Hiroshima: Dropping The Bomb

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Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray, James Holland, and with our special guest, Ian McGregor, for part two of special bombing mission number 13, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

And Ian, in the last episode, you took us through the physics of the thing, through the establishment of the Manhattan Project via tube alloys, the development of the B-29, which is as critical to this story as any other part of it.

Because otherwise, what are you going to do?

Stick it in a Lancaster?

Yep.

Well, they had that discussion.

Paul Tibbetts Jr.

has formed the 509th Composite Group.

He's got them ready.

And they've arrived on Tinian, haven't they?

They're there.

Yep.

They're there.

They're ready to go.

The targets have been selected.

The principal, primary target, secondary target, and a tertiary target.

So there's lots of contingency built into this.

And I think the thing that was really striking at the end of the last episode was the fact that these are tests still.

Neil Armstrong referred to the Apollo 11 moon landing as a test flight.

They were seeing if they could do it or not.

And this is sort of peculiarly kind of in the same spirit, isn't it?

This is...

right on the edge of what they think they can do.

Will it work?

This is why these cities have been selected because they've not been bombed before.

So you could, you know, it's a blank sheet of paper in that regard for the new weapon.

So what are their orders for this bombing mission?

You said they've been on Tinian Air Base for a couple of months.

And we should just say, for those who don't know, Tinian is an island in the Marianas.

We have talked about its capture in 1944 in an earlier episode.

It's roughly about 1500 miles to the southeast of the Japanese home island.

So perfect launch pad for conventional bombing.

And Timmit's had the 509th now on Tinian, tucked away in their secret part of the base, armed guards, barbed wire.

And yeah, it's

must have been surreal life there on basically a rocky atoll where the runways just basically compressed coral, largest runways in the world.

They have been training, they've been training both on dropping what they call pumpkins, which are dud bombs or made-up bombs that are the same weight, about 4,000 kilograms, just so the crews can get used to taking off and landing with that kind of weight in the bombay.

And they've even gone over to the south island of Japan because part of the top secretness of the operation was he wanted the Japanese not to think it's strange that single B-29s were coming across into Japanese aerospace on the home islands in the south.

So again, they were doing that, just doing practice runs.

Incredible.

Yeah, very well planned.

And he wanted to get the crews there too.

So yeah, the primary target, when Curtis LeMay himself, who was now running the 20th Bomber Command, so he's the big cheese in that part of the Pacific.

And I did detect that when I was doing the research.

There's definitely a hierarchy, political hierarchy within the military of who gets to say what to whom, who finds out, etc., etc.

And that's why

when LeMay gives Special Mission Number 13 to Tibbets, he tells him, you know, this order has been given to 32 other commanders around various bases in the near vicinity of the area, including Iwo Jima, etc., etc.

And it's showing that the primary target is going to be Hiroshima, an urban industrial area and key military command center, has a population of about 300,000.

Secondary target will be Kokura, which has huge, bigger than Hiroshima, but huge weapons arsenal, military facilities, depots, that kind of thing.

It's a central hub.

And then the tertiary target is Nagasaki, which was to the north of where they were going to bomb Hiroshima.

major port, major shipbuilding area, industrial hub.

And what we will see when we look at both bombings is with, I think, what would condemn Hiroshima is the fact that it's built on a vast plain that runs out into the sea.

So it's split by several rivers.

So the bomb blast is going to be huge because it's just going to boom, decimate it.

Whereas Nagasaki is built on a series of rolling hills, which can contain the blast.

And I suppose Tibbets and the crew are happy in terms of within a 50-mile radius of their operational flights.

There's going to be no other friendly aircraft that are going to clear the skies of any Japanese interceptions.

And crucially, the US Navy has promised them that there will be almost like a safety blanket of ships and submarines that are going to take them all the way through just past Okinawa in case they have to ditch in the sea.

So that's ostensibly what he's been told.

And then he will brief.

the crews that are going to go, not just on the strike plane, but on the planes that are going to accompany his plane and then the weather planes too.

And the bomb itself has arrived.

This uranium gun fission bomb, which is the you fire the two pieces or one piece of uranium into the other to create a critical mass and to get the bomb to go fissile.

Exactly, yeah.

It's a charge of cordite that's fired through a hollow cylinder of U-235.

It goes through the artillery barrel and into

a much bigger solid cylinder of U-235 and that's what's going to create the explosion.

And an interesting anecdote, again, from the research when I was at Los Alamos, is 64 kilograms of enriched U235 were in that bomb and only 1.7% of it fissioned.

What?

