B29
The Second World War was the making of many legendary names in flight, the planes that had their reputations made in the cauldron of all-out air combat and would become immortalised in popular culture for years after they were pensioned off and replaced. On the allied side, names like the Spitfire, the Mustang, the B17 Flying Fortress, and the Lancaster bomber, all made immeasurable contributions to the war effort, and can legitimately claim to be the planes that defeated the twin tyrannies of the Nazi regime in Europe and the Imperial Japanese government in the Pacific. On the Axis side, while tarnished by the association with the people who commanded them, planes like the Me-109, the Zero fighter, and the FW-190 are still admired for the technical excellence and innovations they gave to aviation. However, while these planes can make claim to saving the free world, another plane can make a good case for kick-starting the modern world. It's story takes in the story of flight in the first and second halves of the 20th century, and it would also be the carrier for the end product of arguably the most significant scientific project of the century. That plane was the B29 - the "Superfortress", the huge four engined silver bomber of the Us Air Force, introduced into the war in 1944, intially to fly the long distances across the ocean to bomb the cities of Japan, but then as the carrier of a fearsome new weapon; the atomic bomb.
When a Boeing B29 Superfortress, christened "Enola Gay" by it's crew, flew a twelve hour mission across the empty expanses of the Pacific Ocean to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, it catapulted the world into a whole new era. An era when planes could fly for thousands of miles, non-stop, at high altitude. Carrying a weapon of such power that from a technological point of view the previous six years of war may as well have been one hundred years ago, such was the extent to which the atomic bomb changed the global political picture. The plane itself was produced at the crossroads between the two worlds and this was reflected in it's design; with it's clattering piston engines and ruler-straight wings it harked back to the earliest days of flight. But the pressurised fuselage and long distance range set the foundations for all that was to follow. It's size too, pointed the way to what was to come; a forty metre wingspan, thirty metre length, four engines, almost twice the weight of it's predecessor, a larger payload, but still much faster despite it's size and complexity. The bloody Pacific war against Japan would be the catalyst to create the modern aeroplane, and to bring together in a few years ideas, dreams, and half-formed plans that had been gradually developing for most of the early decades of the century.
Few would recognise the man who's name would be given to the company that became synonymous with aviation. It just after the turn of the twentieth century that William E. Boeing entered the family lumber industry. In his early twenties he was the perfect age to be intrigued by the sight of an early plane during his travels representing the company. He bought a plane of his own but frustrations with acquiring new parts led him to try constructing his own craft. As with the Wright brothers a few years earlier, Boeing's knowledge of an existing industry served him well when it came to the new technology of aeroplanes. He soon had a wooden plane prototype built and flying from a boat works in Seattle - where the company would remain to date. The Great War came along a year after the Boeing company was founded and the orders for the company's 'Model C' seaplanes by the US Navy secured it's future. The company built a new factory for itself on the shores of Puget Sound, Seattle. The 'Red Barn' as it came to be known was a two level wooden building, where the company designed and built seaplanes, fighter planes, and small bi-planes for passenger and mail use throughout the 1920s.
This was an age when the plane builders were also the operators of the airlines. In 1927 Boeing Air Transport was formed and the company started work on the Boeing 80, their first purpose built airliner. It could carry twelve passengers at 140 mph, and was heavily influenced by a plane produced by another giant American corporation whose name is now more commonly associated with cars; Ford. In the 1920s the Ford Motor Company had built an all-metal passenger plane called the Ford Trimotor (as it had three engines). The Trimotor had been developed around the designs of an engineer called William Stout, who experimented with building planes entirely from metal panels rather from metal or wooden frames coated in fabric, as planes had traditionally been built. Stout in turn had been influenced by the designs of the German Junkers company. So much so, in fact, that when Ford bought Stout's designs and built the Trimotor, the Junkers company started legal action claiming patent-infringement. Their case was understandable; they had built a three engined metal plane in 1924, a year before Ford's buy of the Stout company and the resemblance between the Junkers G24 and Ford TriMotor was undeniable. As a result of the various legal wranglings the Ford was limited from sale in Europe, leaving Junkers in a strong position that would eventually translate into them becoming a major supplier of bombers for the Nazis in the Second World War. The Trimotor, however, would have a major impact in North America, introducing the concept of the reliable passenger airliner that could fly between towns and cities, and bringing with it the now-familiar infrastructure of paved runways, radio beacons, control towers and all the rest.
