WWII Biography

CHAPTER ONE:  "NO DRY RUN"

The sunrise such as the world had never seen began as a seed of reddish-purple light. In one-millionth of an eyeblink, the seed blossomed into a light not of this world, the light of a thousand suns in one.

When the eye-stabbing flash penetrated the goggles intended to shield him, the tail gunner thought he had been blinded. At the signal nearly two minutes earlier, Staff Sergeant George Robert Caron had lowered the dense Polaroids over his eyes and tested them. The bright morning sun had been reduced to an odd, faint purple blob. Nothing more.

Major Tom Ferebee spotted his aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, pressed the trigger of his Norden bomb sight, and calmly, but deliberately, announced “bomb away.”

At that moment “Little Boy” tumbled from the belly of the Enola Gay on its six-mile plummet earthward. Isolated by the blackness of his goggles, Caron counted the seconds after the bomb bay doors burst open.

Freed of its five-ton burden, the B-29 shot upward. Instantly, Colonel Paul Tibbets executed the well-practiced, evasive maneuver calculated to put a safe distance between his crew of twelve and the unknown effects of the blast. No one, not even the physicists responsible for creating the world’s first atomic weapon, could predict what its force would do to the specially modified plane. Or to a city of three hundred twenty-three thousand people. For Little Boy, there had been no dry run. Its deployment marked the first time in history a major weapon had gone into battle untested.

The thirty-third President of the United States had inherited a bloody war. The last thing Truman needed was a dud bomb. If the “gimmick” worked, he was sure it would bring Japan to her knees. If not in one devastating and demoralizing blow, then by another and another. He waited anxiously. The scientists who conceived this two-billion dollar baby and the pilot of the plane who had just delivered it also waited. Its intended victim lay waiting like the outstretched fingers of a
 six-digit hand.

The seven watercourses of the Uta River fanned out gracefully around and between the fingers called Hiroshima, then 
meandered lazily southwestward until, finally, their estuaries licked the 
gaping mouths of the Seto Inland Sea.
 Japan’s admirals and generals recognized Hiroshima's 
waterways were among her greatest strengths. The city’s harbors eased
 troop deployment, and industry lined the banks of its rivers. In their fitful
 planning sessions, military strategists had designated Hiroshima as
 provisional capital and headquarters for the nation’s defense—should
 Tokyo have to be abandoned.

Already, they had established headquarters
 of the Second Imperial Army and military support facilities within the four-
square-mile area that surrounded the Aioi Bridge.


This morning had begun no differently than any other. Japan's undernourished young soldiers, eager to die for their emperor, drilled
 proudly and obediently in the courtyard of Hiroshima Castle. Wrinkled,
 stooped old men fished from the banks of the muddy Uta. Even one fish 
would help relieve the pain of hunger in their families’ bellies. School
 children resumed their tasks from the day before, leveling more of
 Hiroshima's flimsy wooden dwellings, shops, and fences to create broad fire
 breaks that might save her, if and when she came under attack.


On this brilliant morning, August 6, I945, any one of her
 citizens whose eyes turned skyward would have seen only the golden glint of
 an aircraft, scarcely visible at thirty-one thousand feet.

Air-raid sirens,
 which had cried wolf so frequently throughout the past months over a a
seemingly benign reconnaissance plane or two, had not yet screamed the
 plane’s presence through the stirring streets.
 Three times during the night and early hours they had wailed
 their warning: B-san. B-san. The city’s weary people felt the effects of
 another sleepless night.

Hiroshima’s pulse was rapid, its nerves frazzled.
 Fathers and mothers wondered when the whining fire bombs that had 
turned her sister cities into cinders would rain destruction on her. In their 
restlessness, they had not dreamed their fair city had been reserved for
 something else, something new, something unimaginable.


At 8:15:17 a.m., Hiroshima time, their wonderings ended.


In his shoulder-wide compartment, tail gunner Caron had been
 counting. Forty-one . . . forty-two . . .  Suddenly, without a sound, the 
pinprick of energy inside the bomb transmuted into a full-blown explosion.

Light from a thousand suns crescendoed to a brightness that seemed to
 illuminate the universe.
 As though billions of years of-creation had suddenly and
 inextricably reversed themselves, the sky ripped open. Within this
 tumultuous, man-made cataclysm roiled unfathomable temperatures.

Just
 as it had been programmed to do, the bomb released its might eighteen
 hundred and ninety feet above the city. The explosion released fifty million
degrees Celsius, turning matter to energy, mass to ash. Its core reached
 three hundred thousand degrees. At ground zero, directly below, there was
 no running away from the fire and fury. Objects were no longer real. Most 
ceased to exist. Trees, bicycles, tea pots, sleeping mats, houses, people.
 Vanished. Vaporized. Only occasional eerie shadows on stone, imprinted
 like photograms by the intense light, hinted the presence of once-living
 beings.