Yeah, the rest of it was just destroyed in a conventional,

the rest of it just blew up.

Right.

As fragment didn't ignite.

So only 1.7% of that enriched uranium in Little Boy did that damage to Hiroshima.

Dear God.

Wow, that's absolutely amazing.

Imagine if the whole thing that, and if anyone, again, anyone's listening that's been to Hiroshima, you'll know it's just a fantastically beautiful mountain range surround the city like a horse in a horseshoe formation.

Yeah, I thought that.

I just thought, well, that mountain range wouldn't be there for a start.

No.

Well, you think it would have destroyed that as well?

Yeah.

Well, and the other interesting thing about it is that although it's called Little Boy, it's actually quite a big boy because it's 12 feet long.

It's got a diameter of 28 inches.

It's over £9,000, which in modern money is about four and a half tons.

Cylindrical of a pretty blunt nose, isn't it?

And it's got the four stabilising tailfins.

The bulk of it had been shipped out famously or infamously on the USS Indianapolis.

So that's the mechanical parts to actually construct the bomb.

And then the main fissile material that was flown out later.

So it's all put together on Tinian.

Yeah, yeah.

So within Tibbett's secret base, within the base of 20th Bomber Command, the one that's got ultimate security.

I mean, they even frisk Curtis LeMay when he wants to go in there to have a look at the bomb.

They say, well, you're not coming, you know, give me your cigar, you're not having that.

It's in the weapons pit technical area, and that's where the weapon is from the Manhattan Project are there too.

Within the overall command, there is no, as we would see it, a logical military command structure within that area.

It's called the Tinian Chiefs, and they're the ones that are going to give the go-ahead for Tibbets to actually launch the strike.

The mission orders have come through, but they'll decide when it's ready to go.

And they were made up of of a team of air chiefs and scientists from the Manhattan Project.

So they were the ones deciding to go.

And that's famously where they have the arguments.

It's like you just described, Jim, about the bomb.

The bomb's so big.

They're just worried because they've seen it with conventional bombing of B-29s taking off from this runway.

the sea around the islands littered with wrecks from those that have either crashed on takeoff or crashed on landing.

There's a genuine fear from the Manhattan Project team that are there, especially one of the key weaponers, Captain Deke Parsons of the US Navy.

He's the one who's going to arm the bomb on the Enola Gay.

He's raised his hand and said, you know, I am genuinely worried that we shouldn't be taking off with the bomb armed because if anything happens, I mean, it's such a crude thing.

Yeah.

I'm still reading from your only 1.7% of his explosive power being used.

I mean,

holy moly.

But yes, I mean, he's concerned that if they crash,

the bomb will detonate, right?

And destroy Tinian and any variant in between rather than rather than on the target right exactly that's a genuine concern they listened to him the the tinian chief listened to him said yeah okay so what we'll do is once you do take off you'll get to a cruising altitude roughly around 5 000 feet and that's where you can crawl back through the the crawl space from the cockpit into the bomb bay and and arm the bomb and again

very, very fortunate to get access to that B-29 at RAF Duxford.

And I crawled through.

well,

I looked, I didn't crawl through it, I looked through the crawl space and I said, God, I wouldn't want to go through there.

No.

It's

very claustrophobic.

Yeah.

Not just that.

You're arming the world's first atomic bomb that's going to be dropped on a military target.

I mean, imagine if you had the shakes.

Exactly.

He's literally in the bomber at 5,000 feet, crawled through, got into the bomb bay.

There are, I mean, in the Second World War, I mean, I know people do amazing things all the time.

There are

what people were asked to do and expected to do in the Second World War is quite astonishing, isn't it?

And this has got to be right up there.

Yeah, military orders hadn't got up to speed with technology in terms of, you know, I mean,

that is literally kissing your ass goodbye.

That's exactly the point that Al has made repeatedly: that technology has got ahead of man's capability to actually manage and operate these things.

Yeah, yeah, well ahead at this point.

Now, the plane,

famously, the Enola Gay, but what I mean, what I didn't realise is famously cancelled by Doge.

It's fallen foul of Doge and all that sort of stuff.

But it wasn't called the Enola Gay, was it?

It's a renaming, right?

The crew that are going to go with Tibbets, it was ostensibly the crew.

The key people, Navigator Bombardier, Faraday and Van Kirk.

Those three guys were like brothers.

It's like band of brothers.

They trained and flown with each other throughout the European campaign, North Africa.

So So when Tibbett was given this, you know, do not pass go ticket in terms of I can just choose whoever I want, or get out of jail free cut, I should say, I can choose whoever I want.

