\n<\/p>\n
\u2018I<\/span>t was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright \u2013 very, very bright. You could see the city from 50\u00a0miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6\u00a0August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore \u201cDutch\u201d Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I\u2019m\u00a0writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.<\/p>\n We have spent the afternoon looking through wartime logbooks from his 58 overseas combat missions. Now, between servings of dim sum, he is telling me about the 59th, the one that wiped out a city, along with well over 100,000 people.<\/p>\n \u201cThe instant the bomb left the bomb bay, we screamed into a steep diving turn to escape the shockwave. There were two \u2013 the first, like a very, very, very close burst of flak. Then we turned back to see Hiroshima. But you couldn\u2019t see it. It was covered in smoke, dust, debris. And coming out of it was that mushroom cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>The crew of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay. Stephen Walker interviewed Theodore \u2018Dutch\u2019 Van Kirk, navigator (1); Tom Ferebee, bombardier (2); Paul Tibbets, pilot (3); Bob Lewis, co-pilot (4); George \u2018Bob\u2019 Caron, tail gunner (5); and Robert Shumard, assistant engineer (6).<\/span> Photograph: Photogquest\/Getty Images<\/p>\n He stops a moment, awe visibly registering on his face. \u201cThe city was gone. It was only three minutes since we\u2019d dropped the bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n Van Kirk died in 2014. In the years since we met, all the other crew members who flew on the missions to Hiroshima, and to Nagasaki three days later on 9\u00a0August, have also died. Meanwhile, the numbers of hibakusha<\/em>, those who survived the attacks, are rapidly dwindling. We are passing into a twilight of history. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, this biological fact seems disturbingly relevant. Twenty years ago, the world was a dangerous place. Today, it\u2019s\u00a0more so. More nations are developing nuclear weapons with few, if any, effective international controls. Tactical nuclear strikes have been explicitly threatened by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. And, just in the last week, war has broken out in the Middle East over fears that Iran may be very close to having a bomb. In such times, perspective matters. The shocked testimony of those like Van Kirk needs to be heard. History has lessons to teach us.<\/p>\n It was this thought that prompted me to reopen my files, to reread the transcripts of interviews with some of the crew members of both attacks. Much of this material was untouched for two decades; nothing relating to the Nagasaki mission was published. Here were some of the last testimonies of those who did the unthinkable. They were in their 80s or 90s, nearing the end of their lives. How did they remember it?<\/p>\n O<\/span>n 4 August 1945, Charles \u201cDon\u201d Albury, a 24-year-old B-29 pilot, was summoned to a secret briefing on Tinian, a Pacific island 1,500 miles south of Japan. Then the biggest bomber base in the world, Tinian was a jump-off point for a conveyor belt of the almost daily destruction of Japan. About 300,000 people had already died and 9 million were now homeless.<\/p>\n But Albury\u2019s outfit had yet to take part in the attacks. Known as the 509th Composite Group, they occupied a secret compound on a far corner of the base. \u201cSecurity was very, very tight,\u201d Albury told me when I met him at his home in Orlando, Florida. Then aged 83, he grinned mischievously. \u201cI remember one time the base commander got too near one of our planes. A guard nearly shot him.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the 509th\u2019s crews knew nothing about their ultimate missions. And they had been training for almost a year. First in Utah, later on Tinian: \u201cWe kept dropping practice bombs and flying these crazy steep turns. We did it day after day. For months.\u201d But nobody told them why, and few dared ask. Those who did could find themselves swiftly dispatched by their leader, Paul\u00a0Tibbets, a battle-hardened bomber pilot, to hardship posts above the Arctic Circle. \u201cYou learned to\u00a0keep your mouth shut,\u201d said Albury.