Coursing eastward after its sharp right-turn dive, the Enola
 Gay raced away from what was.
 At the split second of detonation, the forward cabin lit up as
though hundreds of flash bulbs had been tripped all at once. Tibbets sensed 
a galvanic tingle on his tongue, then a metal aftertaste reminiscent of lead.


When the sun exploded, Caron appeared like a negative
 image—a solarized figure helplessly blinded. He winced from pain, then 
ripped the goggles off his forehead. His retinas played tricks on him.
 Everything was awash in brilliant yellow and white. Seconds played
 themselves out in slow motion. Form and line gradually became more
 distinct. Color flowed back into bleached-white surroundings.


Eight miles west of the city, at the home of a friend, Satoshi
 Nakamura lingered over his newspaper. He savored another cup of tea.
 Without warning, the east-facing windows shattered with a force so violent
 that it threw him to the floor.

The reporter for the official government news
 agency, Domei, picked himself up from the pool of glass and rushed outside.
 He could not believe his eyes. Over Hiroshima writhed and twisted a 
growing black cloud. Then it burst into a ball of flame, “like the instant 
blossoming of a fantastic flower.”
 Approximately the same distance away, Caron beheld the
 spectacle, but from a unique perspective. Tibbets knew at that moment his
 gunner’s compartment was the place to witness the unfolding drama. The
 pilot waited for a description of the action below.

“The turret’s in the way. I can’t see anything yet,” Caron reported.

Abruptly, that changed. His body registered alarm as
 apprehension swirled in his belly. His heart pounded like a jack hammer.
 No human had ever witnessed the form that now threatened to engulf the fleeing plane, like some sinister plasma out of a science-fiction movie. The
 giant, semi-transparent bubble, expanding rapidly like three-dimensional
 ripples in a pool, was nearly upon them. He tried to scream a warning. It
 was incoherent. He tried again. Just as his warning reached the crew’s ears,
 the bubble of compressed, super-heated air smashed into the plane. The
 aircraft bucked, then dropped like an elevator in free-fall from the tenth
 floor to the first.


"Flak," Tibbets said instinctively, recalling vividly the violent
 jolt of anti-aircraft fire over Europe. It felt and sounded like the familiar
 German 88 mm shell.


The hefty Superfortress had been rocked not by flak, but by the
 shock wave the crew had been warned to expect. Tibbets had remembered 
almost the instant “flak” escaped his mouth. Four seconds after the first hit,
 a second giant bubble, the “ricochet” of the first shock wave reflecting off
 the surface of the earth, again chased them down.


“Here comes another one,” Caron loudly and clearly warned.
 The second collision with the nearly invisible force bounced the plane less
 violently than the first.
 The tail gunner leaned closer to his wraparound windows. A 
tremendous cloud rose from the ground, billowed past the protruding gun
turret and crept into his view. He was awestruck.

Still, duty pressed. In a
 space smaller than an outhouse, he struggled with the unwieldy aerial
 camera a photo officer had thrust at him just before takeoff. But where to
 point it? The gun sight was in the way. He called over the intercom to
 Tibbets and asked for a better angle.  A five-degree turn to the left would do.
 It would give him a clearer shot through his right side hatch.


“Describe What you see,” Tibbets prodded again.


Caron pressed his nose to the Plexiglas. Now, he could see the
 entire live, churning thing. In the hushed waist and forward cabin, everyone listened. His breathy, staccato words spilled out and flooded the
 intercom. 
“A giant column of smoke . . . a purple-gray turbulent
 mass . . . white at the top and fiery red core right down to the base.”

He
 remembered Captain William Parsons’ term during their preflight briefing—a mushroom, he called the umbrella-like crown that was expected
 over the cloud’s column.


“It’s like bubbling molasses down there . . . the mushroom is
 spreading out . . . it’s nearly level with us and climbing. . . . very black, but has a
 purplish tint . . . the base of the mushroom looks like a heavy undercast that
 is shot through with red . . . fires are springing up everywhere . . . like flames shooting out of a huge bed of coals . . . smoke is billowing out into the
 foothills . . . it’s like a peep into Hell.”


“Count the fires, Bob.” It was the perfectionist in Tibbets that
 thought he must keep track even of that. But there were too many. After
 fifteen, Caron stopped counting.
 Tibbets turned the B-29 broadside. The crew gasped. Rising
 boldly before them was the culmination of eleven months’ training and the
 efforts of one hundred thousand workers back home, although the crew
 would not know that detail until Tibbets revealed it on the flight home. The
pilot cautiously skirted the cloud. Like a living tower of hands made by
 school boys stacking palm over hand, one on top of another until there were
 no more hands to stack, it grew.