He was always going to choose those guys to be in the team.

And even though they went through this process of selection, those guys were always going to be with him on the final mission.

So yeah, it's his co-pilot, Lewis, Captain Lewis, it was his plane.

Right.

There was 15 planes in the squadron and his plane was just in very good condition in terms of, you it had the right bombay, the engines had been tuned to perfection.

I mean, it was just ready to go as a strike aircraft.

So Tibbetts was going to take it.

Lewis thought he would be

the pilot, realized once they're getting the briefing that that's not going to happen.

And then to rub salt into the wounds, once he strolls past his plane on the tarmac, on the loading area, he sees that, what's that name?

You know, Lagay, who's who said he could have that?

So he does have a stand-up row.

I'm sorry on his side on this one.

Yeah, he just, you know, he just tells him straight,

I'm flying the plane, I'm commander of the operation,

I'm putting my name on the plane.

I didn't think you mind.

And if you do, tough.

It's staying there.

I can see why Lewis is a bit peeved.

Yeah, well, they never got on after the war.

And then he also tells him to get his hands off the goddamn stick when they're taxiing out on the runway because he said, I'm flying the plane.

But again, you've got to admire, at least he tells him, he tells him straight, no messing, just let's just get on with the mission.

Know your place.

So yeah, it's the Enola Gay, which is named after Tibbets' mother.

Right.

And she was happy about that.

In later life, she was happy that he'd named the plane after him.

She was fine with it.

Extraordinary.

And they changed the markings on the aircraft as well, because the five and ninth planes all have an arrowhead insignia on them.

But for this, they've been replaced with an R.

And this is from the sixth bomb group.

This is to sort of befuddle Japanese identification.

Yeah, that's just taking security to the nth degree.

Because as we know, the Japanese were so good on intelligence.

They kind of knew that, yeah, they kind of knew that

they weren't going to get attacked, really.

They were confident that was going to happen.

That was an issue.

So, yeah, they changed it.

Well, so by the afternoon of the 5th of August,

the mission crews have been brought together, they're assembled.

There's armed.

I mean, the idea of this kind of security when you are in the middle of nowhere on an island that you know everyone who's come in and come out of, I think it's sort of, it's not comical, but it does feel a little tiny bit over the top.

And also way too late after all, because as you say, Fuchs has penetrated the Manhattan Project and the people who really don't want to know about this, the Soviets, know all about it.

They lay out the orders for the sortie and it's like any bombing mission, right?

That's all kind of standard, really, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, but to be fair, I was going to say that the majority of the crews hadn't, a lot of them hadn't been in action.

Obviously, Tibbets, Van Kirk and Ferribe had.

They'd seen a lot of action.

but there was a great many of those crews from the 509th that had just been plucked from training straight away and then gone straight into 509th because they showed an aptitude skill level-wise in that unit.

And so many testimonies that I read at the World War II Museum in New Orleans testified to that.

They hadn't actually seen any combat action.

That's amazing, isn't it?

And B-29, slightly large crew, 11 men rather than 10?

Yeah, yeah.

So

there was various elements there.

Yeah, they took two weaponiers.

Captain Parsons was the chief weaponer.

He'd armed the bomb with Lieutenant Morris Jepson.

So they had both been assigned and come down from Los Alamos.

They'd been involved in the production of Little Boy as well.

They from the military side of things.

I suppose you could say Groves' eyes and ears in the plane, and they would arm the bomb.

Wow.

So, yeah, the Anella Gates radio call sign was changed again, security measure, from Victor 82 to Dimples 82 to minimize radio detection by the Japanese.

I mean, did they sleep that night?

I mean, well, no, no, I mean, they were going to go after midnight.

So they were told to go to the bottom of the corner.

So the briefings are done on the afternoon of August the 5th.

Yeah, they have two briefings, one in the afternoon, then one closer in the evening.

But the ironic thing is, Tibbets tells them to go away and get some sleep, and then he himself goes and plays cards all night.

Because, again, he's just that kind of guy.

Why would he sleep?

He's going to be leading this mission.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, ominously, I suppose, two things.

The scientists, Professor Ramsey from the Manhattan Project, who's been assigned to Tinian, then gives out the crews the famous welder's goggles with Polaroid lenses.

And he's telling the crews, you're going to see a blinding flash of light brighter than the sun.

So you have to wear these.

Don't look directly into the explosion.

And equally, and this was only found out after the war, is the surgeon on the base then secretly gives Tibbets a stash of cyanide pills.

