Morris R.

Jeppson, 83 Weapon Test Officer on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima Posted Saturday, Jul. 23, 2005 I joined the service when I was 19. I couldnt pass the test to be a pilot but I joined nevertheless and was sent to Boca Raton in March of 1943. Boca Raton was basic training and from there a group of went to Yale University for communications training and at the end of the program, in December, we became second lieutenants. A smaller group went to Harvard for air force school for five months of electrical engineering training. Then a smaller group was sent to MIT for basic radar science and engineering. We were sent to Florida to be reassigned and seven of us were requisitioned to go to Wendover, Utah, where the 509th B29 Group was being formed under Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. At Wendover, we were not met by the Air Force, but by Robert Bigham Brode, a professor of physics from UC Berkeley. He gave us a kind of greeting lecture, saying that this was a very highly classified program that we were to be involved with and turned us over to Air Force security and we were assigned to a classified area on the base of Wendover Field. The people at Los Alamos who wanted Air Force people to come in and participate in the development of the fusing system that would go into the bomb they were preparing to use against Japan. We made occasional trips to Los Alamos.

We worked with a Dr. Edward Doll, a civilian with a Ph.D. from Caltech in electrical engineering who was our immediate boss in charge of the electronics of the weapons. There were the same electronics in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but different types of bombs. We were being trained to help with the development of the electronics in the fusing system, and then to fly these things when it was finally developed and the bomb was ready. Radar is very critical. Dropped from 30,000 ft., the bombs weighed 5 tons and they were approaching the ground at the speed of sound. They were intended to have maximum blast effect so they could not be detonated when they hit the ground because the ground would absorb a lot of the energy. They had to be detonated above the ground, at about 1500-1800 ft. At 1500 ft above the ground, you only have one and a half seconds for this thing to decide its going to detonate when its supposed to. On one of the trips to Los Alamos, I went in the library to see if I could learn what was going on. The words nuclear and atomic were never permitted to be spoken outside of that high-tech area of Los Alamos. It was never spoken at Wendover. I found a well-worn book that had been withdrawn from publication but one that talked about the nuclear fission and possibility of making of atomic bombs, so I realized that thats what we were working on. The B-29s would fly with test bombs and drop it on targets on the Salton Sea desert and one of our group would go with each mission. We moved our test equipment from one plane to another and didnt develop relationships with any

particular crew. We were not crew memberswe moved from one to another. Our program moved overseas in June of 1945 to Tinian Island. There were four big runways and 400 B-29s based there, and several more based in Guam and Saipan. And now were flying the Hiroshima mission. Most people dont know the fact the Enola Gay had stenciled on its nose the names of just the nine crew members, the normal crew members. But there were three others on board, and one of them was Captain William S. Parsons, who was in military command of Los Alamos. In other words, he and Oppenheimer ran Los Alamos. He was the mission commander. If anything went wrong, this particular mission was valued at $2 billion. I was to tell him if there was a problem and I was to tell him also if the problem was serious enough that they should take the bomb back to Tinian We had breakfast after midnight and were taken by a truck out to the plane. My role was to test the electronics on the bomb all the way from the battery that operated the circuitry to the timing clocks and the barometric switches and the radars that had to be turned on. The arming of the bomb was about half an hour before the bomb was dropped. My last job was to climb into the bomb bay and remove those three testing plugs, painted green and each about the size of a saltshaker. Those plugs isolated the testing system from the bomb, so there was no chance of any voltage getting from the bomb to the testing system. I

pulled those plugs and put in three red firing plugs to arm the bomb. From that point on, the bomb was running itself. The focus was entirely on making sure that thing worked. I knew from test drops that it took about 43 seconds from the time that the plane jerked up--when the bomb left--to the time of the flash or explosion. I counted to myself to 43. Nothing happened, and that was my moment of real worry. A couple of seconds later, the flash came--reported by people from the front of the plane--and I knew that I had miscounted the time and that the thing actually worked. People were looking down and seeing this enormous cloud coming up and the destruction spreading out from the base--with flames and black smoke and white smoke. And that's the point that it's somber because you know a lot of people are getting destroyed down there with the city. No joy at that point. But it was a job that was done. Everyone by this time was tired. When we landed, the plane was greeted by several hundred people, a whole group of Army, Navy, Air Force generals and admirals. I was lost in the crowd, so it didn't make any difference. The crew went off to a debriefing. Nobody knew particularly what my role or our group's role was, so I went back to my tent. Sitting on the edge of my bunk was a Navy lieutenant whom I had grown up with from the first grade--my best friend Jack Scott. I didn't know he was even on the island, but he said, "Come to the Navy base on the other end of the island. We have a good officers' mess there, and we'll have a good meal and a good bar." So we drove down there and

