Category Archives: War Without End

Going through my late father’s old Air Force flight logs, I see that he was training to fly the B-29 at Alamogordo, New Mexico from June to September, 1945.

So he was probably there when the first atomic bomb was exploded at the Trinity Site, a few hundred sixty miles northwest of the base,  about 5:30 a.m. on July 16.

The surrounding mountains were lit up “brighter than daytime,” one scientist reportedly said, but as the mushroom cloud apparently only reached about eight miles high, dad probably couldn’t have seen it, assuming he was even awake at the time. The rumbling thunder might have awakened him but it had been thunderstorming in the week before the blast. If he was up, in time for an early flight, he never mentioned it to me. But it was Top Secret.

Paul Tibbets and the Enola Gay were already at Tinian in the Mariana Islands training to drop one on Hiroshima. Which they would have installed in their bomb bay by August 6 when they launched for the Empire’s rendezvous with the Atomic Age.

Interestingly, that first bomb was blooded like a Samurai’s katana sword.

The Navy captain who armed it high over the Pacific enroute to Japan badly cut a finger on its sharp tail fins, getting blood on his uniform and on the bomb, according to Robert F. Dorr, author of last year’s excellant Mission to Tokyo: The American Airmen Who Took The War To The Heart of Japan.

If you’re in the market for new details on an old subject, Dorr’s book is a fine read.

UPDATE:  Another book I like is a much-praised historical novel The Green Glass Sea, by Ellen Klages, which includes the fascinating detail that in the first year after the blast, the Trinity site was covered with thin sheets of pale green glass which the fireball had created from the white sand.