Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

In attacking an invasion fleet off Kyushu, the kamikazes would enjoy two tactical advantages that they had not possessed during the Okinawa campaign. First, it was a short flight; and second, the attackers would fly from various airfields around the island, which meant that they would approach the invasion fleet from different directions simultaneously. The Japanese navy was also pouring major efforts into producing suicide submarines and speedboats, as well as suicide gliders to be launched from mountain peaks. The plan aimed to destroy one-fourth of the U.S. invasion fleet. Even if that estimate was out of reach, as it almost certainly was, the kamikazes could realistically hope to draw more blood off Kyushu than they had off Okinawa.

Chapter Sixteen TINIAN, THE ONCE-VERDANT TROPICAL ISLAND SOUTH OF SAIPAN, WAS now the largest airbase in the world. Nearly half of its 39 square miles had been paved over to accommodate airfields for B-29s and fighters. North and West Fields included eight great runways for Superfortresses, each almost two miles long and the width of a ten-lane highway.

From the air, a witness recounted, Tinian resembled “a giant aircraft carrier, its deck loaded with bombers.”1 Others were reminded of Manhattan, an island comparable in size, which was likewise paved over. Tinian’s road network, like that of Manhattan, was laid out in a grid pattern. Its two major north-south roads were called Broadway and Eighth Avenue; east-west “cross streets” included Wall Street, Forty-Second Street, and 110th Street. An undeveloped livestock reserve in the middle of the island was called “Central Park.”

At the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 125th Street, near the isolated northern end of North Field, a guardhouse marked the entry gate to the 509th Composite Group, a mysterious and secretive B-29 unit whose compound was double-fenced and patrolled by armed sentries. The 509th was self-contained—meaning that it had its own separate ground support, logistics, communications, security, and administrative organizations. It did not interact at all with the 313th Bombardment Wing, to which it technically belonged. Bold red and black signs warned unauthorized personnel to stay away from the perimeter. Even the 313th Wing commander, Brigadier General James Davies, did not know the purpose of these enigmatic Superforts that ostensibly fell within his chain of command. When Davies tried to visit the compound, he was turned away at gunpoint. The sole mission of the 509th Composite Group was to drop the atomic bombs.

Paul W. Tibbets Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel, led the group. Tibbets had been provided with virtually unlimited resources to fulfill his mission. He had the power to requisition materials, equipment, or personnel as he chose, and he built his team by lifting entire B-29 squadrons out of other air groups, without explanation. In December 1944, the 509th had set up shop at Wendov...

personnel were kept on a strict need-to-know basis, but the pilots and bombardiers were told that they must train to drop a 9,000-pound “special bomb,” which for the sake of security they called “the gadget.”

An aircraft that dropped the new bomb was required to fly at least 8 miles away from the point at which the device was set to detonate. It would have forty seconds to complete the maneuver. That required a hard-banking 155-degree turn, during which the pilot would dive steeply to pick up speed. Tactical analysis of Japanese fighter defenses led Tibbets to conclude that they should remove most of the armament from the planes, and rely on speed and altitude to thwart interception. The 509th Composite Group would also have to oversee major alterations to the B-29, because the new bomb would not fit into the aircraft’s standard bomb bay. The group trained at Wendover using “pumpkin bombs,” which mimicked the size, weight, and ballistics profile of the uranium and plutonium weapons, named “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” respectively.

Immediately upon completion of the TRINITY test, the major components of the two bombs were transported to Tinian. Crates containing the “gun-type” trigger for Little Boy, and half of the bomb’s uranium U-235 core, were flown to San Francisco and loaded onto the cruiser Indianapolis. The ship made an uneventful passage to a pier in Tinian, arriving on July 26. The crates were transferred to an assembly building at the 509th compound, staffed by a specialized team of Manhattan Project scientists and technicians. The remaining portion of the uranium, packed in two crates, was flown across the Pacific in a C-54. By August 1, all of the bomb components were on Tinian and ready for assembly. Having discharged her mysterious cargo, the Indianapolis sailed for Leyte Gulf. Her passage was cut short on July 30, when the ship was struck by two torpedoes fired by Japanese submarine I-58. She sank in twelve minutes. Her distress messages were not received, and her absence was not noted until three days later. A fourth day passed before rescue vessels arrived on the scene. About 900 of her crew of 1,200 had abandoned ship as she went down, but few lifeboats had been launched, so the men were left treading water or clinging to debris. During their four-day ordeal, adrift in the open sea, about six hundred perished as a result of exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, drowning, or shark attacks. Only 317 of the crew survived. The Indianapolis, Admiral Raymond Spruance’s former Fifth...

