A B-29 emerges from the far doors of the Wichita plant, circa 1944. Copyright © Boeing

You’re going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen.

—General Curtis E. LeMay to B-29 crews, March 9, 1945

You and your workers helped immensely ta shorten the war and save thousands of American lives.

—Captain G. E. Dawson, Chemical Warfare Service, U.S. Army, to Henry Kaiser, August 29, 1945

BANKING A SHARP left, Colonel Jake Harmon landed the first B-29 on Indian soil at Chakulia outside Calcutta on April 4, 1944. The runway consisted of thousands of tightly packed stones, which rumbled under his skidding tires until the huge plane finally skidded to a halt. Thanks to Bill Knudsen, Harmon now had a plane. Thanks to Henry Kaiser, in a few months he and other B-29 pilots would soon have the tools of victory in their grasp, from a Kaiser project Knudsen himself had pronounced a “lemon.”

Out of the Battle of Kansas had emerged the first operational squadron of B-29s, the 58th Bomb Wing, made up of three groups, with Harmon in charge. It had been a mind-boggling epic trip from Salina, with refueling stopovers in New York, Newfoundland, Marrakech, Cairo, and finally Karachi before the final twelve-hundred-mile leg to Calcutta. As Harmon stepped on the runway, the heat and humidity rose up to envelop him like a stifling blanket even as a hot wind blew clouds of dust that stung the eyes and choked the throat. He knew that spelled trouble for the mission his boss, Hap Arnold, had laid out for the world’s most complex airplane.¹

The B-29 did not deal with heat very well. Given the fact that its engines suffered from chronic overheating, no mechanic or engineer or pilot could be very surprised. The planes that followed Harmon watched their performance plummet the farther east they went. One crashed at Marrakech, a total loss; another crashed at Cairo. Then five more went down, two complete wrecks on the Karachi runway. The rest still en route had to be grounded while engineers grappled once more with the overheating engines. By April 15 only thirty-two B-29s out of two hundred had arrived in the theater of war.²

In the 120-degree heat, no B-29 engine behaved like it did in the States. Cylinder-head temperature gauges started in the red zone and stayed there the whole way. “I’d tell my flight engineer to keep his mouth shut about how hot they were running,” a pilot with the 58th Group, Jack Ladd, remembered. “I said I didn’t want to know.”³ The heat caused other problems. The Plexiglas blisters designed by Bendix cracked as they expanded, then they would contract and explode as planes labored to fly over the Himalayas to their final destination in China—while carburetors froze up at the same time.

They still had unreliable engines and a chronic lack of spare parts and supplies—but on April 26 the B-29 passed one crucial test. A plane flown by Major Charles Hansen had its first encounter with the Japanese, when they ran into a flight of Kawasaki Ki-43 Oscars passing over the India-Burma frontier at 16,000 feet. The Japanese followed the plane for a long time, as if they couldn’t believe their eyes at the size of the plane and its speed at that altitude. When they finally attacked, Hansen and his crew shot down one and came through only slightly damaged after the Japanese tried twelve separate passes. Although the electrical system of the top turrets had shorted out, rendering the guns useless, there was no question left. This was a plane ready for battle.⁴

In June 1944, Operation Matterhorn was launched, involving a series of attacks on Japanese bases in China, Thailand, and Singapore. On the fifteenth there was even a trial run on Japan itself, with a raid on the steel-producing town of Kyushu that did little damage but proved the planes could operate over Japanese airspace.

All they needed was a way to close the distance a bit. So simultaneously with Matterhorn, the Navy launched into the central Pacific the biggest and most powerful naval armada ever seen, with fifteen carriers, fifteen battleships, twenty-one cruisers, and sixty-eight destroyers—plus hundreds of fighter and torpedo planes and thousands of amphibious craft, including the ubiquitous Higgins boat. It was not only the most powerful, but so new most vessels were less than two years old. Only five of the cruisers were prewar built; all but nineteen of the destroyers had launched since 1942—as had fourteen of the fifteen carriers.⁵ The force was the culmination of not just a new, modern U.S. Navy, but also the productive forces of American industry and shipbuilding Knudsen and his colleagues had let loose in the tide of war.