Boeing, seeing the success of the Ford TriMotor, designed and built their own passenger airplane. The Boeing Model 80 was very similar in appearance to the Trimotor and the Junkers, but although it pioneered both the on-board galley and toilet, and in service Boeing Air Transport gave the flying world the first stewardesses, the Model 80 was ultimately not as successful. The Tri-Motor had cornered the market for such a plane, and Boeing would have to think bigger. As it happened their next try at making an airliner would in fact be slightly smaller, but far more advanced. And once again the Americans would borrow a few ideas from the Germans. Apart from all-metal construction the biggest advance in plane design during the 1920 and 1930s was making the wings cantilevered, and doing away the need for external bracing wires. When the first monoplanes began to appear alongside biplanes - like the plane that took Bleriot on his pioneering journey over the English channel - their wings were still held up with the same cat's cradle of bracing wires. This cut down much of the potential advantage of having a monoplane in the first place; the monoplane did away with much of the drag of having a biplane configuration, but then got much of the drag back again through the wires. Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis was an extradorinarily sleek and compact design for it's time but still presented a very large frontal area to the wind with it's large landing wheels and spars holding the wings up. Lindbergh needed the large wheels and spars to hold his heavy plane in one piece when it took off and landed, but when he was labouring across the ocean relying totally on the one engine, he must have wished he could've pulled a lever and retracted the wheels out of the slipstream.
Cantilevering the wings - that is, supporting them entirely at their root, just as in a cantilever bridge - would solve the problem and allow for much more aerodynamically clean designs, but the problem was the centre spar of the plane would have to be very large to hold the wing up, and very heavy. Metal construction was the key part of the puzzle - metal was much more suitable than wood for holding the heavy load of a wing, and it allowed planes to become large enough to offset the weight penalty. Just as the great iron steamships of the previous century had become large enough to fit in every larger steam engines, and steel rails had allowed for massive steam locomotives to be built, so too the advance of metal construction allowed aeroplanes to leap forward both in size and efficiency. Being at the forefront of metal construction, the Junkers company were also the pioneers in making cantilever monoplanes. They flew their first prototype, the J1, in 1916. The J1 was a basic single seater, and more powerful engines would need to come along for the concept to carry some passengers.
In 1930 Boeing unveiled a prototype called the Monomail, that, as the name suggested, was a monoplane intended for use as a high speed mail delivery plane. The monomail had all-metal construction, cantilever wings, and retracting landing gear. It could fly at nearly 160 mph, carry six passengers or equivalent cargo, but was still hamstrung by engine and propeller technology. Three years later Boeing revealed a passenger plane based on what had been learned from the Monomail. The model "247" was effectively the first 'modern' passenger airliner, and the world had not seen the like of it before. Even from a modern perspective the 247 doesn't look particularly old, and could pass as a small propeller-driven passenger plane. It pioneered the simple and sleek uncluttered fuselage, with passenger windows running it's length, two large un-braced wings, with the two engines sitting in aerodynamic pods in the wings. In performance it was in a different world to what had come before. The 247 could fly up to 200 mph - by comparison Lindbergh only six years before had topped out at 133mph - and could fly over 6000 feet higher up. It could, and did, fly across the entire United States in twenty hours, all while carrying ten passengers. The Ford Trimotor instantly became obsolete, and Ford, seeing the rapid progress that Boeing and the other specialist aeroplane builders were making, returned to familiar territory churning out cars and trucks. Unfortunately for Boeing, Ford's withdrawal would not mean that they would be free to rule the skies with the 247.
The first sixty 247's were sold for dazzling sums of money to United Airlines, owned by Boeing's own affiliate airline, the Boeing Air Transport. But when Trans World Airlines tried to order the 247 they were declined. The Boeing factory could not accommodate any production for any orders outside of the company's own airline. TWA, naturally not wanting to be left behind the race for the new generation of planes, went straight to the Douglas corporation in California and commissioned their own 247 rival. The Douglas DC-2 rolled out a year later than the 247 in 1934, and while it wasn't the trailblazer, it was superior in nearly every way to the Boeing. The DC-2 was faster, had a range around 300 miles further, and most crucially of all could carry four more passengers. It wasn't much of a difference, but it was enough; after all why would any airline buy the inferior plane? Others came crowding into the arena too, including Lockheed with it's Electra. The Electra - famous as the plane Amelia Earhart was flying when she disappeared over the Pacific - also boasted better numbers than the Boeing and sold in decent numbers.
The mid-1930s were not a promising time for Boeing. Early in the decade the company took up the challenge from the United States Air Corps to build a heavy bomber to match the performance and range of the 247. With the Great War showing that airships were an obvious technical dead-end as bombing platforms the world's armies had switched focus to planes. The overlooked, and un-celebrated, Martin B-10 of 1932 showed the world how a future heavy bomber would look. The Martin introduced the idea of a large bomb-bay in the middle of the plane, and the defensive nose and tail gunner positions. Combining the features of the 247 and the B-10 led Boeing to create it's "299" - eventually renumbered as B-17, and given the nickname "Flying Fortress". The nickname was apt; the "Fortress" had four engines to the two of passenger planes, five machine gun turrets, and could carry it's bomb load fifty miles per hour faster than the 247 could carry it's passengers. Alas for Boeing, when it came time to demonstrate the 299 to the assembled top brass, in a "Fly off" in 1935 with competitors from Douglas and Martin, the 299 crashed, taking the chief test pilot with it. As if the rub salt into the wounds, Douglas then unveiled the DC-3 passenger plane. The DC-3, and it's military transport version, would become so ubiquitous that many were still flying into the 21st century. The DC-3 became a familiar sight throughout the world, and was pretty much single handedly responsible for giving the entire world reliable long distance air transport.
