Our First Atom Bomb: An All-American Story

Our First Atom Bomb:

An All-American Story

Frederick Borsch

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Our First Atom Bomb

An All-American Story

Copyright ©2009 by Frederick Borsch

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-4401-7021-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-7020-1 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-7019-5 (hbk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912438

iUniverse rev. date: 11/19/2009

Contents

Foreword

Leaving Tinian

Interview with Professor Diane Toguri

Getting Ready

Interview with Brigadier General Walter D. Leland (USAF Ret.)

Target

Interview with the Reverend Dr. Theodore McCluskey, SJ

On a Wing and a Prayer

Interview with Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets (USAF Ret.)

Over Iwo

Conversation with Ms. Angelica Engels and Ms. Linda Sorrell

Closing In

Conversation with Ms. Ishoro Ido

Hiroshima

Foreword

You may remember the fight that broke out at the National Air and Space Museum. It began when they were preparing to unveil the restored forward fuselage of the Enola Gay and an accompanying exhibit. At first it was the curatorial staff and a few of the veterans and their supporters who were battling back and forth. The plan for the exhibit included something of the human side of the death and destruction at Hiroshima along with aspects of the politics and ethical concerns about the mission. Several of the pictures and descriptions from Japanese survivors were pretty hard to take. It wasn’t long before General Tibbets and other veterans, followed by the Air Force Association, the American Legion, and a good number of politicians vehemently complained about what they called historical revisionism and a lack of balance. You could almost see the spit fly. Then just about everybody with an opinion joined in. The Senate even passed a Sense of the Senate motion. They did not want the exhibit to question what they saw as the authoritative understanding that the first atomic bomb had helped to end the war and save lives. That was the only story they believed should be told. The exhibit, they maintained, should rightly and proudly stick to those facts.

When the museum director had to resign and efforts were made to limit the exhibit to that basic story, a number of historians weighed in on the controversy. That was far from the whole story, they insisted. Nor was it even all the facts. Those who wanted to omit ethical concerns and other parts of the story were, as they put it, lacking a moral compass. There ought to be a way to help people see and hear the story in all its human and moral complexity.

It was during that argument that I felt I had run into another all-American kind of hero who was trying to get a handle on the significance of what happened in his life and the life of our country. I think I knew that the Enola Gay’s bombardier might have been gone by then, but whoever this was, he insisted on talking with me. He clearly was someone like the bombardier, though, I supposed, he was also rather different, raising other possibilities about that August day in 1945. Even then I realized he could have been some form of an alter ego who had begun to sense that he was not going to live that much longer. Perhaps he and maybe other Americans were searching for some manner of forgiveness, or at least a better understanding about what happened or could have happened on that day.

As for myself, I was only ten that summer of 1945. I can remember the victory garden we shared with our neighbors behind the apartment buildings. Out under a hot sun, hoeing and weeding among the corn, green beans, tomatoes, carrots and, for some reason, radishes, my dad told me that the killing at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki had been necessary and important to our winning a terrible war. Yet even then, I, who over the radio had helped fight D-day, the Battle of the Bulge, and Iwo Jima, can remember wondering what it must have been like to have been on that plane. I tried to imagine how it could have felt to look down on a city and drop a bomb you had been told could kill a hundred thousand girls and boys and men and women at once. I wondered whether it somehow could have been any different.

As the years went on, more questions were raised about whether all the deaths had been necessary and right. I recall a teacher trying to convince us that the use of the atomic bomb had done more to change our lives and the way we think of ourselves than any other event in history. I was too old for the duck and cover drills that the school kids had to practice in the 1950s, but I can remember thinking how silly it would be to get under your desk and cover your head with your arms if an atomic or nuclear bomb was exploding anywhere nearby. Then there was that doomsday clock that a group of concerned scientists would display every few months or so. When the Cold War would get hotter, with both the United States and Soviet Union expanding their nuclear arsenals, the hands on the clock moved closer and closer to midnight and the prospect of a nuclear winter and being bombed back to the Stone Age.