<\/p>\n But in that 4 August briefing a part of the secret was about to be revealed.<\/p>\n Nine days earlier, on 26 July, President Truman had delivered his ultimatum to Japan in the Potsdam declaration: either surrender unconditionally, or face \u201cprompt and utter destruction\u201d. The means of that destruction was not specified. And Japan had not surrendered.<\/p>\n If I live for 100\u00a0years I will never get these few minutes out\u00a0of my\u00a0mind<\/span>The scene of devastation at Hiroshima, 1945.<\/span> Photograph: Universal History Archive\/Universal Images Group\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In the tropical heat of the briefing hut, Tibbets informed his crews that within 48 hours they would destroy a Japanese city with a single bomb unlike any in history, \u201cand hopefully\u201d, recalled Albury, \u201cwin the war\u201d. The bomb, said Tibbets, had been tested in New\u00a0Mexico on 16 July. Its blast was equivalent to the\u00a0destructive payload of 2,000 <\/em>B-29s. The target would\u00a0be one of three cities, in this order: Hiroshima, Kokura <\/strong>(now called Kitakyushu) or Nagasaki. The deciding factor would be the weather. On explicit orders from Washington, it had to be clear for the drop.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody and nothing moved in that room,\u201d said Albury. \u201cWe were just stunned.\u201d Tibbets then introduced a quiet, balding naval captain, William \u201cDeak\u201d Parsons, who would join the mission. Parsons had witnessed the New Mexico test. He told the men that the explosion would be the hottest and brightest thing since the creation. He warned them to wear welders\u2019 goggles because its light would be dazzling enough to blind them. But he didn\u2019t warn them that the bomb was radioactive. \u201cNobody,\u201d said Van Kirk, \u201ctold us this was going to be an atomic bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n Van Kirk remembered Tibbets making a final announcement. \u201cHe said anybody who isn\u2019t comfortable with this and doesn\u2019t want to go, doesn\u2019t have to go.\u201d Nobody spoke. \u201cThis was going to be a day history would remember,\u201d Albury recalled. He had left a wife and baby daughter in America. If this bomb was successful, the war might be over. Then he could go home.<\/p>\n By midnight the following night, they were ready.<\/p>\n One of the men who would be flying was Morris Jeppson, a 23-year-old electronics specialist recruited by the atomic scientists at Los Alamos to work on the bomb\u2019s revolutionary fusing system. For two weeks in 1944 the FBI interrogated everybody in Jeppson\u2019s life before he found himself sharing a plane ride with Los\u00a0Alamos\u2019s director, J Robert Oppenheimer, \u201ca real gentleman who talked nuclear physics with me but never talked weapons\u201d. Sitting in his Las Vegas kitchen, Jeppson, then 82, chuckled at the memory. \u201cPerhaps he was checking me out.\u201d<\/p>\n If so, he passed the test. He and Parsons would monitor the electronic wizardry of the bomb \u2013 nicknamed \u201cLittle Boy\u201d \u2013 all the way to the drop.<\/p>\n <\/span>The \u2018Little Boy\u2019 bomb at Tinian island before being loaded on to Enola Gay.<\/span> Photograph: PhotoQuest\/Getty Images<\/p>\n They would also have to arm it in flight, an exceptionally delicate job that should really have been carried out on the ground. But both men had recently watched too many heavily overloaded B-29s crashing on take-off. \u201cWe saw them burning on the runway,\u201d said Jeppson, \u201cand we saw it often.\u201d Harold Agnew, a\u00a0brilliant 24-year-old Los Alamos physicist who would\u00a0be flying in an accompanying B-29 filled with blast\u2011measuring instruments, had also seen those crashes. If this happened with Little Boy, the consequences could be horrific.<\/p>\n \u201cThat bomb was completely unsafe,\u201d Agnew, then 83, told me when we met at his San Diego home. And he would know. In 1942, as part of a secret team working in Chicago under the Nobel-prizewinning scientist Enrico Fermi, he had witnessed the world\u2019s first controlled nuclear chain reaction. \u201cIf they\u2019d crashed, anything could have happened.