In 1935 Boeing took another blow. With the ever gaining increase in air traffic, and air passenger revenues, the US congress declared that plane manufacturers owning their own airlines was anti-competitive, and decreed that groups including Boeing Air Transport be broken up and the airlines sold-off to become separate companies. This move solidified the already strong stranglehold of the Dc-2 and Dc-3. The simple and dependable design of the Dc-2 had set the mould, and success bred success for the Dc-3. With the USA the trendsetter in domestic passenger flying other countries simply followed suit and ordered up the Dc-3 in droves. Ironically the saviour of Boeing would not be one of the countries that had become the new customers for American planes, but the ever more hostile and threatening government of Germany. The rapid rise of the Nazis in the mid-thirties did not go ignored by the American military. Although they had chosen the rival Douglas B18 over the Boeing 299, partly because of the crash of the prototype but mainly because of the costs, with the Nazi threat they could not forget the "Flying Fortress" and it's immense potential. By late in the decade the B17 was winning over converts as the clouds of war loomed in the distance. Shortly after the the war in Europe broke out the US Air Corps ordered over five hundred Flying Fortresses. Nearly half had been delivered when the Japanese navy planes came swarming out of the sky over Pearl Harbor.
Deciding that they may as well try to get something from their design Boeing had been working to turn the 299 bomber prototype into a passenger plane, only with one major difference. The end result, the 307 "Stratoliner", would be the first passenger plane in service with a fully pressurised fuselage. Compared to the sleek lines of the B17 it had a rather bulbous appearance but anticipated the future with the row of cockpit windows flush with the nose. The "Stratoliner", as it's name suggests, was the first truly high-altitude passenger airliner, flying about two thirds of the 30,000 feet altitude that is standard now. This promised three great advantages; the engines needed to burn through less fuel in the thinner air, the planes could fly over the top of much inclement weather, potentially meaning fewer diversions, and the journey itself was more comfortable for the passengers who would have a smoother ride. The downside was that this would all be fantastically expensive, but unlike the 247 this time there was no competition for Stratoliner, and the two great airlines that had avoided Boeing's previous planes, TWA and Pan-Am, immediately ordered the 307. TWA founder Howard Hughes also bought one to be his personal plane, and planned a round-the-world flight. The large and expensive 307 could not hope to take on the take on the DC-3 on most flying routes, but it was creating a whole new market for itself on the long-haul routes, previously only the domain of the lumbering flying boats. But the Stratoliner could fly much higher, much faster, and much more comfortably than the flying boats. Plus it had all important cachet as the newest, most advanced, most glamorous passenger plane in the world, and TWA and PanAm did not have a problem finding takers for tickets among the world's elite travellers - but it would all be a very short-lived golden age. Long-haul passenger flying, and Howard Hughes's circumnavigation flight, would have to be put on hold in the shadow of war.
In the end only ten 307 Stratoliners would be built. Events in the world would overtake them. With the entry of the United States in the war in 1941 the 307s were requisitioned into military transport service, and the Boeing factory in Seattle began churning out B17 bombers en-masse. The huge increase in production demanded a few changes. Where before the war the earlier B17s had been built all in one piece, almost hand built by a few people, the wartime bombers were built in segments on a twenty-four hour, three shift, production line, just as cars were built, before all the bits - cockpit, fuselage, tail, wings, landing gear, were fastened together. This production method, while being quicker, also had the unexpected benefit of making battle-damaged B17's easier to repair in the field. New pieces could be spliced onto damaged bombers and keep them in service. At the height of production during the war the Boeing factory was turning out sixteen B17 bombers in a single day. But then the need for new planes was a constant requirement during the height of the war. In total over 12,000 B17's were built during World War Two, 922 of which were lost. In 1943 sixty B17's were lost in a single day in raids over Germany, an unhappy total that would be topped by the seventy seven losses in a day with over six hundred casualties in airmen later in the year. Although the German fighter pilots called the B17 the "flying porcupine" thanks to it's bristling armament, it's major usage in daytime raids led to heavy losses. The RAF's Lancaster bombers, which had longer range and could carry heavier loads than the B17, were preferred for use at night. But when the long range P-51 Mustang fighter was introduced as an escort plane, the balance swung decisively in the Allies favour, and the German home defenses would soon be crippled.
