Lt. Col. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle famously led the first U.S. strike against the Japanese homeland during World War II, and Doolittle as a lieutenant general also had a little-known role by happenstance in the last strike in the form of the atomic bombing that destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
Doolittle became involved when a distraught Navy Cmdr. Frederick L. “Dick” Ashworth came to his tent on just-liberated Okinawa to give a report on what he then thought was a failed mission to bomb Nagasaki with the second atomic weapon used in warfare, resulting in the bomber missing the target and ending up with a “Mayday” landing on Okinawa.
Ashworth, who had been the “weaponeer” aboard the B-29 Superfortress in charge of arming the bomb, had just come from a harrowing landing in which two engines conked out for lack of fuel. He could have expected the chewing out of the century for bursting into the general’s tent unannounced to give a failed mission report, but Doolittle settled on hearing out Ashworth after his initial “Who the hell are you?” greeting.
“Commander Frederick L. Ashworth, U. S. Navy, reporting, sir. We’ve just dropped the second atomic bomb over Nagasaki. We need to send a report back to Guam, but your communications people aren’t cooperating,” Ashworth would later recall in a 1958 article for the U.S. Naval Institute.
“Well, son, sit down and tell me about it,” Doolittle said.
Ashworth, a 1933 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who had earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for his service on torpedo bombers in the Solomon Islands, told of a mission plagued by mishaps before the B-29 carrying the 10,000-pound plutonium bomb dubbed “Fatman” got off the ground from Tinian island for the 1,500-mile flight to Japan.
A pump on a reserve fuel tank had failed, meaning that the mission would have to proceed without a hitch for the bomber to make it back to Tinian, but there were several hitches to come.
The B-29 was dubbed “Bockscar,” for its usual pilot Frederick Carl Bock, but the pilot of Bockscar for the Nagasaki mission was Maj. Charles Sweeney. Bock instead flew a B-29 called “The Great Artiste” that carried scientific instruments and photography to measure and record the effects of the nuclear weapon.
A third B-29 carrying special cameras missed a rendezvous point, forcing Bockscar to waste fuel waiting for the third plane to show up before the decision was made to proceed to the primary target of the city of Kokura without it.
“So we headed for Kokura, our primary target,” Ashworth wrote. “However, at 30,000 feet over Kokura, we looked down at a heavy concentration of haze and smoke, apparently resulting from a bombing attack the night before on Yawata, just across the river. That place was still burning.”
The Bockscar crew was under strict orders from Gen. George C. Marshall to make a visual sighting of the target and not bomb by radar. The B-29 made three passes over the city, burning more fuel, but could not find a hole in the clouds for bombardier Capt. Kermit Beahan. It was said of Beahan that he could drop a bomb on a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet.
“After the third pass over Kokura, ground anti-aircraft fire opened up on us,” Ashworth wrote. “Shortly after, we saw about 20 fighters on their way up. The decision to get out of there and head for our secondary target of Nagasaki was not difficult to make.”
Ashworth continued: “At this point, we broke radio silence to notify air-sea rescue teams that we might have to ditch south of Japan. As we approached Nagasaki, the weather appeared to have deteriorated to almost solid overcast. That left us in a real pickle. Here we were supposed to drop an atomic bomb on Nagasaki under visual conditions, and we couldn’t even see Nagasaki!”
“At the last minute — actually about the last 20 seconds — the bombardier, who had been following very closely the radar run, and who had been receiving dropping angles from the radar operator, detected what he thought was the aiming point, a bend in the river flowing through the middle of Nagasaki. He yelled that he had his bomb sight on the target and let go visually.”
The air burst of the Fatman bomb exploded at an altitude of about 1,650 feet with a force of about 22 kilotons of TNT, compared to the 12.5-kiloton “Little Boy” uranium bomb that destroyed Hiroshima three days earlier on Aug. 6, 1945, according to initial estimates.
The initial estimates also were that 60,000 to 80,000 people were killed in the Nagasaki bombing, compared to the 90,000 to 166,000 killed at Hiroshima, but many thousands more were to die of the aftereffects.
“Our gas shortage restricted us to one turn around the atomic [mushroom] cloud, after which we picked up a heading for Okinawa. On the way, I pulled out my target chart. A prolonged examination produced a gnawing uncertainty,” Ashworth wrote. “I knew we had hit Nagasaki, but did we hit our target?”
Doolittle interrupted: “What do you think? Did you hit the target?”
Ashworth replied: “No, sir, I don’t think we did.” He pointed to a spot on the map that was about a mile and a half northeast of the main target. Doolittle then leaned over “and took a closer look at the map. A smile played upon his lips. Then, he stood up and put his arm around my shoulders.”
“Well, son, I wouldn’t worry a bit about that mission,” Doolittle said. “I’m sure that General Spaatz [Gen. Carl Spaatz, commander of Strategic Forces] will be much happier to know that the bomb went off up there in the industrial area instead of over the city of Nagasaki.”
Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Emperor Hirohito announced the unconditional surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945. The formal surrender documents were signed aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.
In his radio address to the nation announcing the surrender, Hirohito, whose voice was being heard by much of the Japanese public for the first time, said, “We must bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable in order to pave the way for peace for all future generations.”
“Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation,” Hirohito said. “Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
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