TWENTY-TWO
THE NEWS OF the surrender was greeted with unrestrained happiness and celebrating. We were going home. We had survived the war. We were alive, and the probability was that tomorrow we’d still be alive. The mood was buoyant and expectant. A return to our families, friends, and careers awaited us. For the first time in years, the world was at peace. The exact measure of the Nazi and Imperial Japan’s decade of murderous excesses was still being uncovered and tallied. The exact nature of the evil loosed upon mankind by the Axis powers would soon tax the comprehension of most human beings.
But for those of us who had fought, the single focus of our lives was that the fighting was over. While Washington finalized the details of the formal surrender and the judicial mechanisms for war crimes tribunals were set in motion, we drank in the blissful monotony of our tropical paradise—swimming in the crystal-clear, coral-blue water, sunning on the sandy beaches, sleeping late into the morning. We drifted from one day to the next. Occasionally I took an airplane up to stay in practice and to do what I loved most, fly. We were missionless and free as birds.
Paul Tibbets told me that I had been awarded the Silver Star for the Nagasaki mission. On August 25, General Nathan Twining flew in from Guam to personally make the presentation to me and to award the Air Medal to each member of my crew. Having a three-star come to Tinian to award these decorations was quite an honor. General Twining was Curtis LeMay’s boss in the theater and reported only to General Spaatz, who commanded all army air forces in the Pacific.
On the appointed day we drove over to the wing command at the 313th Headquarters decked out in our starched and pressed class A uniforms. General Twining reviewed us in military formation and then read each citation individually and pinned the medals to the chest of each recipient.
“How would you like to go up to Japan tomorrow?” Paul Tibbets asked. In Tokyo Bay, General MacArthur was, at that very hour on September 2, accepting the formal surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri.
It took me all of one second to answer, “I’d love it. Let’s go.”
“Get a couple jeeps and trailers and fill them with ten-in-one rations,” he said.
I had my old buddy, John Casey, the commander of the transport squadron, fuel up a C-54 and load it with two jeeps and two trailers. The trailers were filled with ten-in-one rations. Next morning, with Tibbets in the pilot’s seat and me as copilot, our party of about twenty, including Tom Ferebee, Don Albury, Kermit Beahan, Dutch Van Kirk, and Jim Van Pelt, was on its way to Tokyo.
We landed at Atsugi Air Field in Tokyo. The field had been secured just the day before by advance elements of the First Cavalry Division. Their job was to secure all communications facilities, government offices, and military posts in the area. No one could be certain what reception the American forces might encounter and these guys, in complete combat gear, were ready for anything.
The airlift of the First Cav was in full swing. We were part of a never-ending stream of transports that were landing every one to two minutes without stop. The place was a beehive of activity. Unlike the other olive drab transports, we parked our beautiful, gleaming silver C-54 right in front of the operations office to off-load our jeeps and trailers.
The base operations office was an octagonal, wood-shingled building with an open wooden tower propped on the roof. For a major airfield it was primitive compared to the facilities we were used to. Paul proceeded to the operations office, leaving me with the airplane to oversee the off-loading.
No sooner had Paul disappeared into the building than a young colonel came up to me and demanded, “Whose airplane is this?”
“Sir, this is Colonel Tibbets’s airplane,” I replied.
“Get it out of here,” he ordered.
It struck me that this guy was awful young to be a colonel. My guess was that he was younger than I. He had that serious demeanor of a man who had a job to do and would do it to the letter. He didn’t know who we were, and I wasn’t about to tell him. It occurred to me that three weeks earlier, with our top secret priority, I could have parked our Green Hornet inside of the operations office and no one would have raised an eyebrow. But I thought maybe I could reason with him. We were, after all, on the same side. “We’re only going to be here a couple of days. I can leave the air—”
He cut me off. “I’ll give you thirty minutes, then I’ll bulldoze it off the ramp.” And off he walked.
I told Colonel Tibbets, but added that I had a plan. The map showed a small grass field, Chofu Field, just outside the city. I’d take the C-54 up to that field, hitch a ride into Tokyo, and meet him and the guys at the Dai Ichi Hotel. That would allow us to avoid having to butt heads with the young colonel. I had learned long ago that in the military you choose your spots, and this wasn’t worth a fight.
I took a crew chief with me and landed at Chofu Field about ten minutes later. The concrete touchdown pad ran out after about a thousand feet, so I let the airplane roll off onto the grass. Nothing much was happening at this field. A group of P-38s had come in to Chofu to provide air cover for our forces if hostilities erupted. All was quiet, and the fighters sat at the ready. A major pulled up in a jeep alongside the Green Hornet. He introduced himself as the duty officer. I asked for transport into Tokyo, but he told me that only the group commander could authorize that request.