In the late 1930s, as well as building the B17 and the 307, Boeing were also working on developing a wholly pressurised bomber, hoping to apply the same advantages of the technology to military usage. The big hurdle to overcome was how to incorporate a bomb bay into a pressurised plane. Being a passenger plane the 307 could simply be a long pressure cylinder with a floor and seats bolted inside - still how passenger planes are constructed today, but a bomber would have to open the underside. Boeing's solution was to leave the bomb bay un-pressurised but leave a small crawlspace above the bay to let crew get from one end of the plane to the other. This was a very cramped space with only room for one person to shimmy through at a time, but the discomfort for the crew in this respect was more than offset by the benefits of the pressurised hull in others. For crew comfort and communication the main plus over the older generation of bombers would be that they would not have wear oxygen masks during missions. The pilot and copilot could also sit on the same level as the other crew, instead of up above them as was standard with all other large bombers. The crew would also be able to call upon state of the art remotely controlled gun turrets, removing the need for each gunner to operate their turret by hand, which in the B17 meant sitting exposed to freezing temperatures. The gunners in the new bomber could sit in the plane fuselage itself. But the overwhelming advantage of the new plane would be it's planned operating altitude and speed - up to 30,000 feet (10,000 metres) and four hundred miles per hour - would place it out of range of anything the enemy powers would be able send it's way.
With the Japanese attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 the war became a truly global conflict and the US stepped up development of the new "Superbomber". The Boeing XB-29 prototype that rolled out was very impressive. A giant silver four engine plane, the heaviest in the world, with a huge wingspan, it dwarfed the B17. Because it was so large the traditional arrangement of the undercarriage with the two large wheels under the wings, and the tail dragging behind, had to be left in the past. The new plane sat level with the ground. with a large nose-wheel assembly under the cockpit. The now-standard template for the modern airliner had been set. In the early 1940s the XB-29 looked like something from a comic book, and the futuristic effect that enhanced by the plane's extraordinary nose. The design copied the streamlined 'step-less' arrangement of the 307, but the single row of windows like on the 307 would not be sufficient for forward visibility in a war plane. Boeing's solution meant the XB-29 looked like nothing that had flown before. The entire nose was glass, with the pilots sitting behind the top of the window, and the bombardier sat in the middle of what looked like a fish bowl on it's side, with a complete panoramic view.
But for all the daring looks of the XB-29, the project was troubled, and but for the pressure and necessity of the war it might have been abandoned. The main sticking point was the engines. The Wright Company cyclone engines were terribly unreliable, plagued with overheating problems, with the high magnesium content of their construction leading to intense fires that presented a real danger of any engine fire burning through the wings. The wings themselves, long and narrow, did not generate much lift at low speed and the pilots found a plane that struggled to take-off and gain altitude. The lack of speed led to low airflow into the engines, further exacerbating the overheating problems. In February 1943 one of XB-29 prototypes engines caught fire on a test flight, with Boeing's chief test pilot at the controls. The fire soon spread to the wing and the plane plowed into a meat packing factory near Boeing field. The entire crew, and twenty workers in the factory lost their lives. The plane was still secret at this stage, and the wreckage was censored out of newspaper photographs of the disaster. The size of the project was unprecedented for an aeroplane. Rivalries had to be suspended during the war years, with the big companies sharing each other's facilities, and B29's were built in four factories across the United States. This would be yet another precursor of the future, when the building of parts for every large plane from airliners to the Space Shuttle would be outsourced across lots of factories.
Although the "Superbomber" had been conceived to see service in both Europe and the Pacific by the time the B-29 was ready for action the war in Europe was swinging decisively in the Allies favour, and the plane would be kept solely for use against Japan in the Pacific. To begin with it flew from bases in Allied-controlled territory in China and in India, utilising it's three thousand mile range to bomb Japanese-controlled Bangkok and Singapore. To increase the reach of the B29 into Japan the allies planned to set up bases in the Mariana Islands, fifteen hundred miles south east of Japan. In 1944 US Navy and Army forces first recaptured Saipan island and the former US colony of Guam (captured by the Japanese in 1941), and then Tinian island - a name that would become known throughout the world a year later. Officially the B29 was being used for bombing raids against Japanese cities and industry, but the plane also had another, highly secret purpose. A purpose known to only a few top officials, and the purpose that would change the world beyond all recognition.
In the early 1930s, while the aeroplane companies had been wrestling with the problems, both technical and economic, of building large all-metal aeroplanes, scientists in America and Europe had been pondering what to make of the latest development in nuclear physics. The field had been developing ever since the turn of the century with a series of breakthroughs, most famously Albert Einstein's revolutionary equation e=mc2, the equation that summarized how energy "e" was equal to mass "m" times the speed of light "c", squared. Since the speed of light squared was an enormous number, Einstein's equation told the world's scientists and engineers that - theoretically at least - there were staggering reserves of energy bound up in all matter, and that humanity's efforts at releasing the energy so far; the coal, oil and gas burned in hundreds of thousands of steam, petrol and gas engines, in turbines, generators and boilers, was just the very tip of a potentially enormous iceberg. The problem was how to possibly go about unleashing the nuclear energy from matter in a way that would be useful. And this looked like a very challenging problem. After all, until 1932, with the discovery of the neutron, physicists had not even had a full understanding of the structure of atom itself.
