THE FORGOTTEN BOMB - PART 3

As you read the account of what the bomb did to Nagasaki, consider that 96,000 people died OVER THE COURSE OF A YEAR from the bomb and radiation effects. Five months earlier, on the night of March 9-10, 1945, 100,000 people died in Tokyo IN ONE NIGHT when the B-29s made the first fire raid. The 500 attacking bombers created a firestorm that burned out 18 square miles of the city. My “astral twin” (born the same day) Yoshiko Tsuruta, then a baby almost nine months old, survived because her mother took her in her arms and jumped into a ditch full of sewage to escape the fire. My aerobatics instructor back in 1976, the late Tom Bell, was one of the pilots of those B-29s; he could never eat or be around barbecue because he could never forget the smell of burning human flesh that filled his bomber as they flew 6,000 feet above the city.

Tokyo wasn’t alone. Kobe-Osaka was hit by a fire raid three weeks later. On my first trip to Japan, ironically 18 years to the day of that raid, a friend of mine and I became lost in the city and happened upon the last 2,000 acres still as it was from the bombing. The ground was black and nothing grew in it; twisted girders stuck out of the ground, and I was immediately struck by the thought I was looking at a cover painting of a science fiction novel set after World War III. It’s a sight I can never un-forget.

By the time the A-bombs were ready to be dropped, there were only five Japanese cities left that had not been the target of fire raids. After the war, Twentieth Air Force commander General Curtis LeMay, who had ordered the fire raids, told his staff member Robert S. McNamara that had the outcome been different “we would be the ones in the dock at Nuremberg.” In fact, Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering was originally charged with a crime against humanity for ordering the bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 that wiped out the heart of the city; the charge was dropped at the insistence of the USAAF top leadership, whose Eighth, Fifteenth and Twentieth air forces had done far more during their missions than the Luftwaffe had ever done.

And now the story continues:

At 1201:40 hours Tinian time, Fat Man fell from “Bockscar” and twenty seconds later at 1202 hours, it exploded 1,840 feet above the city with a force of 22,000 tons of TNT.

Inside the B-29, the crew were thrown around by several shock waves. Radar countermeasures officer 2nd Lieutenant Jacob Beser was pinned to the floor and thought the bomber would be torn apart.

Navigator 2nd Lieutenant Fred Olivi later described the mushroom cloud he saw out his window: “It was bright bluish color. It took about 45 or 50 seconds to get up to our altitude and then continued on up. I could see the bottom of the mushroom stem. It was a boiling cauldron. Salmon pink was the predominant color. I couldn’t see anything down below because it was smoke and fire all over the area where the city was. 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 1205 hours Sweeney pushed over into a second dive just in time to avoid flying through the cloud of atomic ash and smoke, which was still climbing into the upper atmosphere.

The two bombers turned south toward Okinawa in radio silence. “Bockscar” was so low on fuel they expected to crash at sea and everyone checked their Mae Wests. Back on Tinian, it was believed the mission had failed.

Sweeney had climbed to 30,000 feet and could now descend in a semi-glide with minimum fuel consumption. When they arrived five minutes out of Okinawa, there was heavy traffic moving to and from the runways. All fuel tanks read empty. Sweeney received no response to his emergency calls. He ordered flares to be fired. 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.”

So far as the men in the control tower were concerned when they saw that, “Bockscar” was out of fuel, on fire, had wounded men, and every other possible crisis.

With Olivi still firing off flares, “Bockscar” touched down on Yontan North airfield at 1351 hours local at 140 miles per hour, 30 mph too fast as the number two inboard engine died of fuel starvation. The big B-29 bounced 25 feet into the air before settling down. The pilots both stood hard on the brakes and used the special reverse pitch on the propellers to slow down as they sped past rows of parked B-24 Liberators that were fueled and loaded with incendiary bombs. At the end of the runway, Sweeney made a full 180-degree turn and headed to a paved parking area; the plane was now rolling on fumes.

Ambulances, fire trucks, and other vehicles pulled up. Sweeney told the crew not to say anything about the mission. A jeep took Ashworth and Sweeney to headquarters, where Eighth Air Force commander Lt. General James H "Jimmy" Doolittle, who had arrived on the island two weeks earlier, met them. He asked Ashworth, “Who the hell are you?” Ashworth replied “What the hell is wrong with your control tower? We are the 509, Bockscar. We dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.”

“Bockscar?” replied the amazed Doolittle. “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 that the landing was “the scariest thing I ever saw.”

Three hours later, “Big Stink” arrived. Major Hopkins had circled Nagasaki and photographed the damage with an unofficial camera that a young physicist, Harold Agnew, had fortunately sneaked on board since no one on the plane could operate the official camera. At 1730 hours, the three B-29s departed Okinawa for Tinian, where they arrived at 2245 hours.

While “Enola Gay” had been greeted on her return with fanfare and praise, “Bockscar” was not. The Air Force did not push the story or decorate the crew, again unlike what happened with “Enola Gay” crew. Some said Sweeney should be court- martialed for disobedience of orders, but nothing was done. By then, there was no point in bringing up a near catastrophe.

No one will ever know for certain if bombardier Fred Beaman really bombed visually at the last minute, or whether he followed Ashworth’s suggestion and used the radar. The bombardier always maintained afterwards that he had followed his instructions to the letter.

What is known is that what was seen on the radar screen was not the Mitsubishi munitions factory. It was the Urakami Catholic Church, the largest Christian church in all of Asia, built in the decades following the legalization of Christianity sixty years earlier, through the donations of the parishioners who were the descendants of the Shogun-hating Kakure Kirishitan. The downward force of the explosion flattened every part of the church other than the bell tower, which was directly beneath the center of the blast and immediately became the only structure still standing at what would come to be known as Ground Zero.

Less than a second after the detonation, the northern part of Nagasaki was destroyed and 35,000 people were incinerated, including 6,200 out of the 7,500 employees of the Mitsubishi Munitions plant, and 24,000 others employed in other war plants and factories nearby, as well as 150 Japanese soldiers, one of whom had his skull melted into the top of his helmet as his final remains. A total 96,000 people had died from the bombing and radiation as of a year later.

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