\u201d Parsons would need to be able to improvise, fast. In the hours before take-off, he and Jeppson began practising how to arm an atomic bomb in flight. Over and over, the two men ran over the checklist, leaving nothing to chance.<\/p>\n Out on the hardstand, the bomb-carrying B-29, now sporting the name of Tibbets\u2019 mother, Enola Gay, was bathed in floodlights. \u201cThat was our first surprise,\u201d said Van Kirk. \u201cThe plane was all lit up and there were all these people \u2013 photographers, newspapermen \u2013 everywhere. It looked like a Hollywood premiere.\u201d<\/p>\n The analogy is eerily accurate. Back in May, before it was certain an atom bomb would even work, a secret target committee had stressed the importance of making its \u201cinitial use sufficiently spectacular \u2026 when publicity on it is released\u201d. What mattered was \u201cobtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan\u201d. But to Van Kirk, \u201call the photos and questions from reporters felt like breakfast for the condemned man\u201d. He was relieved that Tom Ferebee, Enola Gay\u2019s bombardier, had earlier cleaned out all the underwear and silk stockings the crew had stashed inside the plane as good luck charms.<\/p>\n At last the surreal scrum was over. At 2.45am Enola Gay, along with Agnew\u2019s plane The Great Artiste, co-piloted by Albury and carrying blast instruments, and a third camera plane later dubbed Necessary Evil, took off from Tinian\u2019s North Field runways, lined with fire trucks in case of the worst. \u201cI really did have faith in Paul [Tibbets],\u201d said Van Kirk. \u201cI knew we were grossly overloaded. But he got us off \u2013 just a few hundred feet from the end of the runway.\u201d<\/p>\n Under a moonless sky, the strike force struck north over the Pacific. Tibbets lit his pipe. One hour ahead, three reconnaissance aircraft also flew towards the three possible targets. In keeping with Washington\u2019s orders, their task would be to radio back how much cloud there was over the aiming points. Ultimately the weather would choose which city was obliterated \u2013 and which spared.<\/p>\n <\/span>The atomic blast rising over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945.<\/span> Photograph: Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Fifty miles out of Tinian, Parsons and Jeppson clambered into Enola Gay\u2019s bomb bay to begin arming Little Boy. \u201cParsons knelt by the bomb with a wrench. I held a flashlight,\u201d said Jeppson. The work was fiddly and dangerous. Part of the procedure involved inserting four bags of cordite \u2013 a form of gunpowder \u2013 into the bomb\u2019s breech plug. \u201cThat worried me more than anything,\u201d said Van Kirk. \u201cLoading all that damn gunpowder while we were on the aeroplane, for Chrissake.\u201d In 15 minutes the checklist was completed. But there was still one final step before the bomb was fully armed. That would come later.<\/p>\n Enola Gay sped through the night into a golden dawn.\u201cThat morning the sunrise was the most beautiful I\u2019d ever seen,\u201d Van Kirk remembered. He plotted a course to Iwo Jima, an island that had seen appalling battles in early 1945. Now it was the rendezvous point for the three planes. \u201cMy biggest fear\u00a0was: don\u2019t screw this up,\u201d said Van Kirk. But his calculations were spot on. Iwo emerged dead ahead, along with The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil.<\/p>\n An hour and 20 minutes from the Japanese coast, Jeppson \u2013 now by himself \u2013 climbed back into the bomb bay, to replace Little Boy\u2019s three green safety plugs with three red arming plugs. He double-checked the red plugs were correctly set, gave the third one a final twist \u2013 \u201cThat was a moment,\u201d he remembered \u2013 and left. He was the last person to touch or see the bomb. Enola Gay\u2019s co-pilot, Bob Lewis, pencilled in his log: \u201cThe bomb is now live. It\u2019s a funny feeling knowing it\u2019s in back of you. Knock wood.