had dinner, and there were several Navy officers there. One of them turned to me and asked, "What did you do today?" I'd heard a lot of their stories, so I thought I'd make just one remark. I said, "I think we ended the war today." Theodore "Dutch" J. Van Kirk, 84 Navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR Posted Saturday, Jul. 23, 2005 I joined the air force at 19. After the first summer of college, I saw the ads to be an aviation cadet, to fly and all that and thought "Gee, I'm going to be in the war anyhow." The war hadn't been declared yet, but you didn't have to be too smart to see that we were going to be in it. I decided that rather than being in the mud and on the ground I would join the Air Force. I signed up in 1940, but they didnt take me until the late summer of 1941. Out of navigation school, I was sent to the 340th Bomb Squadron and the 97th Bombardment Group. The commanding officer was Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. We got on the same crew together and flew the first mission out of England in 1942 on B-17s. Tibbets at that time was our commanding officer and pilot and MajorTom Ferebee was our bombardier. The three of us pretty much flew together. I ended up with 58 missions, Tom, I think, ended up with

64. We trained 15 bombing crews with special B-29s to drop atom bombs. We had absolutely no idea how many times we were going to have to drop the bombbut that's the Air Force for you. You're training people for not only this particular war but also the post-military. The military jumped on the atomic bomb as the weapon of the future. I arrived on Tinian on June 25, 1945. There were about 1700 people in the full 509th Group. We had 15 airplanes and 15 crews, and we were self-sufficient, with our own mechanics, our own medical staff and our own MPs. In essence, we were a small air force. Every one of those 1700 people there were very major contributors, from the MPs who guarded the airplane to the people who flew it. From July 16th, when they had the explosion in New Mexico, they knew that they had a weapon that would work, or that they thought would work, and things got very interesting. We had a lot of briefings, a lot of sessions to tell us what to expect. We were told how big the explosion might be, how it might rock the airplane. Some of them told us how it would destroy the airplane. They said that it'll probably destroy everything within a couple of hundreds of yards of the center of the blast and cause lesser damage further out. You fight a war to win. There were over 100 numbered military targets within the city of Hiroshima. It wasn't a matter of going up there and

dropping it on the city and killing people. It was destroying military targets in the city of Hiroshimathe most important of which was the army headquarters charged with the defense of Japan in event of invasion. That had to be destroyed. All this went on from July 16th. Eventually, President Truman gave the order to use the bombs and we really started getting going in earnest. When [Colonel Paul] Tibbetts was picked to be commanding officer [in 1944], he named me group navigator. He told me, "We're going to do something that I can't tell you about right now, but if it works, it will end or significantly shorten the war." And I thought, Oh, yeah, buddy. I've heard that before. We picked a day the weather was good. At the briefing that day, they told you who was assigned to what airplanes. We were going to drop the bomb, [Captain Charles] Sweeney was going to fly the instruments, George [Marquart] was going to fly the picture airplane, [Captain Frederick] Bock was flying one of the weather airplanes. They called us about 10 or 11 in the evening. I don't know how they expect to tell you that you're going out to drop the atom bomb and not know if it's going to work or if it's going to blow up the airplane, and then tell you to go get some sleep. I wasn't able to sleep. Our takeoff time was 2:45 a.m. We get down to the airplane, and the Manhattan Project had it lit up with a

whole bunch of lights. I said it looked like a Hollywood premiere. [Private] Dick Nelson said it looked like a supermarket opening. But there were questions, picture taking, tape interviewing and everything. We got in the plane and took off. I didn't talk about anything. The navigator was to keep the plane on course, getting the plane from Tinian to Hiroshima on time. It was 12 hr. and 15 min. total. The Enola Gay was stripped downa big metal tube with a lot of instruments and people in it. All the turrets, all the gunsexcept the tail gunsand anything we did not absolutely need, we discarded. It was about 6,000 lbs. lighter. It was just like any other mission: some people are reading books, some are taking naps. When the bomb left the airplane, the plane jumped because you released 10,000 lbs. Immediately Paul took the airplane to a 180 turn. We lost 2,000 ft. on the turn and ran away as fast as we could. Then it exploded. All we saw in the airplane was a bright flash. Shortly after that, the first shock wave hit us, and the plane snapped all over. We looked to see what happened to the target, and we could make absolutely no visual observation because the entire city of Hiroshima was covered in black smoke and dust, debris that had been kicked up by the bomb and the blast, and a large white cloud that you've seen pictures of. I'd guess it was up to 42,000 ft. already.