The Marianas campaign was focused on capturing a handful of islands. Thousands of Americans would die taking the largest: Guam, Tinian, and Saipan. Yet all the fierce fighting that summer, all the death and destruction, took place in order to provide the Superfortress with the island bases it would need to reach Japan. American technology was now driving military strategy, rather than the other way around.

The assault on Saipan began on June 15. Even with the battle still raging on the beaches, Navy engineers and Construction Battalions were ferrying in to start laying out the island’s airfield. A month later the battle was still going on. Even though the Seabees were under constant enemy fire, work on the runway never stopped.

Saipan’s Isley Field would be the headquarters of the new B-29 force, the 21st Bomber Command. The first Superfortress, Joltin’ Josie, fresh from Wichita, arrived on October 12. Soon Saipan would be home to the eighty planes and 20,000 men of the 21st’s 73rd Wing, and Guam would be ready for the next wing in December. Tinian, they figured, would be set by February or March 1945.⁶ It was time to carry the war to Japan.

Yet the initial results were disappointing. The officers of 21st Command tried the same old approach of hitting specific targets day and night. The results were dismal. The B-29s flew seven missions, dropping 1,550 tons of bombs. Not even 2 percent hit within a one-thousand-foot radius of the target. Of 350 sorties versus the aircraft engine factory at Musashino near Tokyo, only 34 hits were achieved on the plant itself.⁷

And the mechanical problems just kept coming. Overheating and blown cylinders, defective valve push rods, busted valve springs, defective fuel pumps, and faulty fuel transfer systems—they kept more than half of the planes from hitting the primary targets, and caused three-quarters of the aborts.

The other big problem was the December weather, and the gales from the jet stream over Japan, sometimes up to 230 miles per hour. Planes downwind were passing over the target at 500 miles per hour. Bombardiers and radio operators barely had time to recognize the target on their newfangled radar scope with its black screen and flashing yellow lights (something else to adjust to), when it would be gone.

After the first wave of B-29 raids, the Japanese were able to breathe easier. Their empire in the Pacific was collapsing, island by island. The American armada in the Marianas had virtually finished the Japanese naval air arm, the proud corps of sailors and pilots who had bombed Pearl Harbor, as a fighting force. But the Japanese homeland remained safe. So many B-29 bombs fell into Tokyo Bay that people joked the Americans were trying to starve Japan into submission by killing all the fish.⁸

Then the jokes died.

On January 19, 1945, there arrived at Guam a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking, cigar-chomping major general named Curtis LeMay, an Ohio country boy with an engineering degree from Ohio State and a reputation as the mastermind of daylight bombing in Europe, to take charge. LeMay decided training on how to fly the B-29 in battlefield conditions had to be the top priority, over bombing of Japan.

The number of planes for each mission would be reduced, and time was spent honing skills in pattern bombing, navigation, gunnery, and cruise control to gain mastery of fuel economy. As the sleek silver planes swarmed and swooped over the blue water to attack their practice targets, LeMay held one conference after another with his commanders, chomping on a cigar or his corncob pipe.

Finally, at the start of February, LeMay judged his men and planes ready. He launched 21st Bomber Command in sixteen sorties against primary targets in Japan. Afterward reconnaissance planes flew high over the bombed areas, snapping pictures. The photos revealed that in fourteen of the sixteen raids, not one target had been destroyed, despite dropping five thousand tons of ordnance. Losses remained high. Twenty-nine B-29s had been lost to enemy fire—and twenty-one had crashed due to mechanical failure.

LeMay’s crews were sore, and more discouraged than ever. LeMay didn’t care. “I’m not here to make friends,” he liked to say, “but win a war.” But how to do that was still eluding him.

Then in March he had it.

It was a drizzly afternoon when LeMay’s adjutant Colonel Edward “Pinky” Smith wandered into the Tinian war room. At first Smith thought the place was empty, but then he realized LeMay was there, sitting in the darkness and gazing at the big map on the wall. He had been there a long time.