\u201d<\/p>\n But on which city would it be dropped? The answer soon came from the weather planes ahead, radioed in code. Conditions were excellent over the primary target. Tibbets switched on the intercom: \u201cIt\u2019s Hiroshima.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody was getting excited,\u201d recalled Van Kirk. \u201cI could see the city out the window. We all formally identified it.\u201d Ahead was the point from which Enola Gay <\/em>would begin its bomb run. \u201cBy this time it was a\u00a0game for me. I was trying to hit that initial point exactly at nine o\u2019clock.\u201d Van Kirk smiled. \u201cI\u2019m a\u00a0punctual person. When I say I\u2019m going to pick my daughter up at five o\u2019clock, that\u2019s when I pick her up.\u201d<\/p>\n He was punctual now. On cue, Enola Gay swung towards a striking T-shaped bridge that Tibbets later described as \u201cthe most perfect aiming point in the whole damn war\u201d. Ferebee hunched over his bombsight. Unlike almost every other city in Japan, this one, with a\u00a0population of about 350,000, had almost never been bombed. It had been preserved instead for atomic obliteration. It satisfied every requirement: it had a\u00a0sufficient military presence to claim it as a valid military target. It had hills on three sides that would concentrate the blast, creating even greater damage. And, as it had been kept intact, it would demonstrate with brutal clarity to the Japanese what an atom bomb could do to a city.<\/p>\n It was impossible to imagine that something so inconsequential and light \u2013 approximately 6kg \u2013 could erase a city<\/p>\n Fifteen seconds before the drop, Ferebee flicked a\u00a0switch. A warning tone sounded across the airwaves. Agnew heard it on The Great Artiste. \u201cWe were flying right beside the bomb plane when the tone went. We opened our bomb bay doors, ready to drop our blast-measuring instruments.\u201d His pilot Albury stared down at the city. \u201cWe could see everything, the bridge, everything. It was a sunny, beautiful day.\u201d Then the tone stopped and Little Boy tumbled out.<\/p>\n \u201cTibbets went hard into that steep turn,\u201d said Van Kirk. \u201cEngines going full blast. I started timing.\u201d Oppenheimer had told Tibbets that the shockwave could crush their plane like a giant hand swatting an ant. There were 43 seconds before Little Boy exploded. \u201cEverybody was counting,\u201d continued Van Kirk. \u201cEverybody was waiting for that bomb to go off because there was a real possibility it was going to be a dud.\u201d Jeppson counted in his head \u2013 too quickly. \u201cI had a\u00a0moment of panic. I thought: it\u2019s a dud. And then, within two seconds, there was this flash.\u201d<\/p>\n Van Kirk was wearing his goggles, but still \u201cit was like a photographer\u2019s flash going off in your face\u201d. \u201cThe whole plane lit up with a white light,\u201d said Agnew. \u201cI\u00a0scribbled a note: \u2018Boy, this thing just went off, it really did.\u2019\u201d On Enola Gay, the tail gunner, George \u201cBob\u201d Caron, screamed a warning as the shockwave tore up towards them. \u201cAnd then, whang!\u201d continued Agnew. \u201cWe got whacked. And then a few seconds later we got whacked again.\u201d \u201cThe whole plane suddenly bounced hard, twice,\u201d said Jeppson. For a horrified instant he thought the shockwave might smash through Enola Gay\u2019s hull.<\/p>\n <\/span>Harold Agnew holds the plutonium core of the \u2018Fat Man\u2019 bomb dropped on Nagasaki.<\/span> Photograph: wikicommons<\/p>\n \u201cThen,\u201d he said, \u201cwe headed to the windows. I\u00a0watched this churning on the ground. And this cloud started building up, rising, rising, rising. It was awesome.\u201d<\/p>\n From his navigator\u2019s window, Van Kirk also stared in amazement. \u201cIt was already up to, oh God, 25,000ft and going up rapidly. Anything and everything had been kicked up by that bomb.\u201d The sunlit city he had been looking at moments before was now a huge cauldron of boiling black tar. In The Great Artiste, Albury gazed, transfixed. \u201cWe watched that cloud rise. It had every colour of the world up there, beautiful colours. To me it looked like salmon colours, blues, greens.