Getting down my new friend’s version of what began it all that August 6 morning was not easy. It took some time to come to know one another. There were moments when I wasn’t sure if he might be putting one of his bluffs on me, but mostly I think he needed time to work up the courage to tell his whole side of the story—warts and all, as they say. What we finally agreed to do was to have a half dozen or so sessions together. I can still see him sitting on his worn piano bench, at times squinting and hunching over as he would recall. Obviously he wasn’t the same athletic young man who flew that mission. Hair that may once have been dark brown was sandy and thinning, but he still looked pretty good for himself, tall and lanky. I could imagine how he had come by the nickname Babe. Sometimes he would turn and easily pick out a bit of a tune, as though to remind him of that time.

At first I thought our sessions might be done in a kind of interview style, but it was soon clear that he was going to tell it his way—recalling that fateful morning and what he was thinking, from the time the plane took off from Tinian until they were over Hiroshima. I then did the best I could to put down what I heard him telling me. Sometimes his mind jumped around—the way minds and memories do—between things happening then and what happened earlier. In a few cases, I have tried to smooth out the tense or indicate when a shift was taking place, but I pretty much let his story go the way he recalled it. Because of the songs he remembered, he had an idea of using song titles for some of our sessions: Night and Day, Sentimental Journey, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Some Sunny Day, that sort of thing. But except for using one of them, I was the one who added the chapter titles, to try to give a little more direction for the story. I have also used a depiction of the Enola Gay (drawn by my artist friend Hugo Anderson) to help give a sense of where crew members would have been on that historic mission.

While I was putting this bombardier’s version of it together, I was able to locate several people whom I imagined could give additional perspectives on what I was hearing. I asked them to look at a draft of the story. I recognize that the subsequent interviews and conversations with them might seem intrusive. Readers can skip over them if they like, but this is how it all came together for me. We should also be clear, however, that, while many of the details and names of the mission of the Enola Gay used here are part of history, this is a story of what might have been. The book, primarily with respect to the bombardier, but also in regard to many of the words and thoughts of others, is a work of the imagination. From time to time you can hear our hero worrying that he could even be dreaming up the whole thing––at times like a nightmare because the bomb was and remains real.

Leaving Tinian

So there you were on that island in the west Pacific that had recently been taken from the Japanese and turned into a base for bombing Japan. You had been there for what, a month or so? And only a day or two before you had been briefed on the full significance of what you were about to do. So what was it like to be there at the start of that mission? Your mind must have been filled with awesome thoughts.

I suppose I could already have been thinking about how our Superfortress would glide over the wide bay with the city coming into view, nearly ringed by its hills. Some of the families might have gone back to sleep after being awakened by the first air raid sirens. I could see the factories and houses, closely packed together—the sun reflecting off roofs. Then there would be the T-shaped bridge I had chosen as target, as I was praying that I had made the right decision, with voices in my head and shouting behind me, the engines pulsing and then whining in the thin air as we slipped closer to the moment when the bomb-bay doors would snap open and who knows what hell would blaze far below.

But that’s not what I wanted to be thinking. Sometimes I would instead picture poker hands in my head. I would think of the five cards smooth in my hand, watching the other players arrange theirs, and then making my discard and drawing to a straight or a full house. Or I remembered the warm evening in Utah when I got the four kings.

And I could hear Night and Day. I was hearing it just after our takeoff. Night and Day and poker cards and my grandfather Fred were in my head at the same time. They weren’t together so much, more crisscrossing, and you can add the strain of the four engines as we continued to climb and the static that comes with the voices over the intercom. Night and day … day and night/You are the one was one of the songs Tokyo Rose played for "her keeds, her boys." I had been listening to it with Angie, sheltering under the palm trees, holding on to one another’s warmth as the storm was passing.

Day and night often got mixed up during wartime. With the floodlights behind us as we rumbled and then began rushing past the hulks of the crashed planes alongside runway A for Able, I couldn’t help seeing again the long skid of the B-29 trying to abort its takeoff last week. For a few seconds, it seemed like they might get away with it, before a ball of flame shot up into the night sky, followed by the dull boom. In the eruption of all that gasoline and napalm, ten more of us were incinerated, not that unlike the Japanese they had been heading off to firebomb.

Our heavily-loaded Enola Gay had barely made it, groaning up into the darkness of a star-thronged heaven. Before that there had been no real sleep—a couple hours with my shoes off after our poker game and something like breakfast with Tibbet’s pineapple fritters, and then the bus to our last briefing and prayer. Now we’re at four thousand feet over the Pacific and turning north, and I was doing my best to keep my mind on whatever wouldn’t trouble me. I was going to do what I had to do and then go home.