Another colonel approached who looked like he was barely out of flying school. “Can’t help you, Major. Times are tough. We don’t have enough of anything, including gas. Everything’s being diverted to Atsugi Field in Tokyo,” he offered politely.
I hadn’t come all this way to strand Paul Tibbets in Tokyo. But at least this colonel wasn’t threatening to plow my airplane into the ground with a bulldozer. I decided to spend a little time commiserating with him. We talked about flying school, what class he’d been in, how young he was to be a colonel, the responsibilities—and then ever so politely I asked again if maybe he could just get me into town. I mentioned that my colonel would be expecting me. He finally relented. An hour later I was standing in front of the Dai Ichi Hotel.
The Dai Ichi Hotel and the Imperial Hotel, which had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, were among the few structures left standing in Tokyo. They were situated close to the Imperial Palace, which had remained untouched by our bombers. Standing near the palace, I wondered if the Japanese would have shown such restraint if they had had the opportunity to bomb the White House.
We all decided to take a swing around the city. Someone had the idea that we should find a translator to accompany us while we were in Tokyo. A hotel employee directed us to the major newspaper office in Tokyo, where we found an affable English-speaking reporter who had graduated from Harvard in the 1930s.
Downtown Tokyo stretched out in front of us, barren. Nothing was standing. The only recognizable objects were the burned hulks of safes and vaults among the charred remains of what must once have been banks and insurance companies. The Tokyo fire department and other emergency agencies had fought a losing battle to save Tokyo’s downtown in the course of repeated bombings over several months. Driving through the rubble of what had been a great city, I saw the strangest of sights. Children, most of them four or five years old, lined the streets waving tiny American flags as we passed, offering salutes to us with their little hands. Not the adults, just the children. I couldn’t understand where they had gotten the flags or why they were doing this. The adults were at best neutral, or perhaps dour, accepting of our presence, but the kids were cheerful.
Our interpreter told us that the Japanese are an orderly people. Since they had surrendered, it was their duty to cooperate with the occupying forces, to accept the shame of their defeat. It struck me that he hadn’t mentioned the shame for what they had done. But for the children, it was a time of hope with the war over.
Nowhere in Tokyo did we encounter any hostility toward us.
Our accommodations at the Dai Ichi were neat, clean, and undersized. Everything—the rooms, the beds, the bathtub—was about 60 percent of what similar accommodations would be in the States. For a guy with my dimensions, it was a tight squeeze.
Although the military issued scrip for us to use as currency, we didn’t need it. The army had taken over the hotel and the dining facilities. The menu was a delightful array of C rations, which veterans to this day fondly recall as corned beef hash. We could order anything on the menu. So we had hash in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. We had fried hash, cold hash, hot hash, hash rolled into a ball, hash flattened into a patty, and mashed hash. What saved the day was an endless supply of sake, which we consumed with abandon.
The next morning I took a jeep and one of the trailers filled with our rations and set out for a day of sightseeing. Maybe we could do a little trading with our rations. We came upon Sophia University, which was a Catholic school.
At the university we found a priest who was German but spoke perfect English with a most proper British accent. He told us how bad conditions had become. Much of the population was near starvation. Everything was scarce—fuel, electricity, housing, clothes, medical supplies. Children had been pressed into factory work as the shortage of men had worsened. Yet the government had continued an endless barrage of encouragement promising that victory was theirs.
The priest gave us a tour of the campus and the main chapel. Not surprisingly, the religious icons in the chapel had Japanese features. A service was under way, and a class of little schoolgirls with white square handkerchiefs on their heads stood in line to receive Communion. In the oriental fashion, they bowed instead of genuflecting. It was all so familiar, comforting, and reassuring.
Food was scarce in Tokyo but we had plenty. And when we ran out, there would be more when we returned to Tinian. In good conscience, I couldn’t keep the rations we had stashed in the trailer. I thought that if I gave the rations to the priest he would know how to properly distribute the food to the children of his parish. All of the guys were in agreement. So we pulled the trailer around and unloaded the cases of food.
The priest was elated. Our ten-in-one rations were a cornucopia, not like the C rations. They were crammed with tins of tuna, chocolate bars, crackers, chewing gum, and sundry other delights. To him, it was like a gift basket.