Sitting and thinking was something LeMay often did at his desk, which was almost always clear of papers. “The general does less work than any man in the Army,” one of his aides said. But another added, “But he thinks more than any man I have ever known.” LeMay was averaging four hours of sleep a night, and when he wasn’t out on the landing strip or reading reports, his officers could find him at his desk, staring into space—or writing letters to the wives and children of his killed and lost crewmen.⁹

In any case, the sight of a silent, meditative LeMay didn’t surprise Smith. He was turning to leave the general alone with his thoughts when LeMay suddenly spoke.

“No, Pinky, don’t go away. I want to talk to you. There’s something I’ve been thinking about—a new way of hitting them.” Smith sat down. For the next few minutes, LeMay laid out his plan, almost to the last detail, with occasional forays to point at the map.

As Smith listened to LeMay’s monologue, it seemed to him “almost unbelievable.” Later he admitted it made his flesh creep. But as he listened, his airman’s instinct told him LeMay’s plan might work, for all its terrible awesomeness. It also told him LeMay knew it would work.¹⁰

In part because he had a silent partner in Henry Kaiser.

Even after building ships, aircraft carriers, airplanes, and steel, one industrial dream had eluded “the man from Frisco”: processing magnesium.

That seems a strange addition to Kaiser’s wish list. But magnesium had become the new miracle metal of the modern aircraft industry. Lighter than aluminum and far more plentiful, magnesium was harder and more capable of bearing precise tooling than steel. When the British learned in the summer of 1940 that the Germans were using the metal in massive quantities for Luftwaffe parts and airframes, they immediately contacted the United States for help.

That December it was Bill Knudsen who first learned about the vital importance of magnesium from Churchill himself. The British thought they might be able to produce 27,000 tons by 1942, if the Americans were willing to make up the difference.

“Your figures are wrong,” Knudsen had told the prime minister. “You will not produce more than half that amount because you haven’t the facilities, and you will not have them”—certainly not in time. Given magnesium’s new importance (it didn’t even appear on the Army’s critical materials list in 1940), the United States was going to have to produce enough for both its own aircraft industry and that of its Lend-Lease ally, he decided—close to 12 million pounds of magnesium per year.¹¹

That had triggered a crash program for magnesium production, in the shadow of the Blitz. The one American company capable of mass-producing magnesium in that tight time frame was Dow Chemical, the biggest chemical company in the country. Its founder, Herbert Dow, had been obsessed by the light white metal. Back during the First World War when the commodity’s price kept falling, Dow had been convinced magnesium would be the building material of the future. Even though there were no customers, Dow had kept his plant in Midland, Michigan, making it, even after he retired.¹²

Now, anticipating the wartime need even before the federal government did, Dow had built a brand-new plant in Freeport, Texas, at its own expense, ready to extract millions of pounds of magnesium from seawater. But Dow’s method was its own, a virtual monopoly—a nasty word in New Deal Washington. So late in 1940, Henry Kaiser had waded into the competition, determined to find a method of extracting magnesium that would break Dow’s monopoly and give him a lucrative government contract.¹³

He found what he was looking for in an odd little Austrian scientist named Dr. Fritz Hansgirg. Hansgirg’s method was more like the one the Germans were using, a carbothermic reduction process that turned brucite clay into magnesium oxide, heated it up with carbon to burn off the oxygen, then cooled it with natural gas. Harry Davis, Kaiser’s man at Kaiser Permanente Cement, checked out Hansgirg and declared the idea good, at least in theory. With the Davis report in hand and his lawyer Chad Calhoun pushing from behind, Kaiser managed to squeeze a $9.2 million loan from his arch-nemesis, Jesse Jones, in the spring of 1941, to build a plant next to his cement factory in Manteca, California, deep in the San Jose Valley. Kaiser was fully launched in the magnesium business, with Dr. Hansgirg as his technical advisor.¹⁴

It was a disaster almost from the moment they broke ground on the facility. Hansgirg proved to be a cantankerous, unreliable character contemptuous of American business methods and—even more alarming—with more-than-casual ties to the Nazi government.^* Nine days after Pearl Harbor, the FBI scooped him up as a security risk and threw him in jail. Kaiser was undeterred, and kept at the Hansgirg process even though it failed to produce much magnesium and was turning positively dangerous.