\u201d<\/p>\n Behind him, Agnew\u2019s oscilloscopes measured the size of the blast \u2013 the equivalent of about 13,500 tonnes of high explosive, four times the tonnage that had wiped out Dresden in February 1945. He grabbed a 16mm cine camera he had smuggled into the bomber before takeoff. He began filming, his hands shaking. \u201cThe city wasn\u2019t there. There was just nothing there. That dust cloud covered the whole city.\u201d He didn\u2019t know it yet, but Necessary Evil\u2019s official cameras would all fail. Agnew\u2019s illicit camera would yield the only movie footage of the Hiroshima bomb.<\/p>\n \u201cMy God, what have we done?\u201d wrote Enola Gay\u2019s <\/em>co-pilot Lewis in his logbook. \u201cIf I live for 100 years I\u00a0will never get these few minutes out of my mind.\u201d Then Tibbets spoke to the crew. \u201cFellows,\u201d he said, \u201cyou have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou just can\u2019t imagine something that big,\u201d said Van Kirk. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t see how the Japanese could continue the war. Nobody said anything about the people on the ground. That wasn\u2019t mentioned at all.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Pilot Paul Tibbets receives a medal moments after landing the Enola Gay after the Hiroshima mission.<\/span> Photograph: George E Staley. Courtesy of Stephen Walker<\/p>\n The same theme rippled across all three crews. \u201cTo\u00a0me it was a great relief \u2013 that it worked,\u201d said Jeppson. \u201cI was happy. I thought I\u2019d be going home.\u201d \u201cDid I think the war was over?\u201d asked Albury. \u201cI was hoping it was. I knew Hiroshima wasn\u2019t there any more anyway.\u201d But the mushroom cloud was. They could still see it, even when they were 400 miles away.<\/p>\n Enola Gay landed back at Tinian to a heroes\u2019 welcome.\u00a0Hundreds were cheering as they taxied in. \u201cWe got out of the plane,\u201d said Van Kirk, \u201cand there were more generals than I\u2019d ever seen in my life. We\u00a0wondered what the hell they were doing there.\u201d They soon found out. Barely had Tibbets stepped from his B-29 before the Distinguished Service Cross was\u00a0pinned to his chest. It was so unexpected that he was still holding his pipe.<\/p>\n Most of the exhausted crew went to bed. Jeppson went drinking with friends. \u201cI remember one of them asked: \u2018So what did you do today?\u2019 And I said: \u2018Well, we ended the war.\u2019 They thought I was pulling their leg.\u201d<\/p>\n But the war didn\u2019t end. And three days later, on 9\u00a0August, the atomic squadron did it all over again.<\/p>\n H<\/span>iroshima, Van Kirk told me, was \u201cthe perfect mission\u201d where everything went right. But the next one would be \u201cscrewed up\u201d, the mission where almost everything would go wrong. Frederick Ashworth went on it. When I interviewed him in Santa Fe he was 92, a long-retired vice-admiral, but in August 1945 he was a young atomic weaponeer who would fill Parsons\u2019 role, babysitting the bomb to\u00a0the\u00a0target.<\/p>\n The primary target wasn\u2019t Nagasaki. It was Kokura, 100 miles further north and home to one of Japan\u2019s largest military arsenals. With Hiroshima devastated, this number two city had now moved up to the top slot; Nagasaki was the backup, in case Kokura was socked in.<\/p>\n \u201cOriginally the second bomb was intended to be dropped on 11 August \u2013 five days after Hiroshima,\u201d said Ashworth. A lean, spare man, he spoke quietly with great precision. <\/strong>\u201cBut a typhoon was coming in. So we had this window. And the thinking was: we hit them, bang, with the second one, right off the bat.\u201d<\/p>\n The bang would come from a different kind of bomb. Unlike Little Boy, \u201cFat Man\u201d was far more sophisticated, utilising plutonium, rather than enriched uranium. \u201cI\u00a0actually carried the plutonium core in its funny little case,\u201d Agnew told me. \u201cI wanted to see what it felt like. And I wanted my picture taken.\u201d He dug out the photo for me. Grinning for the camera, he holds the small case in his left hand. It was impossible to imagine that something so inconsequential and light \u2013 approximately 6kg \u2013 could erase a city.