The reason is that you're not to be taken alive.

If anything goes wrong with the mission and you have to ditch, or God forbid, you had to crash land in Japan, none of you can be taken alive.

And the crew didn't even know that.

God.

Wow.

But just to be clear, they do know they're dropping an atomic bomb.

They know that they're dropping a new weapon of untold power and scale of destruction.

They know that.

Yeah, that's the speech he gives to them right towards the end where they're in the crew hut.

He's saying, we're dropping

a new weapon, a super weapon that could potentially end the war.

So up until this point, it's a bit bit like the dams right they don't know they know they've got a secret mission but they don't know what it is you know because they've been practicing for the last few weeks with what i was saying this this pumpkin they knew they're dropping an enormous bomb and i i would imagine a lot of them are aware of what the ref was dropping in europe tall boys and that kind of thing the multiple bomb bays the ordinary b-29 would have has been elongated to where it's just one bombay 33 foot long so they know we're taking something big yeah so it's 11 p.m on the night of the 5th of august they're kind of getting ready to go and it's paul tibbets who delivers the final remarks and he gets the crew along and he says says tonight is the night we've all been waiting for our long months of training are to be put to the test this bomb is unlike anything the world has ever seen it's incredible he's telling the truth isn't he this what's peculiar about this very often you you read of people briefing crews and geeing their men up with sort of well what we can do is we're going to make all the difference this is actually one of those occasions where they're not lying, right?

Yeah, and

again, if you equate it, say, for instance, to D-Day, if you're getting that kind of briefing, you're surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of your fellow, you know, it could be paratroopers, marines, infantrymen, whatever.

See yourself as part of this huge armada, whereas you're in this Nissan hut, baking Nissan hut on Tinian at night, a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and you're sitting there.

You know, I don't know how many were in that hut, but I can't imagine it was more than three dozen.

And you're being told what you're about to do could end the war.

Yeah.

And I'm sure some of them felt immensely privileged.

I'm sure some of them were absolutely wanting to go to the toilet.

But again, he'd driven them for the past almost year training and all that tension I was talking about on the base and with security and everything else.

They were probably like, let's just get it on.

Let's just get out there and do it.

So 1.45 a.m., August the 6th.

It's now, you know, we've gone past midnight, so it's the 6th of August.

Crew gathering on the tarmac, lights illuminating the Enola Gay.

There's some reporters and senior Manhattan project officers there to kind of document every moment.

It's actually a 12-man crew on this case rather than a normal 11-man crew for a B-29, including the co-pilot Robert Lewis, including the bombardier Major Tom Ferribe.

The navigator is Van Kirk.

Weaponier is Captain Parsons.

He's the man who's got to kind of make it live at 5,000 feet.

And the assistant weaponier is Lieutenant Morris Jepson.

Presumably that's where you get

your extra man from, is it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And one name I didn't put in the list, but we'll talk about later, is Sergeant Bob Caron, because he's in the rear gunner's position of the Enola Gay.

He would see what the bomb was doing because obviously Tibbetts has done a handbrake turn.

He's running hell file.

Final checks, 2.45 a.m.

Tibbetts takes the stick himself.

Dimples 8-2 to to North Tinian Tower, ready for takeoff.

And off they go, climbing into the darkness.

And ahead of them are three weather reconnaissance planes, which is part of this picture that they've been creating for the Japanese.

There's just planes spoofing them and doing recce and so on.

That's straight flush who flies over Hiroshima.

Jabbit 3 goes to Kokura.

Full house goes to Nagasaki.

And those are the three target cities, possible target cities.

And they're going to radio back and say where the weather's favourable and then direct Enola Gay to that target.

And at 6:07 a.m., straight flush confirms clear skies over Hiroshima seeding the target.

And I think that's where we shall take a break before we get to Hiroshima itself and this epochal moment.

Well, it could hardly be more tense, could it?

I mean, my nerves are jangling just thinking about it, to be honest.

Brilliant.

Well, we'll see you in a moment.

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Welcome back to Weird Ways to Make You Talk with me, Al Murray, James Holland, and Ian McGregor.

And Straight Flush has reported back though, Hiroshima.

The skies are clear over Hiroshima and it's a suitable target.

It's a long flight flight though, isn't it?

I mean, it's 1500 miles.

Although the B-29's quick for its type, that's still a long schlep, isn't it?

Yeah, but I was going to say, when I interviewed Paul Tibbets, his grandson, he said, his grandfather said to him many times, it was the easiest mission he ever flew.

And you can imagine all the dozens and dozens of combat missions Paul Tibbets flew over Europe.

