TWENTY
PAUL TIBBETS HAD taught me a technique that caused a lot of controversy among pilots, some vehemently denying it existed and others vocal apostles that a skilled pilot could do it. It was called “flying on the step.” In theory, it was very simple. If you kept the power settings steady and took the aircraft into a gradual descent, the airplane would pick up a fraction more airspeed without using more power and fuel. The pilot would then level off. To retain that increased airspeed and perhaps even supplement it a bit more, you would start down another step and then another step, and so on.
You could milk only a little bit more speed and fly a little farther without consuming more fuel, but that was all I needed—a little bit more. I had the advantage of being at 30,000 feet, so I started my way down the staircase.
I also decided to add some insurance and save a little more fuel by throttling back the propellers to 1,800 rpm from the recommended cruising setting of 2,000 rpm. Turning the numbers over in my mind, I knew this wasn’t going to be enough. So I throttled back to 1,600 rpm, well below the engine specifications for any circumstance. This could damage the engines, but balancing the risks against the benefits, I concluded that I’d rather replace four engines and get my crew safely tucked away for the evening than be bobbing in the Pacific aboard a life raft hoping we’d be picked up.
At the new settings we were consuming 300 gallons of fuel an hour. Flight time to Okinawa was about seventy-five minutes. Theoretically, the airspeed we gained as we came down each step might be just enough to get us to Yontan Field on Okinawa. Of course, we presumed that these procedures could buy us another fifty miles of flight and that the engines would continue to purr at 1,600 rpm.
I’m not sure that I could have found a Las Vegas odds-maker willing to take book that we’d make it.
We were about fifteen minutes from Okinawa. I called the tower at Yontan. No response. I tried a few more times. “Yontan tower. Yontan tower. This is Dimples 77. . . . Yontan. Yontan. This is Dimples 77. Mayday! Mayday! Over.” Silence.
I radioed the neighboring island of Ie Shima. They heard me, and I heard them. My transmitter and receiver were working. At that time, however, there was no direct-communications land link between the Ie Shima tower and the Okinawa tower. And because they were so close, they operated on different radio frequencies. There was no chance that they could raise Yontan for me in time.
I talked to Fred Bock, and he responded. But Fred had to keep his frequency open. If he tried to contact the tower, it might close out my transmissions—or worse, confuse the situation as we continued on a straight line toward the field. It was as if the entire world around us was spinning along and we were somehow suspended just beyond it, cut off from it.
No one was more amazed than I when Bock’s Car caught sight of Okinawa. Ahead of me I could see heavy air traffic coming and going from the field. As the closest American base to Japan, Okinawa was the busiest airfield in the Pacific theater. Missions were being flown around the clock. A continuous stream of P-38s, B-24s, B-25s, and P-51s was taking off and landing.
Kuharek broke in, “Major, all gauges read empty.”
At that moment our right outboard engine quit.
“Increase power to number-three engine,” I yelled to Albury.
We were down to fumes. The power to number three steadied us, but the situation was clear. I couldn’t afford a long, low approach or to be waved off to go around for another try. If the remaining engines went out on us, I’d be making a dead-stick landing—no power, just basically gliding in with a sixty-five-ton airplane. I’d have to come in hot and high, aiming at a point halfway down the runway and maintaining my airspeed well above the usual 110 mph landing speed. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would get us on the ground, hopefully in one piece. I still had 600 gallons of high-test aviation fuel trapped in the belly of the airplane. If we crashed on landing, it very well could explode. We would have one shot to do this.
I told Olivi and Van Pelt to fire the flares of the day. The flare gun was positioned through a porthole in the skin of the fuselage. Red and green flares were fired out in an arc, bursting away from the airplane.
No answer from the field. The air traffic continued to come and go. They were either ignoring us completely or plain didn’t see us, which was remarkable, as this massive silver B-29 lumbered toward them.
“Mayday! Mayday! Yontan. Dimples 77,” I yelled. I could hear the tower talking to other airplanes. But not to me. Again I transmitted, “Mayday! Mayday!” Nothing.
My biggest concern was that if the field was not cleared of incoming and outgoing traffic, I might hit an airplane taking off or be hit by one coming in for landing. Either way, it would be a disaster.
