Tibbets often found himself in sympathy with the exasperation felt in the base machine shops where the changes had to be made by service personnel. At times they became almost openly hostile to these unknown civilians who descended on them and scrapped a long night’s work with the briefest of apologies. Matters were not helped by security’s insisting that the scientists pass themselves off as sanitary engineers—a piece of flummery which led to some very ribald comments. Prohibited from answering some of the questions his own engineering officers and men asked, Tibbets knew that to many of them he seemed cold, aloof, and hard-nosed. The loneliness of leadership which his mother had once warned him about was becoming increasingly clear.
His command had assumed impressive proportions. Besides the 393rd, he now had the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron, the 390th Air Service Group, the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron, and the 1027th Air Matériel Squadron.
Between them they fetched, carried for, and served the 393rd. To police them was the 1395th Military Police Company; supporting them were now some fifty agents from the Manhattan Project. Under Uanna’s instructions, they continued to try to get the airmen to talk about their work, but they rarely succeeded. The word was out: if Wendover was bad, Alaska was worse.
But that did not solve the problems associated with the daily management of some twelve hundred servicemen. There was an outbreak of venereal disease. The security men were concerned that a number of men had shacked up with local married women whose husbands were away in the service. There was a renewed spate of fistfights and drunken brawls in Salt Lake City involving base personnel.
On one memorable night in the city’s Chi Chi Club, a tipsy Captain Eatherly knocked out an infantry major who had ordered him to leave. Eatherly escaped through the club’s back door as MPs arrived at the front.
This time Eatherly avoided arrest. But he was being regularly summoned to Tibbets’s office to explain his misdemeanors. There was a wad of speeding tickets he had collected. Tibbets made him pay. Another incident concerned liquor permits. In Utah a state permit was needed to buy liquor. The permits were good for a bottle a week. Police found Eatherly with fifteen permits. Tibbets blasted his pilot and squared the law.
Eatherly continued to spend many of his nights shooting dice at a hundred dollars a throw at the State Line Hotel in Wendover. Sometimes he lost—and won back—his month’s salary in a few hours. Security agents reported his gambling to Uanna, who complained to Tibbets, “The guy’s a psycho.”
Tibbets said, “Maybe. But he’s a hell of a pilot. That is all that matters.”
Eatherly had demonstrated his flying skill strikingly in mid-November. While he was making a final approach to the field, one of the activating switches in his B-29 went into reverse, a serious mechanical failure. The B-29 began to roll “until it was standing straight up on a wing tip.” Eatherly calmly righted the plane and made a perfect landing.
That night, he lost a sizable sum in a poker game. Eatherly shrugged aside such losses, hinting of a huge ranch back in Texas whose income could meet any of his debts. He claimed he had left the ranch at seventeen to become a pilot, and that he later fought the Japanese in the Pacific. He told the stories well.
Nobody suspected they were pipe dreams, the first signs of the instability which would eventually have Claude Eatherly committed to mental hospitals. His fellow fliers recognized only that he seemed to have a yearning to be famous.
13
Second Lieutenant Tatsuo Yokoyama had allowed a full hour for the walk from his gun battery on Mount Futaba to Hiroshima Castle. There he was due to attend the monthly review of the city’s defenses. He would not be expected to speak, merely to listen as the local commanders discussed the situation. He doubted if any of them even knew his name. That did not upset him; it would be enough if—like last month—the minutes of the meeting were to note again “the alertness of the Mount Futaba battery during practice.”
The days were over when he would arrive at the meeting in a motor-pool car shared with other junior officers. Only the most senior officers were now entitled to use precious gasoline, and then strictly on military business.
Yokoyama did not mind the walk. It was his way of keeping in touch with the changing situation in the city.
The tangle of black-lettered signs directing military traffic to the port were now faded. It was almost three years to the day since the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had boarded his flagship, anchored in Hiroshima Bay along with other Japanese battleships, to hear the first radioed reports from his forces attacking Pearl Harbor and British Malaya. A few days later, he was given the news of the sinking off Singapore of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. But now the revered Yamamoto was dead, killed in 1943 when the plane in which he was traveling was shot down by American fighters, and Hiroshima Harbor contained not one battleship.
Nor were there truckloads of troops winding their way through the streets of Hiroshima to the gaisenkan, the “Hall of Triumphant Return.” Almost every soldier fighting in the Pacific had embarked through Hiroshima’s gaisenkan; now it was empty, waiting for the triumphant return of the troops.
Three years ago, the jetties had been lined with thousands of civilians chanting exhortations to those departing troops; now the only civilians in the area who were not directly employed by the port authority were those tending the vegetable patches that sprouted amidst the cranes and sheds.
Everywhere in the city there were slogans urging people to grow more vegetables, even to cultivate weeds. There were also posted warnings of severe penalties for black-marketeering, profiteering, and spreading irresponsible rumors.
Hiroshima’s narrow streets had undergone changes in this past year. There were fewer trucks, and no taxis; apart from streetcars, bicycling or walking was the only way to get around.
Cafés offered a tasteless green tea, often served lukewarm because of increasing fuel shortages. Coke balls for the hibachi stoves were regularly dampened in water to make them burn longer. Some restaurateurs had devised a method of balling up pages of the city’s newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, dipping the wads in water, and burning them with the coke. Four wadded pages were sufficient to boil a pint of water in ten minutes.
There were thousands of improvised gardens. Flat roofs were coated with layers of soil to raise beans, carrots, squash, spinach, and Chinese cabbages. Wooden barrels, drums, even worn-out pots and pans were used for growing leeks and radishes.
Neighborhood associations had been formed to handle bulk rations, issued only to ticket holders; there were also tickets for free medicine and dental treatment. During the first week of December, the associations would distribute to each family in their care a cake of bean curd, one sardine or small horse mackerel, two Chinese cabbages, five carrots, four eggplants, and half a pumpkin. The stalk end of the pumpkin was highly prized. Usually an inch or two long, it would be thinly sliced and stewed as an extra vegetable.
Bramble shoots were peeled and sucked as a starter; sorrel was soaked in brine and used with a rice substitute for a main course. Reeds from the Ota River were cut and parboiled. Grubs found in fruit bushes and fig trees were boiled and served with imitation soy sauce. Beetles and worms of all kinds were roasted on slivers of wood.