He was in some horrific grades, wasn't he, watching planes get shot down.

But he said, yeah, it was it because it was the organization the planning uh the complete lack of any japanese air defense yeah and it was a six hours to the target 15 minutes over the target to drop the bomb and then six hours back it's very silent tense and professional on the journey in and they're all wearing shirt sleeve order presumably Yeah, and on the journey back, it was very much not

excited or

fist pumping, but positive just conversations amongst the whole crew saying, well, the war's over.

Parsons and Jepson have got to crawl into the bombay and arm little boy, this huge boy.

And, you know, crikey, I mean, nerves jangling.

I mean, this is not a, you know, I'm thinking of the kind of, you know, UXB boy sort of, you know, hovering over the right wire.

It's all, it's that kind of stuff, isn't it?

I mean, just imagine.

And you're moving, you know, you're at 5,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.

There's no margin for error at all.

And as we said, the size of the bomb as well.

Parsons and Jepson have basically got to take out the four green connectors and put in the powder charges and then hook it up to the release wires.

So when the bomb drops, obviously the wires comes out, activates

the radar altmeters in Little Boy, which will then detonate the bomb when it reaches a certain altitude.

So it's programmed.

to explode roughly 1,925 feet.

He's got, as you just said, he's got to do that in flight, take out one plug, replace it it with the next, then connect the wires again.

Yeah, and I love this line.

Van Kirk asks Parsons what would happen if any of the green lights are reactivated and Parsons just goes, we're in a hell of a lot of trouble.

That's the understatement of the war, I think.

Yeah.

In Hiroshima, well, it's an August morning.

There's been sirens sounded.

We've established here, they're used to planes appearing, but air raid sirens amounting to nothing, basically.

Yeah, I mean, the city suffered very little damage.

It's been shot up I think twice in 1944 from carrier-based fighter planes but just being strafed by fighter planes isn't going to cause that much damage.

I think several people are killed from a couple of bombs being dropped a few months before that but that was it.

That's all they've seen.

And if anything the population of the city had slightly increased because of other uh refugees coming from cities that had been bombed.

But just so if listeners don't know the importance of Hiroshima, I'd already said it was a central hub, but you've got to remember that the port and the arsenal next to the port was very significant for the Japanese war efforts.

So, you know, the Japanese Pacific Fleet that attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbor to start the war, they'd left from Hiroshima.

Most of the Japanese troops fighting on the Chinese mainland had left from Hiroshima.

So you can see why the Americans definitely had a reason to bomb it.

But like you said, yes, it's August, very hot, humid morning, clear blue sky.

I'd imagine half the workforce who'd got up are bleary-eyed because they'd been up that night because there'd been this scare because one of the weather planes had gone over.

They just, you know, panicked thinking it's an air raid that's finally come.

That's what the Enola gay is flying over to.

It's just a city waking up and going to work, going about its ordinary business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What are people doing?

You know, school kids, are they going to school or is it the summer holidays?

No, no, no.

I'd say from about

10, 11 years up, most children aren't at school.

That was one of the things I talk about in the book where the civil authorities are arguing with the military authorities because they're two things.

They're drawing more children, young teenagers, into the armaments, cottage industry around and within Hiroshima, but also they're drafting a lot of kids to work with the militia teams to create fire breaks.

Again, it's just insane.

We haven't built any long-term strategy for air raid shelters for the civilian populations.

We've underfunded the fire service.

But I know because the Americans are bombing the country to bits bits with incendiaries, we'll create fire breaks that will save us.

So that's what they were doing that morning.

A lot of teenage children were helping the authorities doing what they've been doing for weeks.

But yeah, it's just an ordinary day.

And a lot of people are just trying to survive because the rice ration's been cut again, because more military are moving into Hiroshima and around the vicinity.

So civilian food supplies, sparse as they were, are now being

pared down again.

So yeah, there's just a lot of, I'd say, depression is the right word.

judging by the interviews that I read, I had with people, it's just starving.

You know, 88% of the economy is now focused on defense by this point.

Japan is absolutely up the creek without a paddle.

It is terrible, the conditions in Japan at this, by this point.

I mean, truly, truly horrific.

Operation Starvation,

which is the, I mean, the American blockade of the, they're not gilding that, Lily, are they?

I mean, extraordinary.

But as far as everyday normal routine can exist in a nation that's sort of bludgeoned and beaten by war, that's what state it's in on the morning.

It's unsuspecting.

It's everyday and comparatively normal within that caveat of normality.

Here we are at the approach.