In August 1941 a fire in a retort furnace killed three Manteca workers; a few weeks later another accident killed two more. By March 1942 the head of the War Production Board’s Magnesium and Aluminum Division dubbed the entire experiment a failure, and lamented the amount of money lost thanks to Kaiser’s “too rapid push attitude without much thought or study.” He noted that the usually ebullient Kaiser looked down in the dumps, surveying the meager production numbers month after month. Time magazine had to pronounce the Manteca venture a “flop so far,” as Henry Luce wondered if this was one miracle even his hero couldn’t pull off.¹⁵ Even Bill Knudsen, no fan of Kaiser, felt free to weigh in, pronouncing Kaiser’s magnesium venture a “lemon.”

But what Henry Kaiser lacked in patience, he made up for in persistence. Over the course of 1942, as Kaiser’s people hammered away at the problems with the Hansgirg method one by one, they also began building three other magnesium-producing facilities using other methods, including Dow’s seawater method. At the government’s request, that company had generously offered to donate its formula and technical specifications to a number of other companies, including Kaiser’s Permanente.¹⁶

By early 1943, Time was able to report: “After many a delay, Henry J. Kaiser’s $6 million Permanente Magnesium plant is finally over the hump.” Finished ingots began to pour out of the four facilities and into factories and plants around the West Coast for making light airframes, bomb casings, and magnesium flare shells. Kaiser was still losing money. But later that year, Kaiser engineers, working with the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, found another use for Kaiser magnesium that would alter the course of the war.

They called it “goop.” It was a mixture of powdered magnesium, a magnesium distillate, and asphalt. Permanente chemists began making it to sweep up all the finely powdered magnesium dust floating through the plant—a highly flammable not to mention explosive hazard. Then they wondered if it wouldn’t have a wartime application.¹⁷ Both the Germans and British had developed incendiary bombs and used them with telling effect on both cities and industrial targets. The American Air Force was doing the same. But this “goop,” the Kaiser people pointed out, didn’t just burn like fire but stuck like glue. Once it started a fire, it would be nearly impossible to put it out.

The Chemical Warfare people discovered this when they tried the goop out in the middle of the Utah desert, at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground. There they built a complete replica of a Japanese village—just the kind of place where parts of planes and tanks were being assembled in Japan’s highly dispersed war industries. New York architect Antonin Raymond, who had lived for years in Japan, designed at Dugway a five-block site complete with industrial and residential buildings. There were even soldiers playing Japanese air raid wardens and firemen, who tried to put out the fires that the dropped goop spread—all in vain.¹⁸

The Army was very impressed. It immediately ordered Kaiser to halt magnesium ingot production. Now everything coming out of his Manteca plant would be in the form of goop—while DuPont and Standard Oil chemists worked out how to make it safe for manufacture. That suited Kaiser, since making goop took one-fourth the time, and at 18.3 cents per pound proved profitable enough to recoup his losses and repay his loans. Even better, “this is our real opportunity,” he crowed, “to be of service to the war effort”—and final victory over Japan.

In little more than a year, Kaiser Permanente had turned out 410,000 tons of goop—all of it to be stuffed into ten-pound cylinders together with proximity fuses and dubbed the M-74 incendiary bomb.¹⁹ And by the end of 1944, almost all of those were headed in one direction: westward across the Pacific to the Marianas and the waiting arms of Curtis LeMay, who would use them to transform his B-29 strategy.

He first tried out the goop incendiaries on December 18, 1944, in a raid on Japanese-occupied Hankow in China. The first trial run on Japan came on February 25. It proved a bust.²⁰ Even though Japan’s densely packed wooden houses should have burned like tinder, the bombing results had been largely ineffectual. That was the problem LeMay had been hashing out in his mind, on that rainy afternoon in March. And it was there that he realized in a flash the problem wasn’t the plane, or the M-74 that was being dropped. It was the height at which they were being dropped. If you expected to create genuine mayhem, you had to get in closer.