On August 4, two days before the Hiroshima mission, four B-29s crashed on takeoff at airfields throughout the Marianas. The accidents dramatized the necessity of leaving the atomic bombs unassembled until the planes carrying them were safely aloft. That meant sending assembly teams up with the aircrews. Colonel Tibbets would pilot the B-29 that would drop the uranium bomb. Model number B-29–45-MO was better known as the Enola Gay; Tibbets had named the aircraft for his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. Two 509th Superforts would fly in company with the Enola Gay as observers, and would drop various measuring instruments.

August 6 began with a midnight briefing in a heavily guarded Quonset hut, and a prayer by the chaplain. The aircrews of the Enola Gay and the other planes boarded canvas-covered trucks lined with benches to be driven to the airfield. They passed through numerous checkpoints en route. Arriving at the hardstand, the airmen found an unexpected scene. The Enola Gay was surrounded by a crowd numbering in the hundreds—VIPs, ground crews, soldiers, and a large deputation of the press. The big airplane was brightly lit by klieg lights. Motion picture cameras were mounted on portable risers. Lightbulbs flashed. Witnesses were reminded of a Broadway premiere or a Hollywood film opening.

At 5:45 a.m., the crew caught sight of Iwo Jima, with Mount Suribachi clear in the morning sun. The Great Artiste slipped into formation, just 30 feet off the Enola Gay’s right wing; the Necessary Evil joined up to the lead plane’s left. Two hours north of Iwo Jima, the

Tibbets and his copilot (Robert Lewis) looked down through the Enola Gay’s greenhouse nose at the familiar coastal contours and islands of the Inland Sea. It was a bright, clear morning, with only sparse and scattered cloud cover. They flew directly over the lobster-shaped island of Etajima, site of the Japanese Naval Academy. The port and city of Kure passed below and to their right. Ahead, the densely populated fan-shaped delta of Hiroshima came into view.

The Enola Gay and its escorts were at 31,600 feet, almost 6 miles above the city. At 8:05 a.m. (Hiroshima time), the navigator announced, “ 10 minutes to the AP.”

At 8:14 a.m., one minute before the drop, Tibbets ordered: “On glasses.” Each member of the crew put on his protective dark polarized welder’s goggles. The bombardier, Thomas Ferebee, checked the Norden bombsight and confirmed that the aiming point was “inside,” meaning that the plane was directly on target. A radio warning signal was sent to the two observation planes. At 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay’s bomb bay doors opened, and Little Boy’s restraining hook was retracted back into its slot. Ferebee told Tibbets, “Bomb away”—but the pilot would have known it anyway, because the plane was suddenly 5 tons lighter, and it lurched upward accordingly.

Charles Sweeney, piloting The Great Artiste just off the Enola Gay’s right wing, watched the 10-foot cylinder as it fell from the strike plane. He thought, “It’s too late now. There are no strings or cables attached. We can’t get it back, whether it works or not.”3 Little Boy wobbled or “porpoised” slightly, then steadied on its course, like a missile. It took a steeper trajectory and shrank quickly fr...

Then Sweeney banked sharply to the left, putting his B-29 into the 155-degree diving turn that he and the other 509th pilots had practiced for nine months. The Enola Gay was turning in a similar arc to the right.

The Great Artiste was flying away from the epicenter, but the interior of the airplane was suddenly suffused with a blinding silver-bluish light, and Sweeney noted that the sky ahead was bleached to a bright white hue. He instinctively shut his eyes, but felt a sensation of light filling his head. At the same time, he noted a peculiar taste in his mouth, like lead. (This was ozone, caused by gamma rays.) On the Necessary Evil, now 15 miles from the blast, one crew member found the light in the cabin so bright that he could have read the fine print in his pocket bible even through the dark goggles.