And, you know, this is 30,000 feet.

I mean, this is seriously high.

I mean, if you think of sort of most heavy bombers over Germany, it's sort of somewhere between sort of 18 to 24,000 feet, something like that, that they're dropping bombs.

So this is quite substantially higher.

You think an airliner is usually operating at somewhere between 35 and 37,000 feet a day.

So, you know, six miles up up or whatever.

So, you know, this is really, really seriously high.

So city's landmarks, you know, you can still see it very clear.

It's nice and clear, isn't it?

There's not hardly any cloud at all.

Yep, perfect conditions for bombing.

You know, you could say that's sealed their fate.

So bombardier Tom Theraby, he's been doing hours and hours and hours of training.

for the bomb run on Hiroshima using the northern bomb site, looking for the T-shaped AO bridge in the heart of the city.

That's his target to drop the bomb.

And that's where he wants, you know, Tibbets to guide him to.

And again, it's perfect weather conditions.

So they've got a good, very clear run at this.

Tibbets orders, put on your goggles.

Yeah, and they all do.

There's an autopilot, isn't there, on the plane?

Yeah, the whole thing in American aircraft, isn't it, where you had over the Bombardier as the pilot.

Yeah.

He steers it in on the bomb site.

So at 8.15 Hiroshima time, Ferribe releases Little Boy.

The bomb falls for 43 seconds and spinning, and it has an altimeter in it.

This is the point, because what they want is they want an airburst to maximize the effect of the bomb.

They don't want it hurtling down and burying itself in the earth and detonating.

They want maximum bang for their buck here, don't they?

And so the altimeter triggers the detonation.

The uranium is fired from one end of the bomb to the other.

It goes fissile, though nowhere near as much as it could have done, as you pointed out earlier, which is just absolutely boggling.

And you get an explosion which is roughly 15 kilotons of TNT.

Yeah,

Truman actually stated it was 20,000 tons.

They actually didn't know.

And it was only when they sent in teams after the war.

And then research over the next three or four decades was the reason why we've come to the decision that it's around about 15,000 tons.

There's a brilliant white flash that lights up the sky.

Massive fireball and then the shockwave, which spreads outwards at supersonic speed.

Yeah.

How many people are killed?

It is really hard to know, isn't it?

Because within a mile of ground zero, people are basically being vaporised, aren't they?

They're being completely evaporated

by the sheer heat of the bomb going off, right?

There's a kind of question mark at the center of where the bomb goes off, isn't there?

Yeah, because they were aiming for the bridge and it's roughly three, 400 meters away.

I mean, still a good aim.

But yeah, I mean, within a half mile radius, everything's gone.

The surface temperature on ground zero is the surface temperature of the sun, just a little bit hotter than that, several thousand degrees.

Jesus.

If that doesn't kill you, the shockwave's going to kill you because then that's when the radiation's kicking into.

The fireball consumes everything within about a mile and a half radius.

I put somewhere within a three-mile radius, over 80% of housing.

was destroyed and that creates the fireball.

And some of the testimonies I took from the eyewitnesses said it was the fireball that was more terrifying because it's, you know, it's a couple of hundred feet high and it's literally surrounding them.

Where do they go?

And as you saw with some of the bombing in like Hamburg and Cologne and elsewhere, there's several rivers split Hiroshima like fingers that run out to the sea.

People are jumping in the rivers and then they're just being boiled because of the heat, the intense heat that's caused the rivers to basically boil.

Most of the people that survive in that three-mile radius, primarily it's because the building's fallen on them.

They just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

The roof falls down on them and protects them from the heat blast, protects them from the fireball by some miracle.

Just extraordinary.

Yeah, one of the key characters in the book, book, the mayor of Roshman, he does die instantly because, you know, the mayor's residence is a two-minute walk away from ground zero, so it gets flattened.

Him and his family are killed, but his wife happened to be out in the back garden just praying and the house fell on her and created an air gap.

So she survived.

But radiation poisoning would kill her later.

Dear God.

Somewhere between 66 and 75,000 people die.

when the bombs dropped and then double that in the next week or two weeks, three weeks, people dying of injuries, blood loss, and then when radiation poisoning obviously starts to kick in.

Yeah.

Yeah, the shadows of vaporized people burned into the concrete is just extraordinary, isn't it?

And there are, I think, I can't remember how many, it's two dozen American POWs are outside Hiroshima Castle tidying the grounds.

And Hiroshima Castle is, again, it's a stone's throw away from where Ground Zero would have been, a couple of minutes' walk.

So, yeah, they're instantly killed.

