He called the airport’s control tower. There was no reply.
As he got closer, Fuchida saw that Hiroshima, the city he had left only the afternoon before, “was simply not there anymore. Huge fires rose up in all quarters. But most of these fires seemed not to be consuming buildings; they were consuming debris.”
Fuchida would have no conscious recollection of landing his plane on the runway, the same one from which Yasuzawa had made his epic takeoff. His next memory would be walking toward the airport exit, immaculately dressed in his white uniform, shoes, and gloves, and coming face-to-face with “a procession of people who seemed to have come out of Hell.”
Horrified, Fuchida walked into Hiroshima. The dead and the dying clogged the gutters, floated in the rivers, blocked the streets. Near the city’s center, whole areas had simply disappeared; for at least a square mile, “nothing remained.” Utterly depressed and exhausted by what he could see, Fuchida wandered aimlessly through the wasteland.
8
The Enola Gay was 363 miles from Hiroshima when Caron reported that the mushroom cloud was no longer visible. Only then did Tibbets catnap, leaving Lewis to fly the plane.
At 2:20 P.M., Tinian time, Tibbets was awakened by Farrell calling from North Field tower to offer his congratulations. Refreshed after a can of fruit juice, Tibbets took over flying the bomber. At 2:58 P.M., the Enola Gay touched down at North Field. She had been in the air for twelve hours and thirteen minutes.
Two hundred officers and men were crowded on the macadam to greet her. Several thousand more lined the taxiways.
They cheered when Tibbets led the crew down through the hatch behind the nose wheel. All were swamped by cameramen and well-wishers. A brigadier general ordered the crowds back. Into the space he had cleared stepped General Spaatz. He walked up to Tibbets and pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on the breast of his coveralls. The two men separated, still not having spoken, and saluted each other. Then Spaatz turned and led away a coterie of high-ranking officers. The others again swarmed around the fliers and plied them with questions.
An officer took Caron’s camera. The photographs were processed and rushed to Washington for worldwide distribution.
Another officer took Beser’s wire recorder. The recordings vanished.
The debriefing was a relaxed, informal affair, helped along by generous shots of bourbon and free cigarettes. By the time it was over, Perry’s party was in full swing.
Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter. All Paul Tibbets and the other men on the Enola Gay wanted to do was sleep.
Aftermath
AUGUST 7
TO MIDDAY, AUGUST 15, 1945
1
By the morning of August 7, news had trickled through to the Japanese leaders that Hiroshima had been hit by a new kind of bomb. They were told the destruction caused was very great but, in devastated Tokyo, the reports sounded distressingly familiar.
President Truman’s statement describing the weapon in some detail, which had been released to an astounded world and a delirious American public the day before, was then broadcast to Japan. It was dismissed by many politicians as propaganda. The Japanese public was told nothing by its leaders.
Worldwide reaction was mixed.
The Vatican condemned the new bomb as a “catastrophic conclusion to the war’s apocalyptic surprises.” A spokesman compared the bomb’s invention with that of the submarine by Leonardo da Vinci and expressed regret that the nuclear scientists did not, like da Vinci, “destroy their creation in the interest of humanity.”
In Britain, the government welcomed the bomb as a means of speedily ending the war. H. G. Wells, who had forecast atomic bombs twelve years earlier in his book The Shape of Things to Come, remarked, “This can wipe out everything bad, or good, in this world. It is up to the people to decide which.”
In a Luxembourg prison camp, top-ranking Nazi war criminals—among them Göring, von Ribbentrop, and Field Marshal Keitel—agreed that warfare had reached a turning point. Von Ribbentrop, the former foreign minister, said, “No one would be so stupid as to start a war now. It is the opportunity for mankind to end war forever.”
In the Soviet Union, the media did not rate the atomic bomb worthy of headline news. While expressing “interest in the new weapon,” radio and newspaper reports stressed that Russian scientists were also “well advanced in atomic research.”
In Washington, D.C., senators called on the newly created United Nations to ensure that the “peace-loving nations share the benefits of the discovery that led to the bomb.”
What most everyone agreed on was that the world would never be quite the same again.
When the Japanese Cabinet learned about the bomb, Major General Arisue was chosen to head a group of high-ranking officers and scientists to go to Hiroshima to investigate. Among the scientists was Professor Asada, the physicist who had worked on Japan’s atomic bomb and who was still perfecting his death ray.
In Hiroshima, with the mayor dead, Field Marshal Hata took over administrative control of the city. He himself had been only superficially injured, although his wife was severely burned. Hata moved his headquarters to the underground bunker cut into the side of Mount Futaba.
Many of his senior officers were dead. Prince RiGu and his white stallion were gone; so, too, Colonel Katayama, whose horse had been found compressed to half its breadth in a crack in the ground. Hata’s orders were relayed through Colonel Imoto, who, although badly injured, was the field marshal’s highest-ranking surviving officer.
Relief workers were slow to arrive in Hiroshima. The first help came from the soldiers based at Ujina. The harbor was over two miles from the epicenter, and little damage was done to it. Marines collected the explosive-filled suicide boats, prepared for the American invasion, from the coves around Hiroshima Harbor. The small craft were emptied of their charges, lashed together, and covered with planks. Raftlike, they moved slowly up the rivers to Hiroshima’s center, collecting wounded and taking them to the military hospital at Ujina. The boats’ passage was hampered by the dead bodies in the rivers; the corpses floated in and out with the tide for days.
The fate of the American prisoners of war is not certain. Two were reported to have been escorted, wounded but able to walk, to Ujina. One was seen under a bridge, apparently dying, wearing only a pair of red-and-white underpants. Two were said to have been battered to death in the castle grounds by their captors.
Warrant Officer Hiroshi Yanagita, the Kempei Tai leader, was still suffering from a hangover when the bomb exploded. Less than half a mile from the epicenter, he was thrown naked from the bed in his second-floor room. The house was on fire. He went to the window and jumped—only to find the house had collapsed and his room was at street level. Dressed in a sheet, skirting the edge of the city, Yanagita made his way to Ujina. There he collected some clothes and ten soldiers, and went to the leveled site where Hiroshima Castle once stood. He saw no American POWs. But when he reached his divisional Kempei Tai headquarters in the west of the city, one of his men told him he had tried to bring two prisoners to the headquarters but, finding it impossible, had left them by the Aioi Bridge. There, one person reported seeing them, hands tied behind their backs, being stoned to death.
American records so far available show that at least pilot Thomas Cartwright and tail gunner William Abel survived the war. Both were awarded the Purple Heart. Cartwright’s commission terminated in 1953. Abel retired from the American forces in 1968. It is possible that they, and indeed other POWs, had been moved from Hiroshima before the bomb fell.