Thirty thousand, forty thousand, forcing
 its curling crown of dust, vapor, and heat fifty thousand feet into the blue
 above Hiroshima.


"My God, what have we done?” The guttural whisper passed
 through co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis’ lips almost without his knowing he
 had spoken. The utterance was neither a lament nor a hackneyed response.
 It was not self-condemning. Rather, the expression came from some
 shadowy, alien part of himself he had not yet come to know. It
 acknowledged the breadth of collective responsibility. It searched for
 answers to the incomprehensible. Searched for questions that had been
 asked only in fiction and poetry. It wondered without judgment at the power
 to create and the power to destroy in the blink of an eye.
 

Just as suddenly, came a quite different thought. This could be
 the end of the war!


Caron flashed a reassuring smile at the dark-haired beauty in 
the photograph as if she were in the tiny tail compartment with him. And, of
 course, she was. He had slipped Kay’s picture into the clear plastic pocket
 over his oxygen chart, and it dangled on a little chain beside him. On the
 reverse side was a snapshot of his baby daughter, Judy. Especially now,
 they were the most gorgeous sight in the world. And if the ominous black
 cloud that loomed above the Enola Gay convinced the Japanese to
 surrender, he would soon be with them.

With little elbow room to finagle the cumbersome K-20 camera,
 the gunner aimed again at that towering, still-climbing thing. He squeezed
 the shutter trigger. Over the roar of the engines he heard the loud kerthunk 
as the vacuum assembly's piston sucked the thin film firmly against the pressure plate. He shifted position as best as he could and squeezed the
 trigger again and again. Photography, second to airplanes, had been his
 passion, but he could not have guessed that the documentary images from 
this last-minute assignment would make front pages around the world.


Right now, there were too many other things to think about. What he was
 seeing seemed so “unreal.”
 As he fired off frames, his mind drifted with the cloud. He
 imagined scientists’ excitement when their experiments revealed that an 
infinitesimally small particle called an atom could be “split,” and from that
 unnatural act enormous quantities of energy would be released.
 Since childhood he had taken things apart and put them back 
together. He had to know how and why things worked as they did.

For
 hours on end at Wendover’s base library, he would contentedly lose himself 
in physics books. It was in that remote, sandy, northwest corner of Utah,
brushing Nevada, during those long months of training for this day, that he
 had been introduced to a famous Berkeley physicist and his atom-smasher.
Now all that sleight of hand had come together in the form of a cloud.


Tibbets was only peripherally thinking about atoms. With the
 dangerous evasive maneuver successfully behind him, he gave himself over
 to the still-rising column and collided with a rhetorical question: Had such
 unbridled force set in motion a new dawn? Mercifully, the immediate task of
 gathering more mission data sufficed for an answer. He shared his
 prescience with no one. Instead, as though telepathic, he voiced the words 
in Lewis’ mind: “I think we’ve won the war.”


Almost as an afterthought, he remembered the wire recorder on 
board. He asked each crewman to express his thoughts about the event they
 had just witnessed. “For posterity,” he said, adding, “Watch your 
language.”


One by one, they did. Shumard, Stiborik, Nelson, Beser, Lewis,
 Parsons, Jeppson, Caron, Ferebee, Van Kirk, Tibbets, Duzenbury. Where
 were the words to explain what they had just seen? Or how they felt? Well-
worn phrases spilled into the microphone connected to their intercom. Amazing. Stupendous. Spectacular.

Each of them added a
 commentary about the enormity of it all, its inevitability for ending the war . . . surely, it would end the war.


The crew could never be absolutely certain of their exact words
 that morning. They would never hear them again. Neither would any high-
ranking government official. Once the wire recorder was placed in the hands
 of an information officer on Tinian, the small island in the Pacific they had
left just six hours earlier, it would mysteriously disappear.


Bombardier Ferebee and weaponeer specialist Navy Captain Parsons were in no mood to be bogged down in reverie. Parsons needed to
 prepare a detailed strike report. He wiped his broad forehead. The
 President was waiting. So were top brass on Tinian. Tibbets already had prepared the short message they wanted to hear:

CLEAR CUT, SUCCESSFUL IN ALL RESPECTS.
 VISIBLE EFFECTS GREATER THAN TRINITY.
 HIROSHIMA. CONDITIONS NORMAL IN AIRPLANE
 FOLLOWING DELIVERY. PROCEEDING T0 REGULAR BASE.

Private First Class Richard Nelson radioed the pilot’s brief
 strike report. Then he transmitted Parsons’ more detailed, coded message to Guam for the eyes of Major General Thomas Farrell, chief deputy to General Leslie Groves, bomb project commander.


