Young Men and Bombs

THEODORE (DUTCH) VAN KIRK, 84

Navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima

When [Colonel Paul] Tibbetts was picked to be commanding officer [in 1944], he named me group navigator. He told me, “We’re going to do something that I can’t tell you about right now, but if it works, it will end or significantly shorten the war.” And I thought, Oh, yeah, buddy. I’ve heard that before.

We picked a day the weather was good. At the briefing that day, they told you who was assigned to what airplanes. We were going to drop the bomb, [Captain Charles] Sweeney was going to fly the instruments, George [Marquart] was going to fly the picture airplane, [Captain Frederick] Bock was flying one of the weather airplanes. They called us about 10 or 11 in the evening. I don’t know how they expect to tell you that you’re going out to drop the atom bomb and not know if it’s going to work or if it’s going to blow up the airplane, and then tell you to go get some sleep. I wasn’t able to sleep.

Our takeoff time was 2:45 a.m. We get down to the airplane, and the Manhattan Project had it lit up with a whole bunch of lights. I said it looked like a Hollywood premiere. [Private] Dick Nelson said it looked like a supermarket opening. But there were questions, picture taking, tape interviewing and everything. We got in the plane and took off. I didn’t talk about anything. The navigator was to keep the plane on course, getting the plane from Tinian to Hiroshima on time. It was 12 hr. and 15 min. total.

The Enola Gay was stripped down–a big metal tube with a lot of instruments and people in it. All the turrets, all the guns–except the tail guns–and anything we did not absolutely need, we discarded. It was about 6,000 lbs. lighter.

It was just like any other mission: some people are reading books, some are taking naps. When the bomb left the airplane, the plane jumped because you released 10,000 lbs. Immediately Paul took the airplane to a 180° turn. We lost 2,000 ft. on the turn and ran away as fast as we could. Then it exploded. All we saw in the airplane was a bright flash. Shortly after that, the first shock wave hit us, and the plane snapped all over. We looked to see what happened to the target, and we could make absolutely no visual observation because the entire city of Hiroshima was covered in black smoke and dust, debris that had been kicked up by the bomb and the blast, and a large white cloud that you’ve seen pictures of. I’d guess it was up to 42,000 ft. already.

When you’re looking at it, you know that a tremendous amount of energy has been released. There was one thought that was uppermost on everyone’s mind. Somebody said, and I thought too, “This war is over.” You didn’t see how anybody–even the most radical, militaristic, uncaring for their people–how anybody like that could stand up to something like this.

MORRIS R. JEPPSON, 83

Weapon test officer on the Enola Gay

We had breakfast after midnight and were taken by a truck out to the plane. My role was to test the electronics on the bomb all the way from the battery that operated the circuitry to the timing clocks and the barometric switches and the radars that had to be turned on.

The arming of the bomb was about half an hour before the bomb was dropped. My last job was to climb into the bomb bay and remove those three testing plugs, painted green and each about the size of a saltshaker. Those plugs isolated the testing system from the bomb, so there was no chance of any voltage getting from the bomb to the testing system. I pulled those plugs and put in three red firing plugs to arm the bomb. From that point on, the bomb was running itself.

The focus was entirely on making sure that thing worked. I knew from test drops that it took about 43 seconds from the time that the plane jerked up–when the bomb left–to the time of the flash or explosion. I counted to myself to 43. Nothing happened, and that was my moment of real worry. A couple of seconds later, the flash came–reported by people from the front of the plane–and I knew that I had miscounted the time and that the thing actually worked.

People were looking down and seeing this enormous cloud coming up and the destruction spreading out from the base–with flames and black smoke and white smoke. And that’s the point that it’s somber because you know a lot of people are getting destroyed down there with the city. No joy at that point. But it was a job that was done.

Everyone by this time was tired. When we landed, the plane was greeted by several hundred people, a whole group of Army, Navy, Air Force generals and admirals. I was lost in the crowd, so it didn’t make any difference. The crew went off to a debriefing. Nobody knew particularly what my role or our group’s role was, so I went back to my tent. Sitting on the edge of my bunk was a Navy lieutenant whom I had grown up with from the first grade–my best friend Jack Scott. I didn’t know he was even on the island, but he said, “Come to the Navy base on the other end of the island. We have a good officers’ mess there, and we’ll have a good meal and a good bar.” So we drove down there and had dinner, and there were several Navy officers there. One of them turned to me and asked, “What did you do today?” I’d heard a lot of their stories, so I thought I’d make just one remark. I said, “I think we ended the war today.”

FREDERICK L. ASHWORTH, 93

Weaponeer on the Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9

At about 1:30 in the morning on the 9th, we gathered at the Bockscar, and [Major Charles] Sweeney [the pilot] and the flight engineer ran through the preflight tests. The engineer discovered that the transfer pumps, which transfer gasoline from the reserve tank into the main tanks, weren’t working. There was 600 gal. of gasoline there, but we wouldn’t have access to it. But Tibbets told him, “You don’t need that gas, so there’s no reason to delay this.”