<\/p>\n Agnew wouldn\u2019t be flying this time. But at midnight on 8 August, two days after Hiroshima, Albury found himself once again in the briefing room alongside his aircraft commander, Charles \u201cChuck\u201d Sweeney. Tonight he would be co-piloting Bockscar, the plane carrying the bomb. \u201cIt was tense,\u201d he told me. \u201cI hadn\u2019t been sleeping too much. I just lay on my bed. I\u2019d written to my wife, telling her I loved her. I just wanted to get on with this mission and get home.\u201d<\/p>\n The briefing was short. Conditions at Kokura were forecast clear, but, because of major thunderstorms en route, Bockscar would rendezvous with the instrument and camera planes over Yakushima, an island south of Japan. \u201cTibbets reminded us we were under strict orders from Washington to bomb visually,\u201d recalled Ashworth. \u201cUnder no circumstances were we to bomb otherwise.\u201d Then they went out to the ramp.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s when we had the first problem,\u201d said Albury. A fuel transfer pump had broken, meaning there were 600 gallons of fuel on board they couldn\u2019t use. Normally they wouldn\u2019t need it, but ahead were those storms. Tibbets called a rapid conference. The stakes were tremendous. With their short weather window, any delay might affect the outcome of the war. \u201cHe said: \u2018Chuck, it\u2019s up to you. You\u2019re commander of the aeroplane.\u2019 And Chuck said: \u2018To hell with it, we\u2019ve never used that fuel before: it\u2019s just ballast. I think we should go.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At nearly 4am and running late, Bockscar gunned down Tinian\u2019s wet runway, once again lined end to end with fire trucks in case of a catastrophic crash. Thirteen minutes after takeoff, Ashworth\u2019s assistant, Philip Barnes, climbed into the bomb bay to replace the green safety plugs with the red plugs. With Fat Man now fully armed, the plane ran headlong into the first of the thunderstorms.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was bumpy,\u201d said Albury. \u201cWe flew into some pretty big clouds and we saw typhoons go by.\u201d Back near the bomb bay, Ashworth and Barnes watched their bomb control panel like hawks, monitoring Fat Man\u2019s warning lights as lightning stabbed the night skies. \u201cThen this white light suddenly came on,\u201d said Ashworth. \u201cThat\u2019s what you see when you\u2019re about to drop the bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Bob Caron with a newspaper headlining the Hiroshima attack.<\/span> Photograph: National Archives and Records Administration (Nara). Courtesy of Stephen Walker<\/p>\n There was a silence as I took this in. Did he think the bomb might go off?<\/p>\n \u201cAbsolutely. Sure. That was precisely what was concerning us.\u201d His next sentence was a masterpiece of understatement. \u201cI told Sweeney we were having problems and we were working on it.\u201d<\/p>\n Barnes saved the day, coolly tracing the fault to a\u00a0misplaced switch. The mission continued into a\u00a0storm\u2011tossed dawn. But when Bockscar joined up with the instrument plane over Yakushima, the third camera plane \u2013 captained by James Hopkins \u2013 wasn\u2019t there. \u201cEverybody was looking out the window,\u201d said Albury. \u201cWe were circling all the time but we couldn\u2019t see him.\u201d They kept circling. What nobody knew was that Hopkins was 10,000ft too high. \u201cFifteen minutes goes by, then another 15 minutes,\u201d said Ashworth. They were using up valuable fuel. \u201cI said to Sweeney: let\u2019s get out of here. We\u2019ve got to get on with the mission.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe were pretty late by now,\u201d said Albury, \u201cmaybe a couple of hours late when we got to Kokura.\u201d The bombardier, Kermit Beahan, started the bomb run. But\u00a0the winds had changed direction. Thick smoke from\u00a0a\u00a0raid on nearby Yahata the previous night was\u00a0blanketing Kokura. In an appalling irony, American\u00a0bombs were preventing the use of the atom bomb. \u201cKermit said: \u2018I can\u2019t find the aiming point!