Until now, no B-29 had ever attacked below 20,000 feet. LeMay decided every single one of his planes would attack at less than half that altitude, at between 5,000 and 8,000 feet.²¹ It was a revolutionary concept—as was its combustible corollary. Instead of carrying a mixture of bombs and incendiaries, as the British did for their attacks on German cities, LeMay’s crews would carry nothing but incendiaries. A front line of pathfinders would drop several tons of bombs and flares from about 25,000 feet in order to mark targets and get things started. Then the real fireworks would come in at a fraction of that level, all at once and without warning.

LeMay also decided daylight raids were a waste of time and planes. The attackers would come at night, not in formation but singly: each B-29 using its radar scope to hunt out a place where its ordnance load would do the most damage.

Even more shocking, LeMay decided they would go in unarmed. Unlike the B-29s, Japan’s night fighter force had insufficient radar to track and catch individual bombers flying in irregular patterns. By the time the Japanese figured out what was happening, LeMay figured, his B-29s would be safe and gone. So, taking a page out of General Kenney’s book, he ripped out all the Superfortress’s precious gun turrets except the one in the rear and got rid of the co-pilot and bombardier. As Kenney had discovered, there was no need for a bombardier at that low level. It also created room for still more M-74s.²²

LeMay’s plan wasn’t just to reduce certain targets or cities to smoldering rubble, as British and American bombers were doing to Germany. It was to burn out the heart and soul of an entire nation. The goal was to save American lives by the thousands by taking away lives by tens or even hundreds of thousands—and above all to prevent the need for a long, protracted invasion of Japan by the ruthless application of a single instrument: the B-29 Superfortress.

That was the plan. “Probably the greatest one-man military decision ever made,” as someone later put it.²³ LeMay had thrown away the proverbial book. But he had also finally come up with a strategy to match the awesome new weapons at his disposal. When the planes arrived over Tokyo, he calculated, twenty-five tons of incendiaries would be raining down on every square mile of the city.²⁴

When LeMay outlined his plan to his commanding officers, some of them called it plain murder. They weren’t thinking of Japanese civilians, but American B-29 crews coming in exposed and almost unarmed at that low level. “Sitting ducks,” they told each other with a shake of their heads, “we’ll be sitting ducks.”

LeMay thought differently. The few night fighters the B-29s couldn’t beat off with their remaining guns, they could evade with superior speed. He also felt confident that the B-29 with its magnificent airframe could absorb whatever battle damage it did incur, and still get back to base.

The first low-level raid was set for March 9, 1945. Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur had raised the American flag over Corregidor as the liberation of the Philippines entered its final stages. Other American soldiers were getting ready to land on Okinawa, in preparation for the invasion of the Japanese homeland. Experts had told the secretary of war that the invasion would last through most of 1946 and cost upwards of a million U.S. casualties.²⁵ LeMay had one goal: to make that invasion unnecessary.

That afternoon when the word went out to the aircrews, “You will come over the target at an altitude of five thousand feet,” there were gasps of surprise and shock. But in the 504th, its colonel, Glen Martin, heard the initial shouts of “Crazy” and “This is nuts” turn into “a roar of surprise and enthusiasm,” as he put it, once his crews realized the scope of the entire plan.²⁶

Some 334 B-29s lumbered into the air and made the fifteen-hundred-mile flight to Japan, arriving just after night had settled over an unsuspecting Tokyo. The effect was terrifying. In LeMay’s words, “It was as though Tokyo had dropped through the floor of the world and into the mouth of hell.”²⁷ Two thousand tons of incendiaries rained down on the city from every direction, burning out sixteen square miles of the city and destroying more than a quarter million buildings. Some 83,000 people died in the conflagration that set entire blocks alight and boiled away the water in Tokyo’s canals. LeMay’s planes returned with their underwings and bomb bay doors blackened by the smoke and soot. Crews could smell roasting human flesh below, which lingered in their planes until they landed back at base.

It was the single most destructive air raid in history—and set an apocalyptic scale for what was to come.

News of the raid reached Bill Knudsen many thousands of miles away, in Dayton, Ohio, at the Air Force’s Wright-Patterson Field. It had been the home of the Wright brothers’ first airplane factory. It was now Bill Knudsen’s office, and his last.

