Truman asked if Byrnes would like that post. It was a surprising offer in view of their previously cool relationship. As the unofficial “assistant president,” Byrnes had been far closer to Roosevelt than Truman, and at times had used his power to snub the vice-president. But in asking Byrnes to become first in line of succession to the presidency, Truman was displaying the political skill that made him so formidable. He wanted Byrnes on his side; he was prepared to buy him.
Byrnes accepted.
Then, speaking in a voice Truman felt was one of “great solemnity,” Byrnes made an announcement more startling and mysterious than Stimson’s had been on the previous evening. “Mr. President, we are perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world. It might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”
31
Beser, like most of the 509th, had heard the news of Roosevelt’s death over the radio. Some of the men had been listening to NBC’s “Front Page Ferrell”; others had been tuned to CBS’s “Wilderness Road”; by far the majority had been following the adventures of ABC’s highly popular “Captain Midnight.”
At 5:49, the first flash interrupted all three programs. By 6:30, local radio stations in Utah were broadcasting details of the poignant cable Eleanor Roosevelt had sent to her four sons: two of them were in the navy, sailing off the coast of Okinawa.
DARLING: PA SLIPPED AWAY THIS AFTERNOON. HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO. BLESS YOU. ALL OUR LOVE. MOTHER.
Beser turned off the radio. His reason for doing so was understandable. “By switching it off, I believed I could deny the truth. President Roosevelt had been leading us for so long that his death was impossible to immediately accept.”
That evening, members of the officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs on the base made their gesture: there would be no gambling or drinking until Roosevelt was buried. Eatherly surprised many by being one of the most vociferous supporters of this pledge.
Bob Lewis touched a popular emotional chord with his words. “I never met the guy. But I felt that I had lost a great buddy.”
For many of these young men, who could hardly remember when he had not been president, the thought of an America without FDR in the White House was impossible to comprehend. Gradually, though, the talk at Wendover, as elsewhere, turned to the new president. Of most immediate concern to the 509th was his attitude toward the prosecution of the war. Everybody at Wendover knew where Roosevelt had stood. Many of them could quote from his speeches with their recurring theme that the enemy must be pursued to its lair. Roosevelt had almost lived to see the pursuit reach Berlin.
But would Truman be so keen to conquer Tokyo?
A well-rehearsed team, pilot Charles Sweeney and bombardier Kermit Beahan brought the B-29 toward the aiming point. For this test, they were using the makeshift range that had been laid out on the salt flats a few miles from Wendover.
Thirty-two thousand feet below, grouped near the AP, scientists and technicians from the First Ordnance Squadron waited to see if the latest adjustments they had made to the bomb’s proximity-fuzing system would work.
Today’s bomb was filled with ballast and a pound of explosive, enough to cause a small aerial explosion so that the scientists could see whether the fuzing mechanism worked at its preset height of two thousand feet.
Sweeney’s crew, No. 15, had been briefed by Tibbets on the test flight. He had reminded them of the importance and value of each fuzed unit, particularly as the system was still proving troublesome.
Though Tibbets had not said so, he was paying the chubby-cheeked Sweeney and his fliers a rare compliment. In selecting them for a flight of considerable consequence for the scientists, he was openly acknowledging what almost all the other crews now accepted: crew 15 was probably the best in the 509th.
The only challenge to this claim came from the vociferous Lewis and his crew.
The relationship between Lewis and Sweeney had been cool from the days both men had worked on the original B-29 test program. Lewis suspected that the Boston Irish Sweeney had “kissed the Blarney Stone”; certainly, Sweeney had a great deal of charm, which he used to get the very best from all those he worked with. It didn’t work with Lewis, a failure that Sweeney philosophically accepted. Professionally, he felt that Lewis was “lucky” to be in the 509th, and even luckier to act, on occasion, as copilot to Tibbets.
This sort of personal tension had increased the competitive spirit between the two crews.
Tibbets watched the situation carefully. He never appeared to favor any crew unduly. After Sweeney had been assigned the test flight, Lewis had been asked to perform a series of takeoffs and landings with a nine-thousand-pound bomb filled with high explosive in his bomb bay. The exercise was not so pointless as it sounded to the crew. Tibbets wanted Lewis, and later the others, to become “psychologically prepared” for the possibility that one day they might be forced to land carrying an actual atomic bomb.
Tibbets was aware of the view prevailing within the higher echelons of the Manhattan Project: unlike conventional bombs, the atomic bomb was far more valuable than the aircraft carrying it, or the crew. He conveyed this thought to Lewis. The pilot performed his exercises with the gentle care of a veteran Red Cross transport pilot.
Approaching the aiming point, Sweeney watched Lewis circling far below. Then Beahan called out, in a Texas accent even Eatherly agreed was “broad,” that the AP was almost in the center of his bombsight’s cross hairs. Beahan, an overseas veteran like Ferebee, was a highly efficient technician, known to his fellow fliers as “The Great Artiste.” Crew 15 held him in such reverence that they boasted he could “hit a nickel from six miles up.”
Beahan asked for a minute course change. Copilot Fred Olivi, a bulky twenty-three-year-old Italian from Chicago, watched Sweeney respond. Olivi thought it was “almost magic” the way Sweeney and Beahan worked together.
The crew braced themselves for the familiar upward thrust following the bomb’s release.
This flight would make another entry in the strictly illegal diary Sergeant Abe Spitzer was keeping of his time with the 509th. He was the radio operator and, at the age of thirty-five, looked upon by the rest of the crew as an old man. They would have been surprised at the gentle-voiced Spitzer’s acid observations on some of the men he worked with. But even Spitzer had to admit that, in the air, crew 15 was a closely coordinated unit.
“Bomb away!”
Beahan’s words were followed by a leap upward from the B-29, cut short when Sweeney went into the usual 155-degree turn. Simultaneously, an explosion rocked the bomber.
Sergeant “Pappy” Dehart, the tail gunner and another Texan, shouted, “It’s blown up!”
The bomb’s fuzing mechanism had detonated prematurely, less than a hundred feet below the B-29. The spent unit continued toward the ground.
Sweeney brought the aircraft under control and landed. Tibbets was waiting for him. He put into words the unspoken fear of them all. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen when we’ve got a real one on board.”
Over the weekend of April 21, the 509th had made their usual journey into Salt Lake City, and already the complaints were being received in the duty office.
Eatherly had set the pace, racing his roadster hub-to-hub against that of his flight engineer. They passed a whiskey bottle back and forth, from one car to the other, as they traveled at close to ninety miles an hour. The bottle was empty when they reached Salt Lake City.
A number of fliers took rooms in the Hotel Utah, and soon noisy parties were under way. A redhead was seen running naked down a hotel corridor, pursued by several pilots in their shorts.