We wanted to go to Hiroshima, but there was no adequate landing facility to accommodate our C-54. There was, however, a field about fifteen miles outside of Nagasaki. It was called Omura, and it was on a naval base where we could land.
What we didn’t know was that the Omura naval base and its airfield were still under the control of the Japanese military. As our C-54 set down, we were the first Americans to arrive in the area of Nagasaki. We were met on the ground by Japanese soldiers and their officers. Although I carried a sidearm during the war, I never loaded it. For the first time since I’d joined the military, I took the clip of ammunition from the pouch on my web belt and inserted it into the handle grip of my Colt .45 automatic. I decided against chambering a round, remembering my father’s admonition.
The scene was awkward, but not threatening, as we deplaned. The Japanese seemed to be waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. All that was left of the airplane hangars were the charred steel superstructures standing like the skeletons of some long-dead beast. Two Mitsubishi Zero-Sen fighters, known to us as “Zekes,” in perfect condition, were parked beside the burned-out hangars. None of the assembled soldiers spoke English, so we communicated in pantomime. We moved our hands as if turning an imaginary steering wheel, driving. We tried to make English words sound Japanese: “Need trucky to drivy Nagasaki.” It’s amazing how universal the belief is that if you speak loudly, slowly, and, in the case of English speakers, add vowels to the end of words, this will pass as a foreign language.
Our problem was that we had traded our jeeps and trailers to a squad of marines in Tokyo for what we thought were thirty handmade silk kimonos. We didn’t care about the jeeps. Like everything else, we had hundreds, maybe thousands, of jeeps back on Tinian, many still in shipping crates. But on closer examination it turned out that the kimonos were made of something, but it sure as hell wasn’t silk. We had been hoodwinked, but what the hell. The marines had a practical use for the jeeps. What we were going to do with the kimonos had yet to be decided. In the world of barter, which Japan then was, it seemed like a good idea to have silk kimonos.
The Japanese soldiers finally understood what we were asking for and delivered three trucks to us. These vehicles were a sorry sight—a single headlight in the middle of a dented and leaky radiator grill, rickety suspension, fenders rusted through. They were a far cry from the equipment we were used to operating. I don’t know what they ran on for fuel, but they sputtered and shook worse than a diesel engine on a cold morning. I expected them to break down before we drove off the field. Some of the guys jumped into the back of one of the trucks and I sat on the roof of the cab. The rest followed in the other two trucks.
The road to Nagasaki wound up and over hills and down into valleys dotted with small homes along the sides of the road. The hillsides were green and leafy. A summer breeze whispered through the tall grass and shrubs and stands of trees. Here and there, Japanese families toiled in fields and gardens, paying us no attention. Occasionally a single, unarmed Japanese soldier—never a group of soldiers, always one at a time—would be walking along the road, showing no response to us, as if our presence was as normal and expected as any other everyday occurrence in this beautiful countryside. Two weeks earlier, he and the families along the road probably would have killed us on sight.
On the outskirts of Nagasaki, we came upon a small resort inn nestled among ancient trees. It was a charming place, two stories high, with double red-tile pagoda-styled roofs, the second-story roof overhanging a lower roof rimming the first story. We decided to spend the night there before pressing on to Nagasaki. Inside on the reception desk lay the register. I wasn’t sure if the Japanese knew the names of the crew who had bombed their city. It crossed my mind that perhaps the better part of valor would be to avoid signing in. We were the only Americans on Japanese soil within three hundred miles of this spot. I watched as Paul walked up to the desk, swiveled the register around toward him, and in a clear hand wrote, “Colonel Paul W. Tibbets USAAF.” I stepped right up after him and signed “Major Charles W. Sweeney USAAF,” and in turn each of our party registered.
An elderly couple were the innkeepers. They were courteous and attentive, and they spoke English. Before the war, Nagasaki had been a favorite tourist destination for American and English travelers. That night we sat around the inn relaxing and drinking sake. I still wasn’t quite at ease, though, and I did something I had never done before or since: I hung the holster with my loaded weapon on the headrest of my bed, within easy reach.
The next morning we proceeded to Nagasaki. The trucks coughed and gagged up the last set of hills. Over the next ridge was the Urakami Valley. At the crest we could survey the length of the valley where a month before the Mitsubishi war plants had been operating at full capacity producing small arms, torpedoes, and various other munitions for the Japanese armed forces.