Tibbets noticed the metallic taste and the flash at the same time. “I got the brilliance,” he said later. “I tasted it. Yeah, I could taste it. It tasted like lead. And this was because of the fillings in my teeth. So that’s radiation, see. So I got this lead taste in my mouth and that was a big relief—I knew she had blown.”5 His copilot, Robert Lewis, turned back in his seat to look. He shouted wildly, striking Tibbets on the shoulder: “Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!” Lewis later wrote in his log of the mission, “My god, what have we done?”

About a minute later, the Enola Gay was hit by the first shockwave. The plane’s aluminum skin made a sharp, cracking retort, as if someone had swung a very large sledgehammer at the fuselage from outside. The aircraft jerked and trembled, but held together. Tibbets estimated that the hit was equivalent in force to about two-and-one-half Gs. This first shockwave was followed quickly by a seco...

Sergeant Abe Spitzer, a radio operator on The Great Artiste, thought it looked as if “the sun fell out of the sky and was on the ground.”

dirty gray mushroom cloud was forming at the top of a great pillar of smoke. The pillar had already climbed higher than the altitude of the airplanes, so the airmen looked up at the mushroom.

“Down below all you could see was a black, boiling nest,” Tibbets said. “I didn’t think about what was going on down on the ground—you need to be objective about this. I didn’t order the bomb to be dropped, but I had a mission to do.”

The Enola Gay and The Great Artiste circled Hiroshima three times, ascending gradually in a corkscrew pattern, while the crewmen continued to gape in awe at the unspeakable devastation below. For a long time, no one spoke. The high-speed cameras in the instrument plane snapped hundreds of photos, and the technicians reported that they had made an excellent record.

Joe Stiborik, a member of the Enola Gay’s crew, later recalled that everyone aboard remained almost completely silent during the long flight home. “I was dumbfounded,” he said. “It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to bring an end to the war, and we tried to look at it that way.”

THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER, dark rumors had circulated through the city. The Americans were said to be preparing some awful fate for Hiroshima. Why else would the city have been left untouched by bombs, when nearly every other city in the region, including Kure, Iwakuni, and Tokuyama, had been devastated?

Early that morning, the coastal radar net had detected the weather reconnaissance B-29s that had preceded the Enola Gay. Air raid sirens had churned, summoning the city’s residents to their shelters. An all-clear signal had sounded at 8:00 a.m. Members of the air raid volunteer corps, including many school-age children, were being dismissed from their duties.

When the Enola Gay and its two escorts droned in from the south, they could be seen clearly from the ground. Witnesses spotted a cluster of parachutes blossoming at high altitude. They were the instrument canisters dropped by The Great Artiste. Little Boy exploded at 8:16 a.m., 1,870 feet above the ground, only 550 feet wide of its aiming point. The nuclear chain reaction it triggered created a core temperature of about 1 million degrees Celsius, igniting the air around it to a diameter of nearly a kilometer. The fireball engulfed the center of the city, vaporizing about 20,000 people on the ground. Thermal and ionizing radiation killed virtually all people within a kilometer of the surface of the fireball, burning them to death or rupturing their internal organs. Farther out, in successive concentric circles around the epicenter, people were exposed to gamma rays, neutron radiation, flash burns, the blast wave, and firestorms. The initial shockwave raced away from the epicenter at greater than the speed of sound, some 984 miles per hour. Streetcars were lifted from their tracks and scattered like toys. Clothing was torn from bodies. Nearly all wooden buildings within 2.3 kilometers were completely leveled, and about half of all such buildings to a radius of 3.2 kilometers. Later, investigators found the shadows of people caught within the inner radius around the hypocenter. They had been vaporized, but their bodies had left faint silhouettes on the pavement or on nearby w...

Like the aircrews of the B-29s overhead, surviving witnesses on the ground remembered the flash (pika) and the taste of ozone in the mouth. Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was sitting at home when his living room filled with a bright white light. In the moment before his house collapsed, the doctor wondered whether someone had lit a magnesium flare just outside his windows.

