GERMANY FALLS – MAY 1945
In May 1945, the Allies defeated Germany. In July, the atomic bomb was ready and war with Japan continued. By August, an invasion of the Japanese mainland seemed inevitable. A bombing campaign devastated 64 Japanese cities. President Truman’s military advisors warned that invading would cause perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. Armed Forces, and the deaths of many Japanese military personnel and civilians.
6 AUGUST 1945 – THE UNTHINKABLE HAPPENS [LINK]
Truman warned the Japanese of "prompt and utter destruction" if they did not surrender unconditionally. When no response came, he authorized using the bomb on targets with large urban areas and militarily significant facilities. On 6 August, a specially equipped B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima from 31,000 feet (high enough to evade Japanese fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire.) The bomb’s firestorm killed perhaps 200,000 people and destroyed 80 percent of the city’s buildings. [LINK]
As the bomb fell, the Enola Gay lurched upward, and the pilot initiated a high angle evasive maneuver to get as far away as possible.[i] A bright flash overwhelmed the crew. Then the bomber experienced the shock waves from the blast. The tail gunner photographed the mushroom cloud. The crew was speechless. One wrote in his journal, “My God, what have we done?”
509TH GROUP
The Enola Gay crew spent months preparing for the mission. Two of them devoted years to acquire the skills they needed that day.
GROUP COMMANDER -THE PILOT
Paul Tibbets, born in Quincy, Illinois in 1915, was raised in Iowa and Florida. Always interested in flying, when he was only 12 years old, he flew with a barnstormer. He graduated from a military academy and attended college, intending to be a doctor. But he decided to become an Army Air Corps pilot. [LINK]
By the end of 1942, he was one of the best fliers in the Air Corps, with more than 40 combat missions. He returned to the U.S. in 1943 to help develop the world’s largest bomber – the B-29 Superfortress. He was then appointed leader of the Group that would deliver the atomic bomb. The 509th Group began training in Utah.
Promoted to colonel in January 1945, Tibbits and his people brought their families with them to the top-secret training site. To maintain secrecy, he told his wife that the skilled civilian Manhattan Project engineers on the base were "sanitary workers." At one point, his wife co-opted a scientist to unplug a drain. During a meeting with these "sanitary engineers," Robert Oppenheimer told Tibbets that his plane, the Enola Gay (named for Tibbits’ mother), might not survive the shock waves from the bomb explosion.
Tibbets retired from the Air Force in 1966 aa a brigadier general. Asked about regrets, he declared in a 1975 interview that he slept ‘clearly every night.’ In 2007, at the age of 92, he passed away. [LINK]
THE TIP OF THE SPEAR – THE BOMBADIER
Thomas Ferebee was born in 1918, on a farm in Davie County, North Carolina (about 5 miles from my childhood home during the War) the third of eleven children. A talented athlete, he attended college and tried out for the Boston Red Sox. Unsuccessful, he joined the Army in flight training. He became a bombardier, completing more than 60 missions in Europe. In the summer of 1944, Paul Tibbets recruited Ferebee to be his bombardier.
Ferebee remained in the military after the War, with most his career in the Strategic Air Command, and retired in 1970 as a colonel. In an interview he said he'd visited Japan after the war and saw "… planes all tooled for suicide attacks. I left there thinking we'd made that war end sooner. Someday when I meet my maker, I'll know then if my ‘one big thing’ was right.” [LINK]
Ferebee told a friend of mine that the top planners never told the flight crew the true power of the bomb. He thought they feared, if the crew knew the truth, they might refuse the mission.
Like Tibbets, Ferebee had no regret for the bombing, saying, "It was a job that had to be done." The two men were close friends for the rest of their lives. He died in 2000. A humble man, his grave is marked with a simple headstone in a country church cemetery near his childhood home.
WHO WERE THESE MEN?
The Great Depression tempered such men. Their opportunities were limited. Most had never traveled outside their home state; few had gone to college. Then, the War forced life and death decisions on them. They grew up quickly, setting priorities about what was and wasn’t important. Tibbets trained eighteen hundred men for a life-and-death mission. He was twenty-eight years old. He said, “I had the maturity of a man of forty. Where I was, you either grew up very fast at twenty-one or you didn’t live to be twenty-two.”
WAS IT NECESSARY?
Some U.S. intelligence advised that the War would end if Japan were assured that it could keep the emperor. Others of Truman’s advisers viewed the bomb as a diplomatic weapon. They believed that dropping it would help America dominate the postwar era, that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by the atomic bomb.” [LINK]
[i] When General Curtis LeMay learned of the Enola Gay’s mission, he wanted a crew under his command to deliver the bomb, despite all the training that Tibbets’ men had done. So Tibbits proposed that LeMay choose his best pilot to ride on a practice run with the Enola Gay crew. Tibbets put the plane into the dangerous high angle turn needed to escape the bomb blast. When the plane returned to the base, LeMay’s pilot said that Tibbits should have the mission.
Interesting story…wondered how the men on the plane felt after the bombing?