With the discovery of the neutron, and the fuller picture of the atom that emerged, a Hungarian-American physicist called Leo Szilard came to a profound realisation. He postulated the nuclear chain reaction; if some of the newly-discovered neutrons were "freed" by a nuclear reaction and absorbed into other atoms then this could then trigger another reaction that released more neutrons, and thus the process would continue. Theorists realised the two main practical possibilities of such a process. Released slowly the energy from the nuclear reaction could provide a source of power, a nuclear engine perhaps, or a nuclear heat source. Released quickly the process would create an incredibly powerful blast of heat energy, and make for a weapon thousands of times more powerful than anything seen before. And given that e=mc2, there would not need to be much material to create such a weapon. In 1938 the mechanism that allowed the chain reaction to become a reality was discovered. Nuclear "fission" was shown to split an atom's nucleus into smaller parts after bombardment from neutrons, with free neutrons released to continue to reaction.
Fission had been demonstrated by German scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, working under the eye of the Nazi government. Leo Szilard had been one of many scientists and intellectuals who had emigrated from Nazi Germany during the 1930s as the full effect of Hitler's authoritarian, anti-Semitic and militaristic policies had come into being. He had moved first to London, and then to work at Columbia University, New York. While at Columbia, shortly after the discovery of fission, Szilard had experimented with uranium and discovered that it was the ideal element to sustain a chain reaction. Concerned by the possibility that the Nazis may also be working on similar goals, he sent a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, with the support and signature of Albert Einstein, warning of the grave consequence of a Nazi nuclear weapon. A year later, with the Nazi 'Blitzkrieg' of Europe in full effect, another two expatriot scientists who had fled the Nazis - the German Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian Otto Frisch, both working at Birmingham University in the UK- calculated that a working nuclear bomb could theoretically be created from only one kilogram of refined uranium. Until then it had been assumed that any potential nuclear weapon would have to contain so much material and be so large that it could only realistically be delivered in a ship. Now it was realised that a plane could do the job too. The embattled British government, face-to-face with Hitler's military forces, also pressed the Americans to take up nuclear weapon research.
Roosevelt established the 'Manhattan' project to make a nuclear bomb a reality, under the control of Robert J. Oppenheimer, an enormous undertaking spread around locations around the US, and including scientists from other Allied nations. The project was top secret, with most of the people involved below the top levels being unaware of the exact nature of what they were working on. Szilard and his Italian-born colleague Enrico Fermi - yet another Nazi emigre - demonstrated the first chain reaction nuclear reactor, named the "Chicago Pile 1" in 1942. The reactor succeeded partly because it utilised graphite as a moderator to help control the nuclear chain reaction; a crucial development that German scientists would never come to discover, greatly hindering any progress on creating a practical reactor or weapon. The Manhattan Project focused on overcoming two major problems in particular. Enriching the required materials, uranium-235 and plutonium-239, and designing the detonation sequence of a nuclear weapon to put the radioactive material into a so-called 'supercritical' state very rapidly in precisely the correct way.
In 1943 the US Army Air Forces were briefed on the Manhattan Project. The full extent of the importance of the B29 project came into focus to everyone responsible for it. There would be huge pressure on the design as all the eggs were literally in one basket. While the British Lancaster bomber had the required capacity to accommodate any nuclear bomb, the US top brass had decided against using it, preferring the greater performance and range of Boeing's as yet untried design - a design that was still suffering engine fires and in the same year would send the company's top pilot crashing into a factory at Boeing's home airfield. That pilot, Edmund 'Eddie' Allen, had been instrumental in setting up a methodical, scientifically minded, testing department within Boeing, and the XB-29 could not have worked without his influence and leadership. Sadly for him and his crew the pressures of war, and the pressing need for the new bomber in the Pacific theatre meant the plane had to be tested despite the obvious problems with the engines. Weeks earlier the same crew had narrowly averted disaster in similar circumstances, landing at Boeing field trailing flames from the wing and with a fuselage filled with choking smoke. Unfortunately as 1943 began the XB29 was struggling to fly without problems for more than an hour at a time, so it had to be sent up and tested in the air despite the reservations of it's chief test pilot.