With the Battle of Kansas won and the B-29 in action, there was still a lot left for him to do. The Air Force had learned that the key to airpower was logistics: how to keep all those thousands of planes in the air gassed, armed, and ready—and headed in the right direction. So in September 1944, he had been put in charge of the new Air Technical Service Command, or ATSC, the Army Air Forces’ logistical and air services.

As for airplane production, the numbers were hitting almost unimaginable heights. For 1944 it included 93,000 airplanes—almost double the number Roosevelt had proposed in 1940 and which everyone had pronounced impossible. In addition, America was producing a quarter of a million aircraft engines, three-quarters of a million machine guns for the Army, four and a half million rifles and small arms, and 17,500 tanks.²⁸

Yet that was almost half the number produced in 1943, and deliberately so. The fact was the problem now was not how to speed up or even maintain production, but how to slow it down as the war’s end approached. Back in July 1943, the New Deal critics had finally gotten their wish. A new centralized agency was set up with a single czar to oversee both war production and manpower mobilization. The czar was Roosevelt confidant and Supreme Court justice James Byrnes, and as head of the new War Mobilization Board he had so many sweeping powers, some called him the Assistant President.²⁹

Yet from his first day in office until the end of the war, he spent most of his time trying to demobilize the war effort and get American business back on track for an orderly transition to a peacetime economy. Production of civilian products had resumed in August 1944—a sure sign that Washington felt it was safe to begin to wind down mobilization. “Reconversion” became the catchphrase of the day.³⁰

Such was the power of the production monster Knudsen had unleashed and American business had created. Certainly as far as Knudsen was concerned, he felt his job was done. He was worn out, his health strained to the breaking point. His daughter Martha remembered him sitting at home with tears streaming down his face as the radio announcer told of German cities he once knew—Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne—reduced to rubble by the bombers he helped build. After six months at Dayton and less than a month after V-E Day, Knudsen formally resigned from the Army, on June 1, 1945. The day before, Hap Arnold had pinned the oak leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal Knudsen had been awarded the previous May, “for exceptionally meritorious and distinguished services in the performance of duties of great responsibility.” Bob Patterson told the press he calculated just by being there Knudsen had single-handedly “raised America’s war production totals by 10 percent.”³¹

As Knudsen saluted and shook hands and set off from Dayton to rejoin his family in Detroit at last, the problem of how to finish the war had passed into other hands. It was no longer a matter of mass production. It was a matter of applying the awesome new technologies industry had developed, in the right places and in the right way.

Here Knudsen had made one final contribution.

On June 11—just ten days after Knudsen stepped down—a flight of specially modified B-29s began arriving at Tinian. The planes had been built at the Glenn Martin plant in Omaha—the plant Knudsen had turned around with the help of a pair of hard-driving managers. These B-29s were different from the others, with slightly wider bomb bay doors and a modified cockpit with extra room for technicians and special instruments. None of the Omaha workers had known why, and even the top managers knew only that they were part of a special project dubbed Silverplate.

Silverplate’s commanding officer was a thin Air Force colonel with wavy hair and dark eyebrows. Paul W. Tibbets had been operations officer of the 97th Bombardment Group in North Africa and Europe, and commanded the first flight of B-17s to arrive in Europe. Then he had switched to B-29s, where he proved so adept at handling the tough, temperamental machines that Hap Arnold had pulled him from combat and set him to work training other pilots. There was probably no one in the entire Air Force who knew as much about the B-29 as Tibbets—and certainly no one as qualified for as nerve-racking an assignment as Silverplate.³²

After months of special training in the Utah desert, and two months in Cuba teaching his crews about long over-sea flights, Tibbets was assembling his men and planes at Tinian for their final preparation. Whatever their mission would be—and Tibbetts had only been told that it would very probably end the war—he had decided that the B-29 with which he would lead the Omaha pack (serial number B-29-45MO 44-86292) would be spray-painted with the name of his mother, who had encouraged him against his father’s will to enter the Air Force.

She lived in Miami, and her name was Enola Gay.