Fred wasn’t my grandfather’s real name. When I was about ten, I learned he’d been Werner until he changed it to Alfred. He thought that sounded more distinguished for an undertaker, especially after the first war with the Germans. Alfred still sounded German to me, but he said it was more American. In any case, I never heard people call him anything other than Fred or Mr. Worth, which I later discovered was a name change too.

I often wonder what he would say to me, so it’s hardly surprising that I am thinking of him this night or what, I guess, you could call the still dark morning. When I was a teenager, my friends said it was strange, creepy even, to have a grandfather who was an undertaker. I would sometimes go and stay with him and Mo, which is what we called Grandmother. Alfred Worth Funeral Home was both their home and his place of business. When I went to his own funeral there, not long after the Japs snuck up on Pearl Harbor, I was surprised to realize the place wasn’t bigger. It had seemed huge when I was growing up, with the upstairs room full of empty caskets for purchase and the parlor downstairs where a body was sometimes laid out for viewing. When I stayed overnight or for the weekend, sleeping on a cot in the hallway outside the casket room, there could be a body down below. If Grandfather was especially busy, there might be another in the smaller back parlor. As long as I wasn’t too noisy, I had the run of the place—out into the garden with the cherry trees or exploring the house. I can picture myself as a small lad looking into the parlor and then slowly approaching one of the bodies they said was at rest. Sometimes I heard loved ones whispering to each other through their sobbing: at last, she’s at rest or sometimes "at least she’s at rest. Grandmother said they were at peace". Aunt Ethyl did the cosmetic work, and she would invite me to see how they looked.

If I was alone, I might come even closer and solemnly examine them. Ned was afraid they might move, but I knew they never would. Dead as doornails, I learned to say. A few times I put my hand on their foreheads. They felt like cold stones. I don’t remember doing it, but Ned insists I once pinched a corpse’s nostrils, which stayed shut because of rigor mortis. I don’t imagine I was allowed to that again. But now I’ve seen more rigor mortis and blown-apart people at whatever rest they’re going to get, including a bunch of guys I knew, than Grandfather could ever have imagined.

Click. This is the Colonel, came Tibbet’s voice over the intercom. You’d think he might just call himself the captain or even Paul. He wasn’t much more than four years older than me, but he was gung-ho into this war, this mission, and his career. He liked being the colonel. We’ve swung around to the north Click. Click. We’ll be flying up the Marianas chain for a while. Click. Click. Leaving Saipan behind. It will look mighty good coming home. He clicked off.

In the starlight I could see the dark, lozenge-shaped island limned by the faint glow of its surf. I could make out only a few lights. They were being careful in case a Jap bomber or two tried to sneak back, but there were not many, if any, Japs left in these parts. In order to get rid of them and get our own bombers this much closer to Japan, thousands of GIs had died down there battling the fanatics dug into their hillsides and caves. They could only be blasted out with hand grenades and flamethrowers. And they laid booby-traps all over the place, even on dead bodies. More death came from death, and it was a bloody business all around with stacks of no-longer-empty coffins waiting to be shipped home. Who would want their loved ones, so young at rest, to be left out here so many thousands of miles from home?

Click. We’re going to hold at five thousand for quite a while. We can burn off more fuel. The old girl is pretty heavy. At this altitude we don’t have to pressurize, and it will be easier for the Judge to arm the bomb. Click.

Obviously he liked clicking on and off. It was his way of being in charge. The colonel would dole out the information.

Click. You are all aware that Operation Centerboard is a very special mission. I will tell you something more about that when I can. I’ve especially chosen each one of you. I am proud of you and what we’ve all been chosen to do for our country. Click. Click. Five thousand feet. Not much headwind for now. Something over five hours to target. Click.

He had chosen us, but maybe particularly me. The best bombardier who ever looked through the eyepiece of a Norden bombsight, he had boasted. I’d certainly had enough practice, all over Europe and on all the practice runs with the highly classified new Norden in these B-29 Superforts.

Click. That’s all for now. I’ll come back on when there’s more I can tell you. Click. Click. Static. Otherwise I think we’d better not clutter up the intercom, although out here we don’t need to worry about any Nips. Click.

On many of the missions over France and Germany, we’d had to worry plenty about enemy fighters. Then, too, during the day raids or on that long night flight to Romania as we came in low over the oil fields, fiery flak would burst and thunder into gray-black smudges all around us. The noise was almost