The weapon dropped over Nagasaki, on August 9, 1945, weighed five tons and was known as the Fat Man.
Photograph courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
At 3:47 A.M.
on August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress took off from the American
airbase on the island of Tinian, in the North Pacific Ocean. Operation
Centerboard II, the mission to drop the second atomic bomb on a Japanese
city, had begun. Already things were not going as smoothly as they had
three days earlier, in the run over Hiroshima.
That attack had been textbook—“operationally routine,” as a classified
Army history later put it. The Enola Gay had reached its target and
returned home without complication; an announcement sent out under
President Harry Truman’s name had trumpeted its success. But Bockscar,
the strike plane chosen for Centerboard II, had been delayed on the
tarmac because of fuel-pump problems. Only the day before, four B-29s in
succession had crashed on takeoff, causing extensive fuel fires. As one
of the scientists on Tinian wrote, “We all aged ten years until the
plane cleared the island.” But clear the island it did.
Bockscar
had been stripped of most of its armor and weaponry to accommodate its
five-ton atomic payload, known as the Fat Man. Thirteen minutes after
takeoff, at 4 A.M. Tinian time, the weaponeer
made his way aft and removed two green safing plugs from the bomb,
replacing them with red arming plugs: it was now live. Whereas the
weapon dropped over Hiroshima had been a relatively squat cylinder, this
one was shaped like a giant egg. It was five feet around and eleven
feet long and painted mustard yellow. At one end was a rigid, boxy tail
fin known as a California parachute, designed to help keep it from
spinning wildly once it was released. The pit crew who assembled it had
signed their names on the casing, and some also wrote messages to the
Japanese—“Here’s to you!” and “A second kiss for Hirohito.” On its nose,
the bomb bore a stenciled acronym, JANCFU, which stood for Joint Army-Navy-Civilian Fuckup.
The
plane beat its way through dark and stormy skies for six hours before
it arrived over the small island of Yakushima, where it was to wait for
two accompanying B-29s, the Great Artiste, which was outfitted with
instruments to help assess the power of the bomb, and Big Stink, a
camera plane. Big Stink never showed. After fifty minutes, Bockscar and
the Great Artiste proceeded to their primary target, the city of Kokura.
It had a population of a hundred and seventy-eight thousand, about half
that of Hiroshima, and was home to what U.S. military planners called
“one of the largest arsenals in Japan.” The Enola Gay, now serving as a
weather plane, had radioed that conditions were good.
The crew had
been expressly ordered to pick out their target visually, rather than
by radar, since the explosive reach of the bomb, although astonishing,
was still limited enough that to be off by a mile or two might result in
the majority of its power being wasted. (Radar bombing was particularly
susceptible to this sort of error.) When Bockscar arrived over Kokura,
at 10:45 A.M., the crew found that the arsenal
was “obscured by heavy ground haze and smoke,” according to the
weaponeer’s flight log. Over the years, three explanations for this
change of fortune have been offered. One is that the weather turned.
Another is that the smoke came from the American firebombing, the day
before, of the adjacent city of Yawata (a nice bit of irony, if true).
The third possibility, as has been claimed in recent years by several
former technicians at a major electrical power station in Kokura, is
that the haze was an intentional release of steam, created as a matter
of routine when the first B-29, the Enola Gay, was spotted. For
whichever reason, if not all three simultaneously, the visual bombing of
Kokura couldn’t be managed. After forty-five minutes, and with
anti-aircraft fire headed their way, the crew decided to try for the
secondary target: Nagasaki.
When
we remember the destructive birth of the nuclear age, we tend to focus
on Hiroshima. It was first, and firsts get precedence in memory. It was
also more devastating an attack than Nagasaki, with nearly twice as many
dead and injured and three times as much land area destroyed. (This was
in spite of the fact that the Little Boy, the bomb dropped by the Enola
Gay, was only three-quarters as explosive as the Fat Man.) But if
Hiroshima was, from a military perspective, relatively well considered,
well planned, and well executed, Nagasaki was almost the opposite. From
the very beginning, it was a JANCFU—a sign that this new era was as likely to be a comedy of errors and near-misses as the product of reason and strategy.
Years
after the bombing, General Leslie Groves, the micromanaging head of the
Manhattan Project, admitted that he had never been able to figure out
exactly when or why Nagasaki “was brought into the picture.” It was
included on an initial list of seventeen potential targets, in late
April of 1945, but by early May it had been weeded out. Although the
city manufactured engines and torpedoes and was an important port, it
was also home to an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, which made it less
attractive. And, from a targeting perspective, it had difficult
topography. Hiroshima and Kokura had their industrial and urban areas
concentrated on relatively flat ground—ideal for the
intense blast pressures produced by an atomic bomb. Nagasaki, however,
was a city within valleys, divided in two by mountains, without a large,
coherent center.
Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura were the
first four targets chosen, with Niigata as a runner-up. Soon thereafter,
following a round of firebombing, Yokohama was removed from the list;
the U.S. military preferred targets that had not already been damaged by
conventional munitions, which would make it hard to see the effects of
the new weapon amid the old rubble. Kyoto was later excluded, too,
because of its cultural importance. This left Hiroshima, Kokura, and
Niigata. Along with Kyoto, these three cities were added to a list of
“reserved areas.” They would be spared other attacks and saved for the
bomb.
