The third possibility, as has been claimed in recent years by several former technicians at a major electrical power station in Kokura, is that the haze was an intentional release of steam, created as a matter of routine when the first B-29, the Enola Gay, was spotted. Another is that the smoke came from the American firebombing, the day before, of the adjacent city of Yawata (a nice bit of irony, if true). Over the years, three explanations for this change of fortune have been offered. (Radar bombing was particularly susceptible to this sort of error.) When Bockscar arrived over Kokura, at 10:45 A.M., the crew found that the arsenal was “obscured by heavy ground haze and smoke,” according to the weaponeer’s flight log. The crew had been expressly ordered to pick out their target visually, rather than by radar, since the explosive reach of the bomb, although astonishing, was still limited enough that to be off by a mile or two might result in the majority of its power being wasted. military planners called “one of the largest arsenals in Japan.” The Enola Gay, now serving as a weather plane, had radioed that conditions were good. It had a population of a hundred and seventy-eight thousand, about half that of Hiroshima, and was home to what U.S.
After fifty minutes, Bockscar and the Great Artiste proceeded to their primary target, the city of Kokura. The plane beat its way through dark and stormy skies for six hours before it arrived over the small island of Yakushima, where it was to wait for two accompanying B-29s, the Great Artiste, which was outfitted with instruments to help assess the power of the bomb, and Big Stink, a camera plane. The pit crew who assembled it had signed their names on the casing, and some also wrote messages to the Japanese-“Here’s to you!” and “A second kiss for Hirohito.” On its nose, the bomb bore a stenciled acronym, JANCFU, which stood for Joint Army-Navy-Civilian Fuckup. At one end was a rigid, boxy tail fin known as a California parachute, designed to help keep it from spinning wildly once it was released. It was five feet around and eleven feet long and painted mustard yellow. Whereas the weapon dropped over Hiroshima had been a relatively squat cylinder, this one was shaped like a giant egg. Tinian time, the weaponeer made his way aft and removed two green safing plugs from the bomb, replacing them with red arming plugs: it was now live. Thirteen minutes after takeoff, at 4 A.M. As one of the scientists on Tinian wrote, “We all aged ten years until the plane cleared the island.” But clear the island it did.īockscar had been stripped of most of its armor and weaponry to accommodate its five-ton atomic payload, known as the Fat Man. Only the day before, four B-29s in succession had crashed on takeoff, causing extensive fuel fires.
But Bockscar, the strike plane chosen for Centerboard II, had been delayed on the tarmac because of fuel-pump problems. The Enola Gay had reached its target and returned home without complication an announcement sent out under President Harry Truman’s name had trumpeted its success. That attack had been textbook-“operationally routine,” as a classified Army history later put it. Already things were not going as smoothly as they had three days earlier, in the run over Hiroshima. Operation Centerboard II, the mission to drop the second atomic bomb on a Japanese city, had begun. on August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress took off from the American airbase on the island of Tinian, in the North Pacific Ocean.