The Shima Surgical Hospital has completely ceases to exist.

Literally underneath Ground Zero, the bomb explodes above it.

And that's one of the key things.

It's all utilities destroyed.

20 out of 23 hospitals destroyed.

90% of doctors killed or wounded or die of their wounds.

93% of nurses killed or die of their wounds.

All the fire teams, like the Great Fire of Tokyo, all fire teams decimated.

So even if you wanted to do something, there's nothing you can do.

It's just a dystopian destruction on a level no one's seen.

Yeah.

And Tibbets, in the meantime, has turned 180 degrees.

So it's in his rearview mirror, really, isn't it?

The tailgunner sees this.

There's other aircraft in the sky watching.

So Necessary Evil, one of the observer planes, sees the mushroom cloud and it climbs past 45,000 feet.

Column of fire, essentially.

And the wind you get being drawn into it is also part of what's killing people, isn't it?

There's stuff flying around, rubble flying around, smashing people to pieces.

And they send a radio confirmation, mission successful, effects greater than Alamogordo, proceeding to base.

So Alamogordo is the place in the New Mexican desert where they've done Trinity Test, basically.

So that's what he's referring to.

Yeah.

There's two shockwaves that hit Leonola Gay as they're heading home.

Tibbets turns the plane towards the open sea.

There are no enemy fighters, just the cloud behind them.

I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary.

And this is one of the things I think research can pop up.

Like Like I was telling you about the 1.7% of U-235 that fissioned.

Famously, Captain Lewis in the Enola Gays log said, oh my God, what have we done?

So he wrote that when they returned to base and they're met by the, you know, the world's press and every general in the Pacific, I think, was there to greet them.

And that's gone down in history as that's that was his opinion.

But then I heard several audio testimonies from some of the crew in the audio archive of New Orleans.

And Van Kirk said, what he actually did was jump out of his seat and shout, look at that son of a bitch, go.

So it just, I'm sure he had two reactions because he must have had six hours coming back thinking, yeah, what have we done?

And so

I'm not questioning that what he put in the log was true, but his initial reaction was something quite different.

Well, and Tibbets recalls saying it, doesn't he?

And he says the giant purple mushroom, which Karen had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, three miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive.

It was a frightening sight.

And even though we were several miles away, it gave the appearance of something that was about to engulf us.

If Dante had been with us in the plane, he'd have been terrified.

So they get back at 2.58 p.m.

to Tinian, Tinian time.

That's a 12-hour round trip.

Enoligay lands on the Coral Air Strip at Northfield.

And obviously, there's a reception committee, isn't there?

Because, I mean, the reporters that are there, they're embedded Manhattan Project people, aren't they?

they that are part of the not propaganda effort isn't quite the right quite the right word but the the sort of how they're how they're going to publicly interface using the atomic bomb uh with the media and you've got scientists fellow airmen but what's the atmosphere when they land is it are people high-fiving each other or is it I mean, did people high-five each other in the 40s?

There's a question.

Well, yeah, I think it's different to when, obviously, they took off.

When they're coming into land, there's hundreds of airmen lining the

runway behind the fence.

When they're taxiing in, there's a lot more airmen and airbase crews running towards the plane.

You know, there's a lot of generals waiting to say hello to them and admirals and pump their hands and everything else.

Thomas Farrell's there, obviously General LeMay's there.

I would say for the Enola Gay crew, it's relief.

Yeah.

With a bit, there must have been some euphoria because they're on a mission.

And, you know, we've got the hindsight of a nuclear holocaust.

They don't.

They just think

they've dropped a super weapon and it's worked and the mission's gone correctly.

But it's just a different vibe.

Because I would argue again that judging by a lot of the testimonies, they all think the war's over.

They think there's no way they can withstand this.

You know, we drop a few more of those on.

And that's the almost comical conversation Tibbets has with LeMay, because LeMay is out of the circle of trust.

He's not involved in the Manhattan Project, much to his chagrin.

He wants to be involved.

And he says to Tibbets, have we got any more of those?

And he's like, well, yeah, we are making more.

And he said, well, get them over here.

Well, let's just finish the job.

So very pragmatic.

Everyone's aware that, as Jim said, everything's changed.

The whole dynamic of how the war is going to end has changed.

And it starts to spread around the world, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

one of the things I think is remarkable about this is this is the world's most secret project.

Obviously, it's until you drop it.

And then you have to say what it is.

Or the Japanese might not get the message and might not understand what the Americans are saying to them by using the atomic bomb.