For the rest of the summer, B-29s dropped tons of Henry Kaiser’s magnesium goop and burned out the heart of industrial Japan. Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Toyama: all vanished in a blistering cloud of fire. LeMay’s six hundred B-29s roamed the Japanese islands almost at will. They took to dropping leaflets on Japanese cities before a raid, urging the population to evacuate before they were incinerated.³³

It wasn’t until May that LeMay was told about the atomic bomb, and the imminent arrival of Colonel Tibbetts’s 509 Composite Group. LeMay had no control over what they were doing, and he didn’t like the setup at all. He certainly didn’t like the attitude of Tibbetts and his specially trained crews. “They were the Second Coming of Christ,” or so they seemed to think, he grumbled later.³⁴ LeMay did convince Leslie Groves that the best way to deliver the bomb was with a single B-29; that way, he said, it would be less likely to attract Japanese attention until it was too late.³⁵ But LeMay was also not convinced that the bomb was really necessary. His strategy alone would force Japan to surrender in time, he believed, and his arguments were persuasive enough that his boss, Hap Arnold, was the only senior military or civilian leader to oppose dropping the atomic bomb.

But the truth was that by August, LeMay was running out of targets. Two of the last, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were chosen for the final act—the one that all hoped and prayed would compel Japanese surrender. On August 1 assembly of the bomb parts unloaded from the cruiser USS Indianapolis began, and on the fifth, LeMay watched as it was stowed on Tibbetts’s B-29, the name Enola Gay flashing jauntily in the tropical sun.

LeMay couldn’t believe it. The five-ton device was so heavy it couldn’t be loaded the usual way. “The only way to load the bomb was to put it into a hole in the ground, taxi the airplane over the top of the bomb, then jack it up into the plane.”³⁶ No one had flown with a 10,000-pound bomb before. But Claire Egtvedt and Ed Wells’s Superfortress could handle 20,000 pounds with ease, and so the next day at 2:45 A.M. Enola Gay, together with two other B-29s carrying cameras and monitoring instruments, rumbled down the Tinian runway and pulled themselves up into the air and away into the darkness.

A eight o’clock Tibbetts dropped his single thirteen-kiloton uranium atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 50,000 people almost instantly. Two days later another Omaha-built B-29, Bock’s Car (serial number B-29-40MO 44-279297), dropped the Hiroshima bomb’s plutonium cousin on Nagasaki, killing another 36,000. The Japanese government, fearful that there might be more such superweapons, surrendered on August 15.

The war was over.

For hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and almost certainly millions of Japanese, it meant being spared death in a prolonged invasion and land campaign to take the islands. To Ed Wells, the B-29’s designer, the news came with a sense of vindication, if not triumph. The plane over which he and the rest of Boeing had labored for almost five years, and which had faced cancellation more than once, had finally come through. Wells himself had spent most of March and April 1945 on Guam with a group of Boeing engineers.

They had arrived days after the first historic raid on Tokyo. Pilots and crews described with awe how thermals erupting from the burning city threw their planes into violent spins, rolls, and Immelmann turns, but the Superfortress had been unfazed. “I’ve flown a lot of Boeing Flying Fortresses,” one pilot told him, “and always thought they were fine planes. But the B-29 beats ’em all.”³⁷

But for the future, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed something else.

Buried deep within the arsenal of democracy, beyond the piles of tires and oil drums and the stacks of steel and bags of concrete; the endless ranks of trucks, jeeps, artillery pieces, and tanks; the harbors full of ships and submarines and aircraft carriers; the skies filled with fighters and bombers; and underneath the piles of charts and graphs and sheets of statistics, was hidden a suicide note. No one consciously put it there. It had simply turned up, unbidden. A power had been unleashed that, if mishandled, could destroy modern industrial civilization itself. Yet it was also a power that, if properly harnessed, could transform the nature of that civilization for the better.

This posed a dilemma, which Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. “Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity,” he said. “If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear.”³⁸

Some might think that judgment too optimistic. But as of today, the suicide note remains unsigned.

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* Hansgirg’s son was chief psychologist for the Wehrmacht.