When you're looking at it, you know that a tremendous amount of energy has been released. There was one thought that was uppermost on everyone's mind. Somebody said, and I thought too, "This war is over." You didn't see how anybodyeven the most radical, militaristic, uncaring for their peoplehow anybody like that could stand up to something like this. Frederick Ashworth, 93 Weaponeer on the Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9 SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR Posted Monday, Jul. 25, 2005 I got out to Los Alamos on Thanksgiving Day of 1944. When I arrived, I was immediately invited to a cocktail party at Dr. [Robert] Oppenheimer's quarters. I'd gone from sea level to 7500 feet and it didn't take very long before a couple of martinis did their business. The cocktail party adjourned into a square dance. My wife was pretty good at it, so she got along pretty well. I didn't have the vaguest idea what I was doing. That was my introduction to Los Alamos. Life was pretty primitive up there. There was mud all over the place. Most of the people lived in barracks-type buildings. Everyone was under real pressure in terms of schedule. It was all work and not much play. But they knew how to play when they wanted to. I'm sure that Oppenheimer was quite sure that there needed to be a social aspect along with the rest. He had people in to his place

frequently. In two-cocktail time, I think there was probably more technical one-on-one transfer of ideas than in meetings in the laboratory. I reported to Captain [William S.] Parsons. I was essentially his assistant. When I was not at Los Alamos, I was frequently troubleshooting for Capt. Parsons in Washington. When it came time to select a base for the 509th group, they sent me out to stake some ground in the Pacific. I was sent out to Admiral [Chester] Nimitz's headquarters to make this selection. That was in February 1945. I was given a letter that told Admiral Nimitz, who was located in Guam at the time, that there was being developed an atomic bomb, which would be in his area, in the Pacific, around the first of August of 1945. The letter was classified top secret and I was the custodian. I got myself a money belt and strapped it around my middle. I took it from Washington all the way to Guam, flying on military transport service. When I arrived in Guam, I went straight to Adm. Nimitz headquarters. I had to open up the shirt of my uniform, pull my shirt out of my pantsin front of the admiraland pull out the money belt. I brought out the envelope, which by that time was pretty sweaty looking, and I handed it to the Admiral, much to his amusement. He read the letter and looked out the window. Then he turned around and said, "Thank you very much Commander." Then he said, "Don't those people out there know that we're running a war out here? It's February and you can't have it out here until August?" I told him that it

was quite obvious from the state of development that it would be no earlier than August, and, in fact, it'd be lucky to be August. In about May of 1945, we relocated to Tinian. And around August 1st, we got a message from Washington, that the use of bomb had been released by the President. But it should not be dropped before the 2nd of August. The real limitation from then on was the weather in Japan. The first permissible weather was on the 6th of August. Our mission [Nagasaki] would be on the 9th. It had pretty much been set. At about 1:30 in the morning on the 9th, we gathered at the Bockscar, and [Major Charles] Sweeney [the pilot] and the flight engineer ran through the preflight tests. The engineer discovered that the transfer pumps, which transfer gasoline from the reserve tank into the main tanks, weren't working. There was 600 gal. of gasoline there, but we wouldn't have access to it. But Tibbets told him, "You don't need that gas, so there's no reason to delay this." Our takeoff was uneventful. My station was in the navigator's compartment, and I had a hole about 8 inches in diameter to look out. I was the weaponeerbasically, I was in charge of the bomb. We flew to the rendezvous point, where we'd meet two other airplanes one with instruments to measure the blast and another holding observers. The observer plane didn't show up. We circled, and after about 35 minutes, I said to Sweeney, "Damn it, proceed to the first target."

Kokura was the target, but the bombardier couldn't locate it because the area was clouded. So the navigator took us to Nagasaki. We had gotten a report that the area was clear, but we noticed undercast clouds. By this time, we'd used almost an hour's gas at the rendezvous point, and the engineer was really sweating it. It was going to be nip and tuck. I went up to Sweeney and said, "We're going to be able to make one run on this targetif we're lucky." I told him to be prepared to use radar. This was in contradiction with orders we'd received that prohibited us from bombing without a visual target sight. We were making our approach on radar and getting ready to drop when [Captain Kermit] Beahan [the bombardier] cries out, "I've got the target!" As we'd gotten over Nagasaki, Beahan had looked into the undercast and saw that it had holes in it. He synched the cross hairs of his bomb sight telescope and released the bomb. We saw the flash and then the mushroom cloud. It's pretty spectacular, like a roiling mass of burning smoke and fire. The colors varied between salmon and pink and yellow flame in color. We took one turn around the cloud, and then we had to get to the ground as fast as we could because of the gasoline situation. We flew directly to Okinawa. Sweeney put the airplane on a long, slow glide, and as we approached the island, he went on the intercom: "Mayday! Mayday!" There was no response. He used flares but still didn't get an