\u2019\u201d Albury continued. \u201cWe made a second try and it was \u00a0still the same thing. Now our engineer started talking about fuel.\u201d<\/p>\n They tried a third run from a different direction. That failed, too. Flak was bursting below. Each bomb run was taking 20 minutes and tempers were mounting.<\/p>\n I will not say I was guilty. Under the same conditions I\u2019d do it again, because I honestly believe it saved a lot of lives<\/p>\n Sweeney and Ashworth argued about what to do, finally agreeing to divert. Kokura had been saved by an accident of the weather. Now it was Nagasaki\u2019s turn to be attacked.<\/p>\n But when they got there, the city was covered in cloud. \u201cWe had<\/em> to get rid of that bomb,\u201d said Ashworth. With their critically low fuel, they might now not make it to base \u2013 which would mean ditching in the sea. Their options were stark: ditch with the atom bomb; jettison it over the ocean; or break direct orders and drop it on Nagasaki through cloud with their primitive radar. They\u00a0had just minutes to decide.<\/p>\n \u201cBy now everybody\u2019s talking back and forth,\u201d said Albury. \u201cThere was too much tension.\u201d Then Beahan began the final bomb run. \u201cThere was no other choice,\u201d said Ashworth. \u201cWe had <\/em>to get that bomb on Nagasaki. But bombing by radar is notoriously inaccurate.\u201d With seconds to spare, Beahan suddenly spotted a stadium he recognised through a cloud gap. Moments later, he yelled, \u201cBombs away\u201d \u2013 then corrected himself: \u201cBomb away\u201d. \u201cThank God,\u201d thought Albury as Sweeney threw Bockscar into the rollercoaster turn.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we didn\u2019t know where the hell that bomb had gone off,\u201d Ashworth said.<\/p>\n In fact, in one of the most bizarre coincidences of the war, Fat Man had detonated almost directly over the factory that once made the torpedoes used in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It killed almost 40,000 people instantly. At least another 40,000 would die later from injuries and radiation sickness.<\/p>\n <\/span>Pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee reunited in the Enola Gay cockpit in 1981.<\/span> Photograph: Ben Martin\/Getty Images<\/p>\n This was Albury\u2019s second atomic explosion in three days. The same Technicolor images pepper his interview, the same \u201cgreens, blues, pinks\u201d of the mushroom cloud, \u201cevery colour of the rainbow, always changing and moving up pretty fast. I was just thinking: thank God we dropped it safely.\u201d The jarring adverb hung between us. How do you drop an atom bomb safely?<\/p>\n But Ashworth was seeing it for the first time. \u201c<\/strong>This was new to me \u2026 It was like nothing you ever saw.\u201d His language became suddenly reluctant as I pressed him further. \u201cI try to keep a relatively neutral reaction to these things \u2013 it\u2019s a personal psychological reaction. This is the job I\u2019m here for, this is what I\u2019m supposed to be doing. I don\u2019t have time to reflect: should I be worried about those guys down on the ground?\u201d<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t, perhaps couldn\u2019t, answer his own question.<\/p>\n Bockscar barely made it back, landing unannounced at Okinawa, the closest American airbase, with a\u00a0minute\u2019s fuel left in the tanks. There were no crowds to greet them, no generals to pin medals on their chests. Nobody even knew they were coming.<\/p>\n There also was no official investigation into their breach of orders. In the end, accuracy was irrelevant. The bomb had done its job. And six days later, on 15\u00a0August, battered by both nuclear attacks, as well as a crushing Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Japan finally surrendered.<\/p>\n A<\/span>bout 200,000 people ultimately died from the two bombings, and possibly many more. The exact figures will never be known. Eighty years afterwards, arguments still rage about whether these annihilations were justified, avoidable or saved more lives than they ended. But what did the crews themselves believe?