“I want any goddamn tower on Okinawa!” I bellowed into the mike.
I yelled back toward Olivi and Van Pelt. “Fire every goddamn flare we have on board!”
“Which ones?” Olivi asked.
“Every goddamn flare we have! Do it now!” I barked over my shoulder.
The flares arced gracefully above the airplane and then exploded into reds, blues, oranges, purples, greens—twenty flares of all colors. We must have looked like the Fourth of July. But it sure as hell got their attention. The multiple flares signaled not only “aircraft out of fuel” but “prepare for crash,” “heavy damage,” “dead and wounded on board,” and “aircraft on fire.” It was a potpourri of disaster warnings. On reflection, any one or all could have been true, depending on what happened next. The smell of gunpowder from the Very pistol that fired the flares filled the forward compartment.
I could see traffic being cleared ahead. Airplanes quickly banked away from the field while fire trucks and ambulances sped toward the runway.
I was now barreling in straight ahead, like a runaway freight train. In a few seconds we’d be on the ground, one way or the other. I prayed we didn’t lose another engine at that moment. I needed just a few more seconds of power.
I was above the concrete runway. I descended quickly, hitting the pavement midway down the strip at about 140 mph. The Bock’s Car bounced right back up into the air about twenty-five feet and then slammed back down to earth. When the wheels again met the pavement, the port outboard engine quit. The sixty-five-ton aircraft veered violently to the left toward a line of B-24s parked wingtip to wingtip along the edge of the runway.
I flipped on the reversible props and hit the emergency brakes, barely getting the B-29 straightened out and keeping it on the concrete runway. I thanked God that Paul Tibbets had had the foresight to equip our fifteen airplanes with reversible propellers. Of the 1,056 B-29s in service, only the ones made for the 509th were equipped with reversible props.
I depressed the brakes as far as they would go. The end of the runway was dead ahead. I grabbed the yoke and, using it as leverage, I put my entire weight and strength onto the brakes. The new Curtis reversible propellers added enough reverse thrust, together with the brakes, to finally slow us down to a roll. We came under positive control just short of the end of the runway.
I was so mentally and physically exhausted at that point that I just let the airplane roll to the side of the runway and onto a taxiway. Another engine quit. Instead of taxiing to a hardstand, I slumped back into my seat and decided to wait for the tow vehicles to come and get us. I cut the engines, and a total silence fell over the compartment. No one made a sound. Then the distant wail of sirens broke the stillness. Within seconds, emergency vehicles pulled alongside. We opened the nosewheel door. A head poked in. “Where’s the dead and wounded?”
I realized how drained I was. I answered, “Back there,” and I pointed to the north, toward Nagasaki.
The crew slowly dropped out of the airplane. Without a word, we drew together. I told them to get something to eat but to say nothing to anyone—not where we’d been or where we were going. The men climbed aboard a waiting truck. I dropped into the passenger seat of a jeep and told the driver to take me to the senior ranking unit commander. I needed to make a more comprehensive report to Tinian and advise them of my location and condition.
The jeep pulled up to the operations center. I told the lieutenant on duty that I needed access to his communications facilities, explaining my mission vaguely and the need to contact Tinian. In a few moments he returned, and to my surprise, I was ushered over to General Jimmy Doolittle’s headquarters. Doolittle was the commander of the Eighth Air Force. Just a couple of weeks earlier he had deployed his headquarters from England to Okinawa, where he soon commanded the “Mighty Eighth.”
The irony struck me immediately. I was about to meet the man who had flown the first American air strike against Japan by bombing Tokyo in 1942. His mission had inflicted very little damage. It had been symbolic, intended to show the Japanese people they were not invulnerable from attack as their military had claimed. And I had just flown what might be the last mission of the war—a mission that had demonstrated to the Japanese people that they could be on the verge of annihilation in spite of what their military and civilian leaders were telling them. The general gave me full access to his communications facilities, and I arranged for a detailed report to be transmitted to Tinian. When I finished, I had a brief and formal interview with General Doolittle.
Doolittle was no-nonsense, a legend in his own time. But I was surprised or maybe disappointed that he received the news of Nagasaki with no sign of emotion. He just wanted the facts.
