World War 2: Air War

Trinity detonation

It was in the 1930s that scientists first began to seriously consider the possibility of atomic weapons becoming a reality. In several countries around Europe they conducted basic experiments with splitting atoms by bombardment and as time went on, became more certain of the potential energies that could be released. But the discoveries were being made inside countries ruled by Fascist regimes. As oppression of Jews and minorities grew, many of the key people involved fled and sought sanctuary in Britain and the United States. Further scientists fled after the fall of France in 1940 and joined these scientists in their work.

In the US a Jewish Hungarian refugee, Leo Szilard, worked with Albert Einstein to send a letter to president Roosevelt, proposing that the US start its own officially sanctioned nuclear research program. Szilard and Einstein were by now both afraid that Nazi Germany was already on the way to creating their own bomb, they hoped to beat them to it. But at that stage America saw no need for such an expensive venture and their proposal was passed over. Until the attack in Pearl Harbour in December 1941. With the country pushed into the war, Roosevelt authorised the program to go ahead, his and others’ own fears of German nuclear advancement now ignited.

The scientist in Britain and America were brought together in 1942. The project would be conducted in the US, but under the original military commander progress was initially slow. He was soon replaced by Colonel, later General, Leslie Groves, who appointed as the scientific team leader Robert Oppenheimer.

With Groves leading the military effort, construction of the facilities needed greatly sped up. Many of the facilities were scattered around the country, but the main points were at a vast lab complex in Los Alamos, New Mexico, another massive factory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they extracted uranium-235 from the naturally occurring element uranium-238, and Hanford, Washington state, where plutonium – an artificial element – was made. This was the Manhattan Project.

While the other two main areas concentrated on producing the fissionable material, Los Alamos focused mainly on how to create the nuclear chain reaction in a bomb. Several methods were theorised, but the most viable came down to two.

General Groves and Robert Oppenheimer

For the uranium bomb a simple gun device inside the bomb case would fire a wedge of U-235 down a barrel with conventional high explosive, it would merge with a ball of U-235 at the other end and form the critical mass required to create the explosive chain reaction. So confident was the team, and so rare was the uranium, that no full scale test was conducted.

For the plutonium bomb, the gun device was not workable. Instead a hollow sphere of plutonium was surrounded by high explosive charges, all very exactly placed and shaped to deliver a perfectly spherical detonation that would crush the sphere into critical mass for a subsequent fission blast. This bomb they were not so sure of, and despite also having only a limited amount of plutonium, the Manhattan team decided a test was needed.

On the 16th August 1945 that test was made. Codenamed Trinity, a plutonium bomb was placed on a steel tower near Alamagordo New Mexico and detonated at around dawn with the force of 20,000 tonnes of TNT. In an instant the tower was reduced to just a few pieces of steel poking up from the ground and sand around it was turned to glass. The nuclear age was here.

Three weeks later Hiroshima and then Nagasaki felt its full force. Despite attempts by one of its creators, Leo Szilard, to convince first Roosevelt and then Truman to hold off on using it. Like many on the project – including Oppenheimer, who resigned two months after the bomb dropping – Szilard had come to fear the possibilities they had helped to open up.

A victim of the A-bomb, showing the patterns of her kimono burned into her skin

Quotes and experiences of those who developed, delivered and suffered under the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the bomb development team, repeating a line from Hindu text after seeing the force he had helped unleash:
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

President Harry Truman, after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima:
“This is the greatest thing in history.”

Colonel Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay:
“We were at 33,000ft and the cloud was up there with us, rolling and boiling. Below, the surface was like a black, boiling barrel of tar…where once there had been a city.”

Bob Caron, tail gunner on the Enola Gay:
“A peep into hell.”

John Hersey, US writer, sent to interview Hiroshima survivors in May 1946, writing of the immediate aftermath:
“The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their hands up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing.On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns – of undershirt straps and suspenders…the shapes of flowers they had on their kimonos…Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent and showed no expression whatever…
“To Father Kleinsorge [German Jesuit priest], the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, mush less screamed in pain…none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried…”

Matsu Moriuchi, an elderly citizen of Nagasaki, emerged from a shelter to find herself surrounded by near naked people lying around the entrance. their bodies swollen and skin peeling off in ragged strips.

On leaving the same shelter, Sadako Moriyama saw what she thought looked like grotesque reptilian monsters, croaking and trying to crawl along the ground. They were people burnt red raw, their bodies smashed by the blast as it had slammed them into walls.

Dr Hiroshi Sawachika, army doctor near Hiroshima:
“We provided one room for the heavily injured and another for the slightly injured. A treatment was limited to the first aid because there were no facilities for the patients to be hospitalized. Later on, when I felt that I could leave the work to other staff for a moment, I walked out of the treatment room and went into the other room to see what had happened. When I stepped inside, I found the room filled with the smell that was quite similar to the smell of dried squid when it has been grilled.”

Akira Onogi, 16 year old citizen of Hiroshima:
“…when the blast came, my friend and I were blown into another room. I was unconscious for a while, and when I came to, I found myself in the dark. Thinking my house was directly hit by a bomb, I removed red soil and roof tiles covering me by hand and for the first time I saw the sky. I managed to go out to open space and I looked around wondering what my family were doing. I found that all the houses around there had collapsed for as far as I could see.”

Some of these quotes were sourced from Voice of Hibakusha
Others from The World At Arms, a Reader’s Digest publication.