<\/p>\n \u201cI will not say I was guilty. I will not apologise for it,\u201d Van Kirk told me. \u201cIn fact, under the same conditions I\u2019d do it again, because I truly, honestly believe it saved a lot of lives.\u201d Most of his crewmates clung to this mantra with the same granite faith. Ashworth, who died in 2005 aged 93, always remained proud of his participation in what he called \u201ca major contribution to the war\u201d. Agnew, who later became a director of Los Alamos, held the same view until his death in 2013 at 92. \u201cWe had to drop it,\u201d he explained. \u201cThe Japanese began this war. If there hadn\u2019t been a Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima would never have happened.\u201d Tibbets went several leagues further. In 1976 he caused an international incident when he simulated the nuclear attack, flying a B-29 in a Texas airshow, complete with a mushroom-shaped explosion. He said he\u2019d \u201cnever lost a night\u2019s sleep over the fact that I commanded the bombing\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Navigator Theodore \u2018Dutch\u2019 Van Kirk.<\/span> Photograph: Getty Images<\/p>\n But there are occasional peepholes into troubled consciences. \u201cYou don\u2019t brag about wiping out 60\u201170,000,\u201d admitted Robert Shumard, a flight engineer on Enola Gay, who died in 1967. And Caron, its tail gunner, confessed to \u201ca partial feeling of guilt\u201d when he saw photos of burned children from Hiroshima. \u201cI\u00a0wish I hadn\u2019t seen them,\u201d he added. Jeppson, who died in 2010, once suggested the bomb might have been demonstrated \u201cwithout the need for destroying a city\u201d. He personally wrote to me of his \u201csorrow\u201d at Hiroshima\u2019s \u201cgreat tragedy\u201d.<\/p>\n And then there was this unexpected postscript.<\/p>\n At the end of our interview, Albury told me how he had returned to Nagasaki \u2013 barely three weeks after bombing it. Tibbets had decided to fly to Japan with some of his team on the strangest of sightseeing trips. They wanted to visit Hiroshima but the airfield there was badly damaged, so they landed at Nagasaki instead. Van Kirk was also on that trip. \u201cWe arrived two or three days before any American troops,\u201d Van Kirk told me. \u201cThere were maybe 20 Americans in the whole city. Nobody knew who we were. We didn\u2019t put a sign on ourselves. It was eerie. Very eerie.\u201d<\/p>\n They drove into the city. \u201cThere\u2019s all this damage you see from just one bomb. I was amazed,\u201d said Van Kirk. \u201cIt scares the hell out of you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe took pictures,\u201d said Albury. \u201cThe people didn\u2019t look very happy, I can tell you.\u201d In the ruins, he saw \u201ca\u00a0shadow on the wall, where somebody was probably walking by when the bomb went off\u201d. There was no trace of the body. The thousands-of-degrees heat from the bomb had simply vaporised it. Then, in a\u00a0hospital, he saw the dead and dying, \u201csome of the people laying out on the ground outside. It was the only place I saw bodies. They were treating some of the people on the lower floors.\u201d<\/p>\n He suddenly stopped. \u201cIt was devastation,\u201d he said finally. \u201cI can\u2019t go back there. I don\u2019t dwell on this too much. It\u2019s been almost 60 years.\u201d There was a long silence. We ended the interview there and I thanked him. But it seemed his mind was still in that hospital.<\/p>\n Then he said, very quietly: \u201cNever again.\u201d<\/p>\n Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker is published by William Collins. stephenwalkerbeyond.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright \u2013 very, very bright. You could see the city from 50\u00a0miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.\u201d I\u2019m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[1331,1332,1327,1326,1330,1333,1329,1334,220,364,1071,1328],"class_list":{"0":"post-9266","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-atomic","9":"tag-bombs","10":"tag-brag","11":"tag-dont","12":"tag-dropped","13":"tag-hiroshima","14":"tag-men","15":"tag-nagasaki","16":"tag-nuclear","17":"tag-people","18":"tag-weapons","19":"tag-wiping"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}