Our takeoff was uneventful. My station was in the navigator’s compartment, and I had a hole about 8 inches in diameter to look out. I was the weaponeer–basically, I was in charge of the bomb. We flew to the rendezvous point, where we’d meet two other airplanes one with instruments to measure the blast and another holding observers. The observer plane didn’t show up. We circled, and after about 35 minutes, I said to Sweeney, “Damn it, proceed to the first target.”

Kokura was the target, but the bombardier couldn’t locate it because the area was clouded. So the navigator took us to Nagasaki. We had gotten a report that the area was clear, but we noticed undercast clouds. By this time, we’d used almost an hour’s gas at the rendezvous point, and the engineer was really sweating it. It was going to be nip and tuck. I went up to Sweeney and said, “We’re going to be able to make one run on this target–if we’re lucky.” I told him to be prepared to use radar. This was in contradiction with orders we’d received that prohibited us from bombing without a visual target sight.

We were making our approach on radar and getting ready to drop when [Captain Kermit] Beahan [the bombardier] cries out, “I’ve got the target!” As we’d gotten over Nagasaki, Beahan had looked into the undercast and saw that it had holes in it. He synched the cross hairs of his bomb sight telescope and released the bomb.

We saw the flash and then the mushroom cloud. It’s pretty spectacular, like a roiling mass of burning smoke and fire. The colors varied between salmon and pink and yellow flame in color.

We took one turn around the cloud, and then we had to get to the ground as fast as we could because of the gasoline situation. We flew directly to Okinawa. Sweeney put the airplane on a long, slow glide, and as we approached the island, he went on the intercom: “Mayday! Mayday!” There was no response. He used flares but still didn’t get an answer. Finally, he called the tower and said, “We’re going to land!” We touched down about halfway up the runway and came to a screaming halt right at the end. Later, we ran tests on the gas tanks. We had about 35 gal. of usable fuel. And 35 gal.–as far as a B-29 is concerned–is immaterial. We were essentially out of gas.

On the way back to Tinian, we tuned in to some local news and got word that the Japanese had approached the Swiss about surrendering. We were all pretty elated. Looking back, I think that what we did was entirely the thing we had to do under the circumstances. It was a major contribution to the end of the war, and I was fortunate to have participated in it. But the real story here is the mission. It came within a gnat’s eyebrow of being a disaster.

CHARLES (DON) ALBURY, 84

Co-pilot on a B-29 that accompanied the Enola Gay and on the Bockscar

On Aug. 6, our job for the Hiroshima mission was to drop instrumentation to record the magnitude of the bomb blast and the radioactivity. When Tibbets dropped the bomb, we dropped our instruments and made our left turn. Then this bright light hit us, the brightest light I had ever seen in my life. And the top of that mushroom cloud was the most terrifying but also the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life–every color in the rainbow seemed to be coming out of it. Then it felt like someone came and slapped the airplane two or three times. And that was it. I said a little prayer: Lord, please take care of all of them down there. It was all I could do.

On Aug. 9, I think we finally took off about 4 in the morning. There’d been some bad storms around Japan, and the cloud cover was bad; you couldn’t see much. We headed for our primary target, which was the city of Kokura. We were approaching it about [six] hours later, but the clouds had been building up there, even at our altitude. So we decided to head for the secondary target, Nagasaki.

But even Nagasaki’s got cloud cover. We decided we couldn’t take the bomb back to Tinian, so Sweeney says we’ve got to drop it by radar or drop it in the ocean–and we sure as heck didn’t want to drop it in the ocean. Ashworth walks off somewhere in the plane and comes back 10 or 15 minutes later and says if we absolutely have to drop it by radar, then we can. So that’s what we were going to do–but about 30 seconds before the drop, we hear Beahan shout, “I think I’ve got it!” He’d found a hole in the clouds, so we didn’t need to use radar. The bomb hit the city on the other side of these big hills around Nagasaki. Most of the people lived on the side where the bomb didn’t go. It saved a lot of civilian lives.

As I was watching the same dust and mushroom cloud sweep over the city that I’d seen over Hiroshima, [Sergeant Raymond] Gallagher started shouting, “The bomb’s going to hit the airplane!” That must have been what it seemed like back there–like the cloud was going to hit us. This one shook the plane more than the other did. We felt about three strong shock waves. Even as we were moving away from it, we could still see the mushroom cloud.

About a week or 10 days later, Tibbets and I flew a C-54 transport plane into Nagasaki to take some doctors and other civilians there. I saw people looking out their windows at us. I saw a lot of hatred in their eyes, but I could also see that they were glad the war was over. I went up to the top of a hill where a hospital was. I saw a poor guy begging by the side of it; it looked as if he was still bleeding, and his clothes were all ripped up. I felt so sorry for him. Inside the hospital I saw a shadow on the wall–a person had obviously been walking by that wall when the bomb went off. I had never really appreciated until then that this bomb could do something like that. All I could keep thinking was, I hope there is never, ever another time when we have to use one of these. –Interviews by Coco Masters, Carolina A. Miranda and Tim Padgett