?” said Doolittle. “You, you’re not lost?
Thank God you didn’t hit those B-24s. Just missed one hell of an explosion.
Guess you already had one hell of an explosion.”
He looked hard at Ashworth. “We heard you were down.”
Later, Doolittle remarked to a friend of Ellen in New
Mexico, Linda Davis, that the landing was “the scariest thing I ever saw.”
A little later, the crew sat in the mess hall eating
Spam. The third plane, piloted by Hopkins, arrived three hours later after
circling Nagasaki and photographing the damage with an unofficial camera that a
young physicist, Harold Agnew, had snuck on board. This was fortuitous. No one
on the plane knew how to operate the official camera because the man assigned
the task was kicked off before takeoff because he had hastily grabbed a raft
instead of a parachute.
At about 5:00 or 5:30 p.m., all three B-29s left
Okinawa for Tinian Island, arriving at 10:45 p.m.
Unlike the Enola Gay that had bombed Hiroshima,
Bockscar was not greeted on its return with fanfare and praise. The military
did not push the Bockscar story or decorate the men who flew the mission—unlike
what happened with the Enola Gay’s crew. There was talk that Sweeney should be
court-martialed for disobeying orders, but nothing came of it. We had won the
war. There was no point in making the military look bad. There was no need to
do a formal review, which could reveal the embarrassing mishaps, just as there
was no need to assemble the other cores or fly more missions. A full-scale land
invasion of Japan was averted, saving what the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated
would be tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives—although the exact figures
are one of history’s great “what if” questions.
By Ellen Bradbury, Sandra Blakeslee ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED NYT AUGUST 4, 2015