Nagasaki was never reserved. In fact, it was bombed
conventionally no fewer than four times before the Fat Man was dropped,
including a little more than a week before Operation Centerboard II
began. The city was not added to the list until the day before it was
finalized. The draft version of the strike order, written on July 24,
1945, gave the targets as “Hiroshima, Kokura, and Niigata in the
priority listed.” On the version in Groves’s papers, in the National
Archives, someone has crossed out “in the priority listed” and scrawled
in “and Nagasaki.”
Image courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
Bockscar arrived at Nagasaki at 11:50 A.M.
Tinian time, by which point it had been in the air for nearly eight
hours. Given the plane’s mechanical problems, the crew were close to the
point at which they would have to turn back or risk ditching. To have
any hope of making it to a friendly airbase they would likely have had
to drop the Fat Man into the ocean. “Less than two hours of fuel left,”
one of the pilots wrote in his mission diary. “Wonder if the Pacific
will be cold?”
Nagasaki had clouds, too. It was the bombardier’s
twenty-seventh birthday, and as Bockscar made its way over the city he
searched for an opening. The prescribed aiming point was the Mitsubishi
Steel and Arms Works, which covered an area about half a mile long and a
quarter of a mile wide at the mouth of a valley, along an inlet from
the ocean. “I got it! I got it!” he suddenly shouted. Control of the
aircraft, and of the ability to drop the bomb, was turned over to him.
Forty-five seconds later, the Fat Man was released. Bockscar banked, to
put distance between it and the imminent inferno.
The Fat Man
detonated at two minutes after noon, sixteen hundred and forty feet
above the ground. According to the readings that had been collected at the Trinity test,
three weeks earlier, in New Mexico, this altitude would maximize the
destruction done to light wooden buildings (the sort that civilians
lived in). Color footage of the explosion was filmed from the Great
Artiste. It shows the nearby clouds moving out, propelled by the
shockwave, and the remains of the nuclear fireball, pink and orange,
rising, turning in on itself, becoming white. The cameraman pans up and
down, taking in its full height. There was death and chaos on the
ground, but from the air there was just the mushroom cloud.
Did
the bombardier actually see his target? Postwar recollections are
uncertain. The physicist and future Nobel Prize laureate Luis Alvarez,
who was an observer on the Hiroshima mission, later wrote that he always
took the story about the last-minute hole in the clouds “with a grain
of salt,” noting that the errors in placing the bomb were similar to
those that occurred with radar bombing. Ground zero ended up being some
three-quarters of a mile off target, close enough to the Mitsubishi
Steel and Arms Works to destroy it and far enough north to take out a
torpedo factory in a different part of the city.
But the bomb only
achieved this unexpected double success because it went off over a
mostly civilian district. The U.S. military’s official damage map,
produced in 1946, labels the structures within three thousand feet of
the detonation point: Nagasaki Prison, Mitsubishi Hospital, Nagasaki
Medical College, Chinzei High School, Shiroyama School, Urakami
Cathedral, Blind and Dumb School, Yamazato School, Nagasaki University
Hospital, Mitsubishi Boys’ School, Nagasaki Tuberculosis Clinic, Keiho
Boys’ High School. Forty thousand people died, and another forty
thousand were injured, according to the American government’s postwar
estimates. After Hiroshima, now that the bomb was no longer a secret,
the Army Air Forces had drafted propaganda leaflets to inform the people
of Nagasaki about the possible coming shock—as much an act of
psychological warfare as a humanitarian warning. But internal
coördination with the bombing crews was so poor that the leaflets were
delivered late. They fluttered down over the city the day after the Fat
Man went off.
Bockscar circled the mushroom cloud once and then headed for Okinawa, its nearest emergency base. By 1:20 P.M.,
it was over the island, the crew radioing frantically for permission to
land. There was no response. One of the pilots fired a flare gun out of
a porthole, to warn all those who could see it that the bomber was
coming in, like it or not. The landing was rough but successful. (On
touchdown, an engine immediately cut out from lack of fuel.) The crew
wired a confirmation message to command, then got some food. They did not make it back to Tinian until 10 P.M.
No one was waiting for them. There were no photo ops. Back in the
States, even though the bombing was headline news, it shared space with
the announcement that the Soviet Union had joined the war effort.
President
Truman seems to have been surprised by the second bombing, coming as it
did so soon after the first. Intercepted Japanese reports of the damage
on the ground at Hiroshima were just trickling in to American
officials. Truman, who had written in his diary in late July that
“military objectives and soldiers and sailors” were the target of the
atomic bomb, “not women and children,” apparently confronted the reality
of the weapon for the first time. The Secretary of Commerce, Henry
Wallace, reported in his journal that “the thought of wiping out another
100,000 people was too horrible” for the President. “He didn’t like the
idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids,’ ” Wallace added.
The
day after Nagasaki, Truman issued his first affirmative command
regarding the bomb: no more strikes without his express authorization.
He never issued the order to drop the bombs, but he did issue the order
to stop dropping them. Even if Hiroshima remains preëminent in our
historical memory—the first nuclear weapon used in anger—Nagasaki may be
of greater consequence in the long run, something more than the second
attack. Perhaps it will be the last.
Alex
Wellerstein is a historian of science and an assistant professor at the
Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey. He runs the blog Restricted Data.
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