From flight tests and modifications during 1944 it was determined the size and shape of a bomb that would be able to fit inside the B29. The project to enable the planes to fit the atomic bomb was code-named "Silverplate", and involved among other things, stripping out much of the armour plating, and most of the gun turrets, to save the weight needed to accommodate bombs that might weigh over 4500 kilos, as well as redesigning the bomb bay to allow the bombs to be armed in-flight. In 1944 509th Composite Group, the primary squadron for the atomic bombing missions, was established at Wendover Air Base, in the remote deserts of western Utah, under the command of Lt. Col Paul Tibbets. The 509 would practice dropping so-called "Pumpkin" bombs; conventional bombs in the same shell as the nuclear bombs. The bombs themselves were still very much a work-in-progress. The Manhattan scientists had focused in on two different designs for detonating the nuclear weapon. The first was called a "Gun-type" bomb, where one piece of nuclear material was fired at a target piece, sending it supercritical and detonating. The problem with the gun-type was that if it used plutonium fuel it was too long to fit inside the Silverplate B29 bomb bay. The second type, called the "implosion" bomb, used conventional explosives to collapse a sphere of material into a reaction. This design promised to be more compact and practical to deliver, but also was far more complicated to implement. To ensure success both types would be developed; work on the implosion bomb continued apace, while a gun-type bomb that would use uranium was also being designed. Uranium was much rarer than plutonium -the preferred material- but reliable enough to work if it was needed in action. The uranium bomb was given the code name "Little Boy", and the plutonium bomb called "Fat Man".
Security was an overriding concern of the Manhattan project. Although the Nazi military was clearly in retreat after the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, they were still producing some innovative and destructive weapons. The worst case scenario was that spies could provide the remaining Nazi scientists and engineers enough information to construct a working nuclear device. Combine that device with the Nazi V1 "Buzz bomb"; the autonomous flying bomb that was often striking at the citizens of London, or the astonishing, and frighteningly advanced V2 rocket, then the war may carry on for many more years. Then there was the continuing Pacific war against Japan. Even with the capture of the Marianas islands and the building of the bases for the planned 'Silverplate' missions, the Japanese mainland presented a formidable target. The successful Allied capture of the Pacific island of Okinawa alone had involved terrible bloodshed with over 212,000 military and civilian casualties. In fact the atomic missions were launched with the hope that once the Japanese leaders saw the destructive new super-weapon that was in the United States's hands they would opt for surrender and peace. Any leak to the Japanese about the 509th Group's mission may have jeopardised everything, whether it be sabotage of the components of the bomb, attacks on the planes in transit, attacks on Tinian island, or the mass evacuation of cities and a mass increase in anti-air defenses.
Security was so tight that when the time came for the first test of a nuclear device, even the President was not initially told of the results of that test. Lower down the chain, several senior commanders found themselves looking down the wrong end of sentries rifles when they got too close to the silverplate B29s, and the components of the atomic bombs. Not everybody involved with the Manhattan project had even thought that testing a device first was a good idea. Allied soldiers were still dying in Europe and the Pacific, and any test could potentially waste up to a billion dollars worth of suitable refined atomic material. With the final capture of Berlin, the death of Hitler, and the surrender of the German forces, President Truman requested that the testing be carried out before the planned Potsdam Conference, the meeting of Allied leaders convened to draft up terms to be offered to Japan for their surrender. If Japan refused, the President reasoned, then at least one bomb mission would be authorised. Truman had publically promised Japan to "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth" if they refused. Only a few people knew the full truth of those words. At the conference Truman was notified in a coded message of the successful test of a nuclear device in the remote New Mexico desert on July 16th. The "Trinity" device (or "Gadget" as it was known) had detonated with the force of 19 kilotonnes of TNT, an explosion big enough to devastate a city, create a three hundred metre wide crater, and a shock wave felt over one hundred miles away.
The Trinity test had taken place at Alamagordo Bombing Range in southern New Mexico, as remote a place as any in the United States. The site had been chosen in 1944, and by the time of the test had been thoroughly prepared and was the temporary home to well over four hundred people. The test had been originally been planned to take place inside a giant containment capsule to try to contain as much of the extremely valuable refined plutonium as possible. The seven metre long cylindrical steel capsule, called "Jumbo", had arrived on site by rail car but by the time of it's arrival it was decided not to use it. J. Robert Oppenheimer had judged that there was enough plutonium being produced in the Manhattan project's reactor in Hanford, Washington State, that containment would not be needed and would interfere with the necessary measurements of the test. "Jumbo" would be propped in a tower next to the explosion to see just how powerful that explosion it was. The device itself would instead be hoisted up a thirty metre tower and detonated in the open air. The name "Gadget" for the device wasn't simply a euphemism for security; the scientists shied away from calling it a "bomb" because - strictly speaking - it wasn't one as it was not portable.