Father Johannes Siemes, a German Jesuit priest and a professor of modern philosophy at Tokyo’s Catholic University, had been evacuated from the capital to the Novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Nagatsuke, a suburb of Hiroshima. He was sitting in his spartan bedroom, about a mile from the epicenter, when the room was suddenly filled with a “garish light which resembles the magnesium light used in photography, and I am conscious of a wave of heat.”11 Moments later came a great tearing sound, a sudden collapse of ceilings and walls, and a sensation of falling or sliding into an abyss. Dr. Hachiya’s house was filled with swirling dust. He could see only a wooden pillar, leaning askew, and then noted that the roof was caving in. He had been wearing underwear, but a moment after the flash he was completely naked, though he had not noticed the garments being ripped away. Like many others, the doctor first assumed that a conventional bomb had fallen directly on his house. He shouted to his wife, “It’s a 500-ton bomb!”

Those caught in the open were lifted off their feet and carried through the air. Michiko Yamaoka, a fifteen-year-old girl on her way to her job at the telephone exchange, was looking up at the planes overhead when the bomb exploded. “You can’t really say it washed over me,” she recalled years later. “It’s hard to describe. I simply fainted. I remember my body floating in the air. That was probably the blast, but I don’t know how far I was blown.”13 Fragments of glass and wooden splinters tore into flesh.

Futaba Kitayama, a thirty-three-year-old woman serving on a firebreak demolition team, was buried under the remains of a home that she had been working to pull down. Extracting herself from the wreckage, she noted that she was bleeding. There were embers in her hair, and shards of glass had torn into her flesh. She found a towel and began wiping blood from her face. “To my horror, I found that the skin on my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove.”

Many were naked, and seemingly unaware of their nakedness—and many were also barefoot, because their shoes had lodged in the burning asphalt and been wrenched off. Their faces were hideously blackened and swollen, and their hair singed and frizzy. Those trapped beneath wreckage called out to passersby, begging for assistance or a drink of water. Everywhere, the plaintive mantra was heard: “Mizu, mizu, mizu!”18 (Water, water, water!)

trying to push their intestines back in. People with their legs wrenched off. Without heads. Or with faces burned and swollen out of shape.”

Fires spread, mounted in strength, and merged into fast-moving firestorms. They advanced quickly over the devastated landscape, consuming wreckage and engulfing refugees on foot. In this respect, the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing was similar to the earlier incendiary raids on Tokyo and other cities. Many who might otherwise have survived died by the inhalation of dust, ash, and smoke. The flames whipped up powerful whirlwinds, like tornadoes, and sections of roofing, doors, tatami mats, and various other debris were lifted and carried away. The odor of burning flesh settled like a pall over the city. According to Matsushige, “the fat of the bodies was bubbling up and sputtering as it burned. That was the only time I’ve seen humans roasting.”

They ran down the stone embankment steps to the narrow, muddy banks, where they found impossibly large crowds of refugees. As in the firebombed cities, the rivers became mass graves. Futaba Kitayama, badly injured, made a beeline for the nearby Tsurumi Bridge—but when she looked down into the water, she drew back in horror. “People by the hundreds were flailing in the river. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women; they were all in the same state: their faces were puffy and ashen, their hair tangled, they held their hands raised and, groaning with pain, threw themselves into the water. I had a violent impulse to do so myself, because of the pain burning through my whole body. But I can’t swim and I held back.”

About two hours after the explosion came the black rain: freakishly large and heavy drops, the size of marbles, black and sticky in color and consistency. Caused by condensation that had absorbed rising ash and dust, the black raindrops were large enough to cause pain when they fell upon refugees, and they stained their skin with dark blotches that would not wash away. The black rain was very cold, and some of those who were caught out under it began to shiver. Though the survivors would not know it until later, this sinister rainfall was contaminated with radiation.

Those in the city saw the flash but did not notice the boom. Those who lived farther out on the outskirts saw the flash and then afterward heard the boom. The Japanese in Hiroshima spoke of a pika, meaning a flash, and a don, meaning a very loud sound. Thus, the nuclear explosion was called the pikadon, the flash-boom.

wards were filled with an estimated 10,000 horribly burned and wounded patients. Little could be done for the worst burn cases. If the doctors even tried to remove their clothing, the skin peeled off with it. Signs of radiation poisoning were seen even on August 6; they would grow more distinct in the following weeks and months. Victims bled through the skin, gums, and eyes; they vomited blood, or expelled bloody diarrhea; their hair came out in clumps. Many patients in the hospital received nothing but a dab of iodine on their wounds. One man confronted a doctor at the hospital, asking why the medical staff were doing nothing for the immense crowds in Asano Park. The doctor replied: “In an emergency like this, the first task is to help as many as possible—to save as many lives as possible. There is no hope for the heavily wounded. They will die. We can’t bother with them.”