“What was the extent of the damage?” he asked.
“I can’t be sure, General. Smoke obscured the target,” I answered.
“But you hit the target?” he pressed, stone-faced.
“Yes. Definitely, sir.”
Doolittle was silent, unsmiling. He sat reflectively. Maybe he, too, was thinking about the irony of the moment. Or about the long struggle that had stretched over the previous three and a half years since he and a brave band of pilots and their crews flew their B-25s off the heaving decks of the USS Hornet, barely making it into the air. “It’s been a long time coming,” he finally offered.
“Yes, sir. I hope it means the end,” I replied quietly.
Sensing that the interview had come to an end, I snapped a salute and turned to go. As I reached the door, Doolittle called me back.
“Sweeney?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I can only tell you what they said to me,” he began, a smile creasing the corners of his mouth and then spreading across his broad face. “Well done!”
I joined my crew in the mess hall. There was a buzz of excitement as I walked through the line getting some chow. The talk around me was that a second atomic bomb had been dropped. In the military, scuttlebutt moves fast. How they knew about the second drop was amazing to me. Of course, no one paid any attention to me or knew who my crew and I were or where we had come from. The speculation was fantastic. One guy ladling out mashed potatoes was telling his buddy that he had heard it was a P-38 that flew in with a bomb no bigger than a baseball.
What I was interested in was whether the Japanese had made any announcement about surrender. They had not.
We stayed at Okinawa for about two hours while we ate and the Bock’s Car was refueled. John Kuharek told me that he had measured the fuel, and that we’d had seven gallons left when we touched down—less than one minute of flight time. We still had a five-hour flight back to Tinian. After takeoff, the mood aboard the airplane was relaxed but very quiet, almost somber. We turned on Armed Forces Radio, hoping to hear news of the Japanese surrender. Instead, the lead story was that our allies, the Soviet Union, had that day declared war on Japan and were massing troops for a push into Manchuria. “How convenient,” I thought. To the victor goes the spoils, and I was certain that Stalin didn’t want to lose out on the loot he could cart off from Japan.
As the hours ticked by and we plowed through the moonlit sky, no word of Japanese surrender or even about our mission came over the airwaves. The music of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller drifted softly through the airplane. I’m not sure what was going through my crew’s minds, but I began to think ahead to the realization that if the Japanese didn’t surrender, we would be flying more of these missions. The thought left me cold. I was the only one aboard who knew that we were several weeks away from having more bombs. This interlude would give the Japanese more than enough time to recover, regain their balance, and stiffen their resolve. Having lived through and overcome the devastation of the two atomic bombings, as they had survived the firebombings, they might actually convince themselves, using some perverse inversion of logic, that they could fight through the new horror, too. The samurai code of death with honor might engulf the entire population in a spasm of self-sacrifice.
At 10:30 P.M. I set the Bock’s Car down on Runway A at Tinian. It had been twenty hours since we had last set foot there. There were no brass bands or cheering multitudes to greet us. No klieg lights or phalanxes of cameras or microphones or film crews. We were met by our ground crew and one photographer, a welcome sight to me and the men of the Bock’s Car.
We were home. We were alive. We had completed our mission.
From the cockpit, I could see two solitary figures standing off to the left in the dim light. One was Paul Tibbets and the other was Admiral Purnell, the highest ranking naval officer on Tinian. I was the last of the crew to climb out. I was beyond being tired. I felt like I had passed a point of exhaustion and that I couldn’t sleep if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t have mustered another ounce of energy if my life had depended on it.
A voice greeted me. “Pretty rough, Chuck?”
It was Tibbets. I echoed, “Pretty rough, boss.”
I don’t remember extending a salute in the presence of a flag officer, and if I didn’t, no one seemed to mind. Admiral Purnell extended his hand to shake mine. “You know, Major, those hours before you dropped the bomb, we’d just about given up on you.”
The admiral then filled me in on what had happened. He told me that when General Farrell had first read the Hopkins transmission, he’d become violently sick to his stomach. “But although we were worried,” the admiral continued, “Tibbets here said if anyone could get it done, you could. I see he was right.”
That statement of confidence from the man I most admired washed away the travails we had gone through. Forget the brass bands and the crowds. This moment meant much more to me.
