The pictures in front of Beatty had been taken only minutes before via a satellite 22,000 miles above the earth and had been absorbed through a receiving unit, inside of which a sensitized film was developed and prints made. To untrained eyes, the cloud formations would not mean a thing. However, to Beatty, a particular spiral-shaped mass of clouds 300 miles in diameter north of the Gilbert Islands stood out. He had a pretty fair idea what was emerging out there.
Near or on the equator during this time of year, the ocean waters were quite warm. At least eighty degrees. The sun beat down day after day. Water vapor would condense and release its heat into the surrounding air. The air would start to rise and become warmer. As it warmed, it rose all the faster. Then it would pull in more moisture-laden air at sea level, which would rise and release more heat. Soon, a chain reaction would be set in motion, with destructive spiraling winds, huge cumulus clouds, strong rains, and a column of gently descending air in the middle. Add to this an easterly wave — a trough of low pressure — blowing from east to west in the inter-tropical convergence zone along the equator where the opposing winds of the two hemispheres meet, and a polar trough moving from west to east, and you had the makings of a serious tropical disturbance.
Beatty set his coffee cup down. Once he saw the eye of the disturbance, he arrived at only one conclusion.
A typhoon was beginning to spawn.
MARY JANE
At exactly 4:03 hours, the Superfortress navigator eyed his instrument panel from left to right — altimeter, compass, airspeed indicator, and clock. He pressed his intercom button and spoke clearly.
“NAVIGATOR TO COMMANDER. ALTER COMPASS HEADING TO THREE-TWO-TWO.”
“TURNING THREE-TWO-TWO,” a voice replied.
As the navigator jotted the necessary notations in his log, he felt the aircraft climbing in the darkness. The island of Iwo Jima was immediately below them. The original ETA he had given to the commander near Asuncion was only off by one minute. Not bad for two hours flying time.
In the cockpit, the pilot was calling out the altitude for the commander.
“Seven thousand… Eight thousand…”
Once the commander reached the required 9,500 feet, he leveled off.
“Take over will you, Carl,” he said to his pilot.
“Sure.”
“I’m going to make the rounds.”
The commander — Ian Clayton — unstrapped himself from his seat and stretched. Now he would begin the stroll to talk and to check in on each of the other eight crew members, starting with the tail gunner.
In its day, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress was a very unique bomber. To start, the pilot and co-pilot had different titles than was common with other World War Two bomber crews. Aboard the B-29, the pilot was actually called the commander. The co-pilot was the pilot. Many new features were inserted into the Superfortress. It had a pressurized crew compartment in the nose and a pressurized thirty-foot padded crawl tunnel over the huge bomb bay that led to a second pressurized cabin in the rear. On the other B-29s, prior to the atomic missions, five computerized power-driven turrets were aboard where gunners could transfer control to each other. On the 509th bombers, this luxury was removed for the sake of speed and the weight of the atomic bomb, in this case the notorious Fat Baby, the 12,000-pound monster, twelve feet long and twenty-eight inches in diameter.
The bomb bay of every B-29 held a maximum of 20,000 pounds of conventional bombs. The four engines developed 2,200 horsepower each. The wingspan was a then unheard of 141 feet, and by the time it was loaded for a conventional bombing mission, the B-29 could carry an all-up weight of 140,000 pounds. The B-29 altitude reached an impressive 31,000 feet. On March 9, 1945, three hundred B-29s wiped out fifteen square miles of Tokyo in a single incendiary. B-29s also dropped two deadly bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To the Mary Jane crew, the B-29 was the fiercest of all war machines. Most of the earlier bugs, such as engines overheating and catching fire in flight, and windows blowing out at high altitude, had now been dealt with. The Mary Jane crew had learned to cherish the B-29.
In the aft section, Clayton tapped his tail gunner. Sergeant Gabriel Schwartz was a skinny young man who had shot down three ME-109s over Europe with a Liberator squadron, prior to his arrival in the Pacific. In the tight compartment, he was adjusting his gun sight, which controlled a pair of .50-caliber machine guns. When he turned to greet the commander, Schwartz grinned. The small adjustable spotlight on the sight outlined his face and curly hair. Clayton liked him.
“Hi yuh, captain.”
Clayton rested his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “Keep a good eye out there, Gabe. You’re the only eyes in the rear.”
The gunner nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
“This will probably be the last mission anybody carries out in the war. Shoot down two more bogies and you’re an ace.”
“Fat chance of that,” Schwartz laughed.
“You never know. Are you all set to take some good shots of the mushroom cloud?”
“You bet.” Schwartz felt under his seat and yanked out a box camera. “It’s not that great looking, but it gets the job done.”
“Film all loaded up?”
“Ready to go, sir.”
“Good man. See yuh.”
“See yuh, captain.”
Forward from the tail, the radar operator, Sergeant Mark Crosby, out of the corner of his eye saw Clayton open the bulkhead door. Crosby, the only married man aboard and one of the oldest too at twenty-five, was surrounded by mounds of equipment and instruments vital for the third atomic mission. Arranged on the shelves were direction finders, receivers, spectrum analyzers and decoders. His headset could receive different enemy frequencies in each ear. He would soon be listening for any enemy action, in addition to radar signals that could detonate the bomb before arriving at the target of Kyoto. Crosby was seated at his desk, smoking a cigarette, staring into his cylinder-shaped screen, when Clayton approached. The radar image — reflected radio waves that revealed the outlines of land masses — showed a small island passing directly underneath. With Crosby, Clayton peered into the screen to see the geographical image. When he pulled away, Crosby gave him the thumbs up.
The gunners’ compartment behind the trailing edges of the wings was vacant for this trip, in order to keep the weight down. All the gun sights and armor plating had been removed, and the port and starboard blisters plus the central fire control position on top had been taken out and the holes smoothed over. Clayton stepped up to the tunnel opening and began his thirty-foot crawl. He emerged opposite the radio operator’s desk, manned by Staff Sergeant Nevin Brown, an overweight, balding man in a creased baseball cap, reading a pocket book under a dim light. A big band music lover, he adjusted his headphones, gave the commander a wave, and returned to his reading. Diagonal to Brown was the meticulous navigator, Captain Dwight Marshall. He knew his job thoroughly and Clayton trusted the dark, handsome man with his life.
“Right on course, skipper,” Marshall said over the drone of the four engines, calipers in hand. As usual, Marshall sat bent over his desk, where he had a Mercator map spread out. It was his job to guide the mighty B-29 over 1,500 miles of near-open water to the target of Kyoto and back to base again on the tiny island of Tinian. As navigational aids, he relied on dead reckoning (where course, speed, time and wind drift came into play), the star shots of celestial navigation, and reports from the radar navigator.