Knowing nothing of the concept of an atomic bomb, they wondered what had happened.

Among the survivors, few expressed anger. The predominant mood was one of passivity and fatalism. Many shrugged and remarked, “Shikata Ga Nai.”26 The expression was common in wartime Japan: “It can’t be helped.” The disaster had occurred, and now it would run its course. Some would live, others would die, and the war would go on until those in power said it was over.

By prearrangement, the White House issued a statement announcing that the United States had dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, “an important Japanese Army base.”

He then read portions of the statement for a newsreel crew. The film was made in his stateroom in “flag country” on the Augusta. Wearing a light tan summer suit with red tie, the president sat at a desk facing the camera, a round porthole visible behind him. “It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” He explained that the United States, with assistance from Great Britain, had assembled the leading scientists and built the immense industrial plants required for this enterprise, at a cost of more than $2 billion.

As for the Japanese, the Potsdam Declaration had given the Japanese a fair opportunity to avoid this awful fate, but leaders in Tokyo had promptly rejected that ultimatum, and therefore: “If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

IN TOKYO, NEWS OF THE CATASTROPHE in Hiroshima arrived in fits and starts. At 8:30 a.m., fifteen minutes after the explosion, the Kure Navy Yard reported that the neighboring city had been struck by “a new weapon of unprecedented destructiveness.”31 An hour and a half later, an airbase 80 miles outside Hiroshima reported that “a violent, large, special type bomb, giving the appearance of magnesium...

At first the army leaders and technical authorities expressed doubt that the Americans could have built such a weapon. Admiral Toyoda, who had been fully briefed on Japan’s failed nuclear program, judged that even if the enemy had assembled enough fissile material for a bomb, they had probably built only one. And even if they had more than one, the number could not be more than two or three, so they would not have enough to destroy the entire country from the air.

Anami said that the army’s technical advisers were skeptical of the existence of an atomic bomb, but that an investigatory mission had been sent to Hiroshima to learn the facts. At a meeting of the newly formed “Atomic Bomb Countermeasure Committee,” representatives of the Technical Board said they doubted that the Americans could have built such a bomb, or if they had, they could not have transported such an unstable device across the Pacific. They speculated that Hiroshima had been hit by a “new type [of] bomb with special equipment, but its content is unknown.” The press was authorized only to say that Hiroshima had been hit by a new type of weapon, but no mention of atomic bombs was made in Japanese newspapers until the eighth.

The next day, the team submitted its report to the Imperial General Headquarters, concluding that there was no possible doubt that Hiroshima had been hit by an atomic bomb.

As the Japanese ambassador commenced his formal greetings, Molotov cut him off and invited him to take a seat, adding that he had a formal statement he wished to read. Molotov took a page out of a folder on his desk and began reading the Soviet declaration of war against Japan, pausing at intervals for the translator. He stated that his government was acting in response to the request of the Allied governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China, which had invited the Soviets to join in the Potsdam Declaration. (That was false.)

The Soviet Union would consider itself at war with Japan on the following day, August 9, 1945. Molotov did not offer any justification or rationale for abrogating the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, which was scheduled to expire the following year.

Working in closely guarded secrecy for the past several months, the Soviets had prepared one of the largest and most overpowering ground offensives in history. Assembly areas were set up well behind the border, and senior field commanders had traveled into the region incognito, wearing uniforms of junior officers. Troops, tanks, field artillery, and other war matériel had been moved east on the Trans-Siberian railroad, with continuous round-trips of some 136,000 rail cars. Since the fall of Germany three months earlier, Red Army strength in the region had more than doubled, to about eighty-nine divisions.39 Japanese intelligence had failed to detect any sign of these vast preparations and troop movements.