answer. Finally, he called the tower and said, "We're going to land!" We touched down about halfway up the runway and came to a screaming halt right at the end. Later, we ran tests on the gas tanks. We had about 35 gal. of usable fuel. And 35 gal.as far as a B-29 is concernedis immaterial. We were essentially out of gas. On the way back to Tinian, we tuned in to some local news and got word that the Japanese had approached the Swiss about surrendering. We were all pretty elated. Looking back, I think that what we did was entirely the thing we had to do under the circumstances. It was a major contribution to the end of the war, and I was fortunate to have participated in it. But the real story here is the mission. It came within a gnat's eyebrow of being a disaster. Charles "Don" Albury, 84 Co-pilot on a B-29 that accompanied the Enola Gay and on the Bockscar SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR Posted Monday, Jul. 25, 2005 On Aug. 6, our job for the Hiroshima mission was to drop instrumentation to record the magnitude of the bomb blast and the radioactivity. When Tibbets dropped the bomb, we dropped our instruments and made our left turn. Then this bright light hit us, the brightest light I had ever seen in my life. And the top of that mushroom cloud was the most terrifying but also the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in your lifeevery color in the rainbow seemed to be

coming out of it. Then it felt like someone came and slapped the airplane two or three times. And that was it. I said a little prayer: Lord, please take care of all of them down there. It was all I could do.

Eyewitnesses of Hiroshima Living Under the Cloud The atom bombs dropped over Japan ended a terrible war and persuaded the world never to use nuclear weapons again. Why that legacy is now in periland what we should do about it Crossing the Moral Threshold Why U.S. leaders never questioned the idea of dropping the Bomb From TIME.com Web Guide: Hiroshima, 60 Years Later Online resources relating to the dropping of the atomic bomb Oral Histories Morris R. Jeppson, 83 Weapon Test Officer

Theodore "Dutch" J. Van Kirk, 84 Navigator

 Frederick L. Ashworth, 93 Weaponeer on the Bockscar Charles "Don" Albury, 84 Co-pilot

The Japanese Pilot Remembering Hiroshima Gallery & Graphics Hiroshima TIME & Life Photo Essay after the bomb

The Nuclear World A TIME graphic of today's nuclear states

From the TIME Archive Hiroshima Archive Collection TIME's Hiroshima reporting from the aftermath of the bombing and over the past 60 years

On Aug. 9, I think we finally took off about 4 in the morning. There'd been some bad storms around Japan, and the cloud cover was bad; you couldn't see much. We headed for our primary target, which was the city of Kokura. We were approaching it about [six] hours later, but the clouds had been building up there, even at our altitude. So we decided to head for the secondary target, Nagasaki. But even Nagasaki's got cloud cover. We decided we couldn't take the bomb back to Tinian, so Sweeney says we've got to drop it by radar or drop it in the oceanand we sure as heck didn't want to drop it in the ocean. Ashworth walks off somewhere in the plane and comes back 10 or 15 minutes later and says if we absolutely have to drop it by radar, then we can. So that's what we were going to dobut about 30 seconds before the drop, we hear Beahan shout, "I think I've got it!" He'd found a hole in the clouds, so we didn't need to use radar. The bomb hit the city on the other side of these big hills around Nagasaki. Most of the people lived on the side where the bomb didn't go. It saved a lot of civilian lives. As I was watching the same dust and mushroom cloud sweep over the city that I'd seen over Hiroshima, [Sergeant Raymond] Gallagher started shouting, "The bomb's going to hit the airplane!" That must have been what it seemed like back therelike the cloud was going to hit us. This one shook the plane more than the other did. We felt about

three strong shock waves. Even as we were moving away from it, we could still see the mushroom cloud. About a week or 10 days later, Tibbets and I flew a C-54 transport plane into Nagasaki to take some doctors and other civilians there. I saw people looking out their windows at us. I saw a lot of hatred in their eyes, but I could also see that they were glad the war was over. I went up to the top of a hill where a hospital was. I saw a poor guy begging by the side of it; it looked as if he was still bleeding, and his clothes were all ripped up. I felt so sorry for him. Inside the hospital I saw a shadow on the walla person had obviously been walking by that wall when the bomb went off. I had never really appreciated until then that this bomb could do something like that. All I could keep thinking was, I hope there is never, ever another time when we have to use one of these. Crossing the Moral Threshold Why U.S. leaders never questioned the idea of dropping the Bomb By DAVID M. KENNEDY SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR Posted Monday, Jul. 25, 2005 His left hand resting on an inexpensive Gideon Bible, Harry S Truman took the presidential oath of office on April 12, 1945. It was an extra 13 days before he received his first substantial briefing on the U.S. effort to develop an

