Duzenbury, the engineer, and Caron, the tail gunner, who had flown with Lewis many times before, were surprised at how serious he was this crisp fall morning at Wendover. They knew Lewis as a joking twenty-six-year-old who wore a battered peaked cap and a stained flying jacket. He looked like a combat veteran, even though he had never seen action.
Lewis was treating this flight, in the words of Caron, “as if he had on board the president and the Cabinet.”
Squashed in the tiny tail turret, the gunner was tempted to snap on the intercom and tell the pilot to relax.
The impulse passed. The checking continued.
“Equipment secure, Navigator?” The intercom emphasized Lewis’s Brooklyn accent.
“Secure.”
Captain Theodore “Dutch” van Kirk, the navigator, settled himself more comfortably in the padded seat with its fitted armrests. He wondered who Lewis was trying to impress. In the week he had been at Wendover, van Kirk had noticed that Lewis enjoyed an audience.
Tibbets had tried to reassure the navigator. He told van Kirk that Lewis was “just letting off tension. In the air, he’s a natural.” Van Kirk had his own ideas about “naturals.” Too often he had found them “daredevils trying to prove things to other people.” He hoped Lewis was not like that.
Lewis had always thought all navigators a strange breed, with their blind belief that any pilot could steer a course to an absolute degree. Today, though, the pilot intended to follow explicitly any course change van Kirk indicated. In that way, Lewis could not be blamed for any foul-up.
Seated in the cockpit watching the winking lights on the instrument panel, Lewis experienced a familiar feeling of well-being; he had come a long way.
In his boyhood days on the streets of Brooklyn, a swift pair of fists had been better than a classy accent; in flying school, he knew, his abrasive manner had worked against him. But in the end, even his most demanding instructor had conceded that Lewis was a highly gifted pilot. He’d never forgotten the pride his mom and pop had shown when they first saw him in an officer’s uniform, and his own satisfaction while walking through his Brooklyn neighborhood and being “greeted as somebody.” Then there had been the day he had taken the legendary Charles Lindbergh up in a B-29. After the flight, Lindbergh had said he would have been happy to have had Lewis fly with him on his epoch-making flights.
It was Tibbets who had developed Lewis into one of the most experienced B-29 pilots in the air force. The summons to Wendover had not surprised Lewis. He had written to his father: “Paul needs me because I am so good at my job.”
Modesty, as Lewis would admit, was not one of his endearing qualities. But he had others: generosity and a fierce loyalty to his crew, especially the enlisted men. Down on the flight line, mechanics hero-worshiped Lewis because he bent regulations to get them better working conditions.
He had joined his flight crew a few days earlier when the B-29 arrived, the first one to be delivered to Wendover. There had been keen competition among the pilots to fly it, and Lewis had been almost schoolboyishly excited when he was chosen to do so. He immediately began to talk of “my crew” and “my ship.”
But for this flight van Kirk and Ferebee had taken the places of his usual navigator and bombardier. Tibbets explained to Lewis that van Kirk and Ferebee would take turns flying with all the crews. Tibbets added a promise. “It will be just like the old days, Bob.”
That cheered Lewis. The “old days” were when he had “a one-to-one relationship with Paul without other people getting in the way.”
In his ten days at Wendover, it had not been like that. Lewis felt that Tibbets never had time to sit down with him and reminisce about those old days. Worse, “He didn’t laugh at my jokes, he wasn’t so tolerant if I made a small mistake. I put it down to nerves over a new command.”
The last flight checks were ending. Lewis asked van Kirk the estimated flying time to the initial point, or IP, the map reference from which the bomber would commence its bombing run. From the IP to the AP, the aiming point, would be a matter of a few miles. Over that distance, Lewis would work with the bombardier, Ferebee. He had disliked Ferebee from the day they met. He thought the bombardier acted “superior,” talked like “a playboy in the movies.”
One night, Lewis and Ferebee had played poker. Lewis had lost half his month’s salary. He could ill afford to do so; a broken marriage had left him short of cash. Half-jokingly, Tibbets had told Lewis to stay in his “own league.”
Tibbets knew Ferebee was one of the best poker players in uniform. He also felt Lewis was a “poor loser”—an accusation the pilot would always hotly deny—and Tibbets did not “want card games creating unnecessary problems.”
In his mind, Lewis ran through the main points of the briefing Tibbets had given. He was to climb to thirty thousand feet and fly south to the bombing range, the man-made lake, Salton Sea, in Southern California. There, Ferebee would try to drop a single blockbuster, filled with ballast, into a seven-hundred-foot circle on the northern edge of the lake. Tibbets had told Lewis that once the bomb was dropped he was to execute a 155-degree diving turn, which would take him back in the direction from which he had just come. Tibbets had emphasized, “Keep your nose down, and get the hell out of the area as fast as you can.”
Tibbets hoped the maneuver would provide the answer to how an aircrew could survive the expected shock wave from an atomic bomb. He had calculated that Lewis should be some seven miles away when the test blockbuster hit the ground. He did not explain to Lewis the reason for this action, “because that would have meant telling him too much too soon.”
Shortly before boarding the B-29, Lewis had received another surprise. Beser had arrived on the apron saying he was bringing along on the trip some three hundred pounds of special equipment.
“Can’t tell you why,” said Beser cheerfully. “It’s a matter of security.”
That didn’t endear Beser to Lewis. Waiting for takeoff, the radar officer was squatting on the floor of the B-29, aft of the toilet in the rear section of the plane, with his spectrum analyzers, direction finder, search receivers, and antennas.
Beser was about to make the first flight in which he would practice coping with enemy attempts to interfere electronically with an atomic bomb. Some of his instruments had been specially modified at Los Alamos. During the flight, they would receive signals from the ground simulating enemy radar beams. It would be Beser’s task to recognize, anticipate, and deflect the beams.
“Ready to start engines?”
Duzenbury studied the engineer’s panel before answering Lewis. He was, at thirty-one, the oldest man in the crew. Duzenbury hadn’t questioned why Tibbets had brought him to Wendover. It was enough for him “to work for the finest gentleman in the air force.”
He also liked Lewis; next to the colonel, Lewis was the best pilot Duzenbury knew.
“Start engines, Captain.”
One by one, each of the four Wright Cyclone turbine engines roared into life, and the tower cleared Lewis for takeoff. At the end of the runway he boosted the engines to 2,300 rpm while Duzenbury checked the magnetos and generators. Then, Lewis advanced the throttles to their full power position and slowly released the brakes. At 95 mph, just as the manual said, Lewis lifted the largest bomber in the world into the air.
Exactly on time, he reached the IP. Minutes later, Ferebee announced he had the AP in his Norden bombsight. “Bombs away. Correction. Bomb away.”
Lewis banked the bomber violently to the right, dropping its nose to give him more speed. A surprised Caron far back in the tail shouted into the intercom. “Cap’n, it’s like a roller coaster back here!”