The plutonium core for the Gadget arrived at the bombing range on July 11th 1945, and was assembled in the bedroom of the ranch house that had stood on the site before it was requisitioned by the military. The ill-fated Dr Louis Slotin - who would fatally irradiate himself a year later when he accidentally dropped a similar core while performing an experiment - assembled the the core two days later. A test explosion using a giant stack of TNT held in May had shown that the site was lacking in some crucial infrastructure. More vehicles were brought in, the roads on the site were widened, more phone lines installed. When the time came for the real test in the early hours of July 16th, predictions among the Manhattan scientists ranged from no chain reaction at all (known as a "fizzle") to a complete success. Officially all the observers who were not in shelters were ordered to lie on the ground with their backs turned to blast, but several watched with darkened goggles or with one eye through darkened glass.
What they saw, at 5:29 am, was the test tower disappear and the desert floor light up with a glowing light, seemingly as bright as the sun, that begin to expand, followed by the rushing air of a terrific shock wave blasting over them. The dark pre-dawn sky and surrounding mountains were lit up as though it was midday by an expanding glowing white mushroom cloud. The cloud would eventually stretch over seven miles into the sky. Even those who had shaded their eyes found themselves temporarily blinded by the unexpectedly bright light. The steel capsule "Jumbo", sitting nearby survived but the huge object was moved a considerable distance. For those watching the test it had been a great success, a more powerful explosion than most of them had expected, and the new weapon would doubtlessly end the war. Within hours though there was more sober reflection as those present wondered what would happen after the war. The yield of the bomb was clearly on a completely different scale to anything that had come before. Suddenly the power to destroy whole cities with one small device had become terrifyingly real. Test director Kenneth Bainbridge told Oppenheimer soberly "Now we are all sons of bitches." Oppenheimer remembered that "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent." Some years later he famously said that he also thought of words from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, words that become synonymous with his work: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".
Meanwhile in the Pacific on Tinian Island the 509th Composite Group, including the 393 Bombardment Squadron, was arriving and being assembled ready for missions carrying the nuclear weapons against Japan. A list of targets had been drawn up. Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka and Yokohama had all be extensively damaged by B29 raids. On May 26th a large portion of Tokyo was destroyed by US incendiary bombs, with great loss of civilian lives - the largest in one raid in the entire war. The Target Committee, as it was known, had drawn up a list of target cities, based mainly on their military importance and whether they had been bombed before. The committee was keen to stun the Japanese by bombing a target that had seemed out of range of US forces, and President Truman was keen to try and minimise the inevitable outcry that the bomb would generate. He told Secretary of War Henry Stimson "military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children". Stimson himself had, by coincidence, been on his honeymoon in the city of Kyoto many years earlier and successfully lobbied to have the city removed from the target list.
The final list read thus; Kokura, a munitions manufacturing centre; the ports of Hiroshima and Niigata; and in place of Kyoto the city of Nagasaki. The "Little Boy" bomb had arrived in Tinian on July 26th, only ten days after the Trinity test, followed shortly after by it's uranium core, and on August 2nd the "Fat Man" plutonium implosion bomb. The Trinity device had been an implosion detonation, so only one of bombs had been tested, but the simplicity of the "gun" design convinced the Manhattan scientists that it would work. The first of the fifteen Silverplate B29's had landed on Tinian island on June 11th. Colonel Paul Tibbets's plane, officially B29-45-MO serial number 44-86292, but christened 'Enola Gay' after Tibbets' mother, rolled out of the Martin aircraft assembly plant in Bellevue, Nebraska in May 1945. The 393 squadron had been flying raids over Japan dropping the "Pumpkin" bombs, partly as trial runs, and also a diversionary tactic to make the atomic bomb run look like any other mission. "Special Mission 13", the code name for the Atomic bombing mission would consist of sevenB29's, with the lead plane carrying the bomb at the head, escorted by two more planes, threeseparate planes performing weather reconnaissance over the target and the two reserve targets,and a back up lead plane standing by to rendezvous with the lead plane at the island of Iwo Jima to transfer the bomb should the lead plane encounter mechanical problems. The planes would leave North Field base at Tinian, a large airfield occupying a large portion of the island,with four large runways, and the facility to load the bomb assembly on board the planes.
In the pre-dawn hours of August 6th, 1945, the "Little Boy" was loaded into the bomb bay of the Enola Gay, and it's crew of twelve climbed aboard. Colonel Tibbets would be the plane's commander, alongside him in the co-pilot's seat the plane's regular commander Robert Lewis.Sitting in front, in the plane's fish-bowl nose as the bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, under strict instruction that the target would have to be lined up under visual aim, and that the weapon could not be released if the target was obscured by cloud. In command of the mission itself was Captain William Parsons, the director of the "Little Boy program. On arrival at Tinian Island Parsons had decided that the bomb should be armed in-flight rather than on the ground. Given the relative simplicity of the design Parsons feared a crash and fire on takeoff may set the device off. This was something of a last-minute decision and Parsons spent the hours before the mission began repeating the procedure for placing the detonator into the bomb.