And, you know, this is in the light of the Potsdam Declaration, where Japan's been warned of prompt and utter destruction if it did not surrender.

So the Americans have demonstrated exactly that, haven't they, with the bomb?

Stimson briefs Truman because

he's coming back from Potsdam on the USS Augusta.

Stimson briefs Truman and I think this is amazing.

Truman reportedly says, this is the greatest thing in history.

Well, he actually stands on his chair with both, he's got a communique from Simpson and he's, to corroborate it, he's got a coded communique from Groves.

Yeah, obviously both saying the same thing.

And he's like this.

This is the greatest news in history.

And he's right.

I mean, there's a few more twists and turns,

as we know.

And then at 11 a.m.

Washington time, he releases a formal public statement.

from the White House, even though he's out at sea, going, 16 hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base.

That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT.

If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

Well, that's very apocalyptic, isn't it?

And in actual fact, they haven't got a reign of ruin from the air.

They've got one, haven't they, or maybe two?

But

I believe they then

put down that speech, translate it into Japanese, and they drop millions of leaflets on Japan.

Because obviously, you've got an insulated population smothered in government propaganda that has no idea how badly the war's gone and what's happened at Hiroshima.

So that's to let them know.

While they're still keeping their neck on the enemy by just increasing the incendiary rates, they don't stop.

And there's an interesting argument with Spatz, who's running the U.S.

Army Air Force in the Pacific.

He puts forward the argument after the Hiroshima mission that do we need to carry on with these missions?

Do my men need to risk their lives on these missions?

Because we've got this.

Are we dropping another one?

Shall we delay the next incendiary rates?

And it's like, well, no, just carry it.

We're carrying on.

It is

the thing that marks the beginning of a new world, isn't it?

And it's one of these things with the Second World War when you think, you know, the RAF is flying Gloucester Gladiators and at the end of the war flying Gloucester meteors.

You know, they go from biplane fight planes to jet planes, but this is the colossal vault into the modern world, isn't it?

The atomic bomb.

Yeah, I mean, we talked about Henry Hap Arnold, who's the father of the B-29.

He learned to fly with the Wright brothers.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

It's amazing, isn't it?

When you put it like that.

It's just mad.

It's absolutely mad.

But that's, as we know,

war drives innovation.

An escalation as well.

An escalation, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is what this is the sort of pinnacle of.

I mean, and in many ways, it's the perfect logical extension of strategic bombing.

It's the perfect logical extension of steel not flesh.

You know, it's a 12-man crew has killed scores of thousands of people in an instant in a way that a big bomber raid, you know, would endanger far more American lives to pull off.

So, you know, the starting point is this idea, we'll let the technology do the lifting so that we don't have to endure any more SOMs.

And the end point is this.

Yeah.

And we don't have to step foot on Japanese soil, risking our lives.

It's jobs done.

Well, Ian, thank you so much for taking us through this.

I mean, it's...

They do it again because the Japanese government responds with mokusatsu to the American demand that

they surrender.

For my money, in a way, it's the second atomic bomb that's the one that changes the world.

Because if you're prepared to to do it once, well, fine.

But if you're going to do it a second time, it shows that

you really have made up your mind about how you're going to prosecute war from now on.

And you and I shall be looking at those final moments of the war in a later episode, won't we?

Thank you so much for joining us and taking us through this.

It's a fascinating history.

It's really striking that thing of Lewis jumping up saying, Look at that son of the bitch go.

And then later on,

what is it that we have done?

There is a need for portentous language in this situation, isn't isn't there?

Because the gravity of what they've done is sat next to, have we ended the war?

Of course, there's going to be conflicting feelings around this.

It's so interesting.

Yeah, it's just interesting how those members of the Enola Gay led their lives after the war.

And the one guy who had the message discipline for the next several decades was Tibbetts.

Didn't change his line once.

Incredible.

It's one of the most famous, infamous episodes in the history of the world.

And yet you've brought brought a lot of very fresh new research to this, Ian.

Blend of technical stuff, science, but never losing sight of the immense human drama of the entire operation from the development of the bomb to the mission itself through to the Japanese who suffered the fate of this in Hiroshima is remarkable.

And, you know, hats off to you.

Thanks.

And thank you for bringing this story to the podcast and your expertise and huge knowledge on it.

So, thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Hiroshima Men is in all good bookstores.

And as you always say, and some bad ones too.

And some bad ones as well.

No, thanks so much, Ian.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We hope you enjoyed it.

We hope you were stimulated by that as we did.

We'll see you again very, very soon.

Cheerio.

Cheerio.

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