“It was close,” I offered. “What the hell are we so gloomy about? Mission accomplished. Now what about some beer?”
Tibbets laughed. “Chuck, I’m afraid I have some bad news. The beer ran out. But maybe the medics have some medicinal whiskey left,” he added with a wink.
“What are we waiting for?”
The trucks dropped us off at the medical detachment, where the medics pronounced us fit. We were told that our rations of medicinal “relaxants” were awaiting us at the officers’ club. We were then taken to the intelligence hut. General Farrell, Admiral Purnell, Dr. Ramsey, Colonel Tibbets, and the formal interrogators were in attendance but said little as they listened intently to each of us recite the events as we’d seen them.
When we arrived at the officers’ club, a bar had been set up with a full selection of sour mash bourbon, Scotch, and 120-proof grain alcohol. Up to that point the mood among the crew had been subdued. But after almost forty-eight hours without sleep and a couple of drinks, we began to loosen up, relax, and allow ourselves the luxury of drinking ourselves into blissful oblivion.
Some of the crew from the Enola Gay joined us, and we partied into the morning light as gradually, one at a time, men wandered off to their quarters.
Paul Tibbets also joined us. He was always with his men. He and I sat off to one side for a bit and informally ran through the whole mission. Not in the stale rote of the intelligence debriefing but in the style of two professionals, two friends, who had the common experience of being the only two pilots to have carried out such a mission.
General Farrell had made a brief appearance to congratulate us. After reading the intelligence debriefing report, he went to the communications hut and sent the following cable to Washington:
CENTERBOARD—To Groves Personal From Farrell APCOM 5479 TOP SECRET
Strike and accompanying airplanes have returned to Tinian. Ashworth message No. 44 from Okinawa is confirmed by all observers. Cloud cover was bad at strike and strike plane had barely enough fuel to reach Okinawa. After listening to the accounts, one gets the impression of a supremely tough job carried out with determination, sound judgment and great skill. It is fortunate for the success of the mission that its leaders, Sweeney and Ashworth, were men of stamina and stout heart. Weaker men could not have done this job. Ashworth feels confident that the bomb was satisfactorily placed and that it did its job well.
At about five A.M., being well potted, I began to navigate my way back to my Quonset hut, more by instinct than intellect. I had left Tom Ferebee and Jim Van Pelt at the bar drinking. While I was still trying to find my way home, they got there first. They’d apparently come up with the great idea of borrowing General Farrell’s jeep and taking a ride around the compound. Their excursion came to an abrupt and unexpected end when they drove the jeep into my quarters, where Kermit Beahan and Don Albury had retired earlier and were sound asleep. I laid down among the wreckage and drifted into a deep sleep.
The Japanese were assessing the damage at Nagasaki, and the Soviets had invaded Manchuria. After Hiroshima, the Japanese military had argued that the United States had only one bomb, that we had used it, and that we had done the worst we could do. The military generals’ staffs believed the bombing at Hiroshima could be a rallying point in mobilizing the populace to rise up against an invading army and inflict massive casualties upon American troops, forcing a negotiated peace on terms acceptable to them.
Nagasaki changed the dynamic between the war faction and the peace faction within the Japanese inner cabinet, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War. The six members of the council, up to that point evenly split on the direction the war should take, were about to meet to decide the fate of their nation. Without question, the army and navy general staffs still wielded the actual power in Japan and were committed to fight on. Talk of surrender could result in summary execution for any of these council members. General Korechika Anami, a member of the council and Japan’s minister of war, had waxed poetically about the last great battle on Japanese soil: “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” But the second atomic bomb presented a unique opportunity for the inner cabinet to consider the unthinkable—unconditional surrender.
The inner cabinet convened a formal meeting in the eighteen-by-thirty-foot air raid shelter below the Imperial Palace. They were to be joined in the muggy, unventilated space by Emperor Hirohito. His presence was both unusual and encouraging to those assembled. The lives of millions of his people and of millions of Allied troops depended on what transpired at that extraordinary gathering.
Several hours later I would awake to the news that there was no news. It had been over twenty-four hours since the drop, and still the Japanese were silent. The prospect that these missions might become a matter of routine suddenly seemed all too real and disturbing.