With a few photographers present to document the departure, the Enola Gay, lit up under a floodlight, and it's support planes left Tinian, to engage in what would be the most destructive single military mission in the whole of history. They would rendezvous as planned over Iwo Jima and, with the weather reports favourable, flew on for Hiroshima. At around quarter past eight local time Major Ferebee sighted the target zone in his sights. The bomb was released. The Enola Gay was flying at around 10,000 metres (30,000 feet) and the bomb took just over forty seconds to fall to it's detonation height. Tibbet's immediately on release turned to plane hard over to try to outrun the shock waves as best he could. All on board feared that the planes may be badly damaged by the blast wave. As they turned, "Little Boy" detonated at around six hundred metres above the city.
In a single blinding flash of extreme heat around 80,000 people in the city were killed. About seventy percent of the city was destroyed. Virtually every thing standing within a mile of the detonation point was obliterated. A mushroom cloud just like the cloud over the Trinity site boiled thousands of metres into the sky. Devastating fires soon began to blow up and spread throughout what was left of the city. Rescue for those left would be slow to arrive. All communication with the rest of Japan had instantly stopped at the time of the bomb's detonation. Senior Japanese commanders had no real idea of what had happened until military planes began to sight the pall of smoke hanging across the city. Sixteen hours later the US Government would make an official announcement of what had taken place. With the news of the atom bomb made known to the rest of the world, senior Japanese atomic physicists were sent to Hiroshima. After inspecting the remains of the city they concluded that the US government were indeed telling the truth, but, they told their superiors, given the complexity of designing and manufacturing such a bomb, it was unlikely that there were more than one or two further bombs, and that there was no pressing need for the Japanese military to surrender.
With no Japanese surrender forthcoming, a second atomic bombing mission took off from North Field on August 9th. This time the "Fat Man" plutonium implosion bomb would be carried and dropped over the city of Kokura. The lead plane, B-29 "Bockscar", commanded by Major Charles Sweeney, immediately ran into problems that threatened to derail the mission. The reserve fuel tank system was found to be inoperable, limiting the range of the mission. A problem that was only exacerbated when one the escort planes failed to meet the bombing group over the planned rendezvous point off of the southern tip of Japan, and fuel was burned through while waiting, ultimately in vain. One plane down from what had been planned. Bockscar and the second plane, with the codename "The Great Artiste", headed for Kokura. When they arrived over the planned drop site they found cloud and drifting smoke from other American incendiary bombing raids obscuring the target. They passed over three times in the following hour, all the while attracting the unwanted attention of ground defence fire. After the third pass they abandoned Kokura and headed for the alternate target; Nagasaki. The respective fates of thousands had been set by the vagaries of drifting smoke in the wind and the atmospheric conditions. Kokura had received a fateful reprieve, one that would not be presented to Nagasaki. When the pair of B29's arrived over Nagasaki, only twenty minutes after leaving Kokura, it too was blanketed by low cloud. They flew in on a first pass, guided by radar. Through bombardier Kermit Behan's sights the cloud cleared briefly. Beahan spotted the city and released the bomb. The more powerful plutonium device detonated at the same height as the bomb over Hiroshima, but because of the terrain around Nagasaki it caused less damage as the blast was contained slightly by hills around the city. Nevertheless around 40,000 people were killed instantly, and as at Hiroshima, many more would be killed in fires.
A day later, on August 10th, Emperor Hirohito of Japan offered his surrender to the Allies. Two days later the Allied commanders accepted the offer conditionally and awaited word from Hirohito. The next day, August 13, US commanders, hearing no word, ordered further B29 bombing raids resumed. It would be a further two days before the Emperor announced over radio to the Japanese people his intention to surrender, and only on September 2nd would the formal end of the Second World War come. The effects continued to haunt Hiroshima and Nagasaki for long afterwards. Nuclear weapons had the potential to cause devastation in a way completely removed from the initial heat and shock wave; radioactive "fall out", the waste products of the reaction. In the coming years there would be great increases in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki areas in illnesses and genetic defects linked to the radiation. Chief among these was cancer, estimated to have claimed nearly 2,000 additional deaths. The controversy over the two nuclear missions has been a continuing debate ever since. Detractors point out that the United States could have engaged in more diplomatic avenues, revealing the potential power of the bomb, the results of the Trinity tests, or dropping the bomb over the sea or an unpopulated area. It's unilaterally decided use against civilians, it is argued, can only be classed as a war crime under international law. Against this the defenders point to the number of lives potentially saved by averting an invasion of Japan, that the firebombing campaigns claimed even more lives than the two atomic bombs, that the attacks had to have the element of surprise to shock the Japanese into surrendering, and that the Japanese military had not surrendered even after the Hiroshima bomb. But one thing remains undeniable. Thanks to the nuclear bomb, and the B29 thatcarried it, the modern world had suddenly, and violently, been born.