The valley floor was a stretch of rubble dotted by grotesquely twisted lumps of steel beams and columns. A brick chimney rose here and there amid the wreckage where the munitions plants had once stood. From a distance, the destroyed armaments plants looked like erector sets a child had twisted and bent and carelessly tossed away. We had driven through the verdant hills to a wasteland. As we descended into the valley, we were the first Americans to set foot in Nagasaki and survey the damage. United States naval personnel were waiting on board vessels anchored in the harbor until scientific survey teams were sent in first to test for radioactivity. We weren’t even supposed to be in the area, not to mention driving through the valley.
The trucks came to a stop midway in the valley. I walked alone along a brick sidewalk to a point I estimated was where ground zero would have been on August 9. In the distance ahead of me I could see a solitary Japanese soldier walking away along the same sidewalk, unaware or uncaring that we were here. There were very few people around as I surveyed the surroundings.
I looked straight up into the blue sky where at 1,890 feet the Fat Man had exploded. In an instant on that August day, which oddly seemed so long ago, everything around me that morning had been vaporized in a burst of blistering heat and blast.
I walked to what must have been an intersection of main streets. On one corner I peered down into the cellar of what had been a fire station. It was then that I was struck by the significance of our weapon. In the cellar was a fire truck that had been crushed flat, as if a giant had stepped on it. In fact, the entire infrastructure of the city was flat—no water, no emergency facilities, no firefighters. Everything was gone.
This had not been the conventional slow, incremental destruction of a target, as we had destroyed other Japanese cities. This had been instantaneous obliteration. There had been no time for the people to grow accustomed to the bombing, as other Japanese had done in Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka. There had been no time to allow the mind to rationalize that you could survive. More Japanese had died during a single fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 9 than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki—97,000 killed, 125,000 wounded, 1,200,000 homeless. For its victims, the firestorms in Tokyo were every bit as horrifying as the nuclear blast. Intense napalm fires incinerated everything. Tornadolike winds whipped through the city as the fires consumed all the oxygen, creating a vacuum that itself suffocated people. Yet the Japanese had fought on. But they could not fight on after the second atomic strike.
Nuclear weapons had changed the human response to warfare. No longer would war be seen as simply an extension of national policies by other means, a condition of the human spirit that occasionally broke out of the bounds of civilized conduct. The Japanese military leaders might wish to fight to the death, but it would be their nation that would die.
The casualty figures at Nagasaki were still a matter of some speculation. It would finally be estimated that in the first instant 40,000 people were killed, and that another 30,000 to 35,000 died of their injuries within a few days. Seventy-five thousand more were wounded. As I looked around, I saw no bodies among the rubble, nor would I see any in other parts of the city. Apparently, and with the efficiency for which the Japanese are noted, the survivors had almost immediately started to clean up and care for the wounded.
Standing amid the rubble, I felt a sadness that so many had died on both sides, not only there but in all the horrible places where the war had been fought. We would learn that over fifty million people had perished because of Japanese and German aggression—the majority of them unarmed men, women, and children—in Asia, the Pacific, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and a thousand other places. And millions of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, the best and brightest of an entire generation, would never realize their tomorrows.
I thanked God that it was we who had this weapon and not the Japanese or the Germans. I hoped there would never be another atomic mission.
I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation. Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood. The suffering evidenced by the destruction around me had been born of the cruelty of the Japanese militaristic culture and a tradition that glorified the conquest of “inferior” races and saw Japan as destined to rule Asia. The true vessel of remorse and guilt belonged to the Japanese nation, which could and should call to account the warlords who so willingly offered up their own people to achieve their visions of greatness.
My crew and I had flown to Nagasaki to end the war, not to inflict suffering. There was no sense of joy among us as we walked the streets there. We were relieved it was over, for us and for them.
Although the industrial valley and the shipbuilding facilities along the Urakami River had been totally destroyed, the residential and business districts of Nagasaki had been spared. The life of Nagasaki was going on as usual there. Kermit Beahan, Don Albury, and I walked around the city. Businesses were open; the people went about their daily routine. Children lined up in their uniforms to attend school. The mood was different from the mood in Tokyo. There was an air of sullenness, but not of despair. The people on the street were polite to us. Of course, they didn’t know who we were, but they didn’t seem fazed at the sight of three American servicemen strolling through their city.
The rebuilding was already under way. Unlike the Russians, who had immediately carted off the spoils of victory from Manchuria, dismantling factories, railroad trains, and rolling stock and literally taking every nut, bolt, and brick, the United States, even in the early days of the Occupation, began to assist in feeding, clothing, and housing its former enemy. Soon money and material would flood into Japan to rebuild the economy its leaders had so recklessly destroyed.