atomic weapon--a process fast approaching its climactic stage after more than three years of colossal expense, toil and urgency. Neither Secretary of War Henry Stimson nor Leslie Groves, overseer of the vast atomic project, was in a particular hurry to get the new President's ear because they knew that all the important choices about the Bomb had already been settled. Their conversation with the President on April 25 proceeded accordingly. "Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrifying weapon ever known in human history," Stimson told Truman. The meeting lasted just 45 minutes. None of the men questioned the assumption that the weapon would be used as soon as it was ready, and the sooner the better. That assumption had animated the creation of the Manhattan Engineering District in the first place. It energized the near manic pace at which Groves ramrodded the project forward. It suffused all thinking about the Bomb's purpose, development and eventual detonation. It was never seriously challenged. America's atomic project dated from 1939, when Albert Einstein warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany was trying to develop atomic weapons based on an isotope of uranium, U-235. The American nuclear program thus commenced under the sharp prod of fear that Germany would win the race to be the first atomic power. It is fully reasonable to assume that the first U.S. bomb would have been used against Germany had it been available in time.

As it happened, the war in Europe ended before the bomb was built. Stimson appointed the so-called Interim Committee on May 1, 1945, to give advice on the Bomb's use against Japan. Scholars have probed the record of the committee's month-long existence in vain for evidence of the kind of deliberative decision-making process that the resort to nuclear weaponry might seem to have warranted. Stimson asked the committee primarily for recommendations about how, not whether, to use the new weapon. Members spent only about 10 minutes of a lunch break discussing a possible demonstration of the Bomb's effect in an unpopulated area. No other alternatives were brought forward. Without qualifications, the committee recommended "that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible." The discomforting truth is that Allied leaders strode unhesitantly into the atomic age. "I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used," Truman later wrote. "[N]or did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise," Winston Churchill added. Nothing in the record contradicts them. Dropping the Bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, was among history's most notorious foregone conclusions. Crossing the Moral Threshold SUBSCRIBE TO TIMEPRINTE-MAILMORE BY AUTHOR Page 2 of 2 <<Previous 1 | 2

In Japan the obliteration of Hiroshima did not at first yield conclusive results. Japanese scientists assessing the Hiroshima damage doubted that the Americans could possibly have harvested enough radioactive material to make more than a few bombs. It was even likely, they said, that Hiroshima was a one-off stunt that could not be repeated. (This deprecation of the magnitude of the U.S. Bomb program suggests how ineffective a demonstration would have been.) Only after the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on Aug. 8 and the second nuclear attack on Nagasaki on Aug. 9 did Emperor Hirohito, in an exceedingly rare display of direct political command, overrule some of his own military leaders, who advocated an apocalyptic fight to the finish. Citing the unprecedented destructive power of the atom bombs, he declared, "I swallow my own tears and give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation"--which called for Japan's unconditional surrender. The atom bombs thus undoubtedly sped the conclusion of the war against Japan. They also ignited a moral controversy that has endured to this day. That controversy concerns an issue much larger than the bombs themselves, one whose origins date from well before the war. In 1933 the U.S. War Department sponsored a design competition for a new kind of weapons system--the strategic bomber. While Germany, Japan and Italy bombed civilians in World War II, only the U.S. and Britain configured their forces and defined their war-fighting doctrines around the central element of a massive strategic

air arm designed to carry the battle to the enemy's civilian society. In Europe the U.S. B-17 and B-24 bomber fleets made a considerable effort to restrict their attacks to highvalue economic and military targets. But in the endgame of the war against Japan, long-range B-29 bombers systematically undertook fire-bombing raids that consumed 66 of Japan's largest cities and killed as many as 900,000 civilians--many times the combined death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons that incinerated those two unfortunate cities represented a technological innovation with fearsome consequences for the future of humanity. But the U.S. had already crossed a terrifying moral threshold when it accepted the targeting of civilians as a legitimate instrument of warfare. That was a deliberate decision, indeed, and it's where the moral argument should rightly focus. Kennedy teaches history at Stanford University and is working on a book about the American national character.