Little remained to be done. The radioactive cloud continued to
 drift menacingly toward them. Tibbets swung the Enola Gay southward 
toward Tinian onto the flight path the Allies had named the “Hirohito
 Highway,” after the Emperor himself.

Junior, as Caron nicknamed the nineteen-year-old Nelson, monitored the radio on the long return flight. Every few minutes Captain Lewis pestered him. “Any reports yet of Japan’s surrender?”

It was too
 soon for such a breakthrough. Furthermore, stunned Japanese officials were issuing no statements.


The crew also fell silent. Tibbets lifted the oppressive stillness.
 “Hey, Bob. How was the ride back there?”

Once, on a practice
 run, the Colonel had nosed a B-29 into the same dive-turn maneuver with
 robust assertiveness. The “g” forces plastered the tail gunner against the compartment’s frame and made him feel like “the last man on a giant ‘crack the whip.’”

“Better than the quarter ride on the Coney Island Cyclone, Colonel.”

“Just pay me the twenty-five cents when we land.”

“Sorry, Colonel. You’ll have to wait till payday.”

Harry S. Truman crowded the microphones clustered in front
 of him. In the few months since he had assumed office, his Missouri drawl
 had become familiar to radioland listeners. Now, the President was seconds
 away from the most earth-shaking, electrifying message any political leader
 had ever delivered.

"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a
 military base. We won the race of discovery against the Germans. We have
used it in order to shorten the agony of war . . . to save the lives of thousands
 and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we
completely destroy Japan’s power to make war."

“The first atomic bomb was dropped.” It was an assemblage 
of words that had never before been spoken. Now, all at once, Truman was
 revealing to a startled nation that the United States had developed a secret,
 revolutionary new weapon and, although it had not been ready to use on 
Hitler, its deployment against Japan could end the war and save countless
 thousands of young lives.
 That was what mothers at home had been praying for.

Coursing eastward after its sharp right-turn dive, the Enola
Gay raced away from what was. At the split second of detonation, the forward cabin lit up as
though hundreds of flash bulbs had been tripped all at once. Tibbets sensed
 a galvanic tingle on his tongue, then a metal aftertaste reminiscent of lead.

When the sun exploded, Caron appeared like a negative
image—a solarized figure helplessly blinded. He winced from pain, then
 ripped the goggles off his forehead. His retinas played tricks on him. Everything was awash in brilliant yellow and white. Seconds played
themselves out in slow motion. Form and line gradually became more
distinct. Color flowed back into bleached-white surroundings. Eight miles west of the city at the home of a friend, Satoshi
Nakamura lingered over his newspaper. He savored another cup of tea.


4:30 p.m., Wednesday, 8 August, I945

Dear Bob,


So, the Carons are on the “front page.” And lil Annie is still on her feet to tell
 about it. There’s so much been happening since 11 o’clook last night (here’s
another reporter). First, Bob, I am so darn proud of you that the lump in
 my throat is like a watermelon, and Dad, too. He had to stay home today,
 too much was happening. I hope you won’t mind anything we might have
 said; it has no bearing on your secret mission, because we really didn’t
 know. I just had my usual hunches, or hunch, ever since I heard the news on 
Monday about the bomb, I was writing to you at the time. Then last night
, Gabriel Heater said “The B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb was piloted by
 Col. Tibbets of Florida.” Then I knew, so I stayed up till the 11 o’clock news
 came on. That’s when your name was announced; that’s when the phone
 started ringing, and it hasn’t stopped since. Most of the pictures I had are
 being used, they are all over the front pages. Do you mind, Bob? After all,
 you are a world-wide famous person along with your gang. I only hope Kay 
is O.K. I think I will try and call her tonight. Don’t imagine she heard it
 last night. They all asked me for pictures of Judy. I said I didn’t have any
 yet. No doubt Kay has new ones, and they will ask her there for any. Dad
 was asleep. I had to wake him, and it goes without saying I was not the 
calmest person in the world, because I didn’t know you all were safe until a woman reporter from Newsday told me you were. Lynbrook says they are 
all proud of you. They started calling us to tell us so last night. Dad is buying
 all the papers to send to you, also Kay. Some of the “copied” news items in 
the city are balled up; I guess you can see that on reading them. Am making
 stew, so have to make the dumplings now. So long, God Bless you and keep
 you safe.


Love,
 Mother

Excerpt from Fire of a Thousand Suns
By Charlotte Meares

Copyright © 1995 Charlotte Meares

fire of a thousand suns

The Gripping Story of Enola Gay Tail gunner, George r. Caron, development of the B-29 Superfortress, and the secret atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima