The war effort

The effort required of the men, materiel and treasure necessary to win the Pacific War was gigantic. There had been nothing like the undertaking in history and there has been nothing like it since. An entire industrial city had to be constructed in Oak Ridge Tennessee to produce an atomic weapon; an aircraft delivery system had to be planned, constructed and delivered; three heavily fortified enemy held islands had to be captured and airfields constructed afterward to accommodate the B-29 aircraft that would carry the war to the Japanese home islands and eventually bring hostilities to an end. All of which represented only a portion of the entire overall war effort carried out in the Pacific and elsewhere in the world between December 7, 1941 and September 2, 1945.

Development of The A Bomb

Some 7,300 miles east of the Mariana Islands, a plant had been constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in early 1943 for the manufacture of materials for the atomic bombs that would be launched from an island in the Marianas. This huge effort involved 200 prime contractors; 200 million board feet of lumber; 400,000 cubic yards of concrete; 100,000 tons of steel; 750 buildings; 30,000 bachelor quarters; 15,000 family housing units; 55,000 carloads of material and equipment and 12,000 pieces of construction equipment in use at the same time.

The main building was over a mile long. The facility’s steam power plant generated 238,000 kilowatts and its three boilers produced 750,000 pounds of steam per hour. Fifty railroad cars were required each day to fuel the plant’s boilers. The cost of the Manhattan Project as it was secretly known was $20 billion (through August 1945).

The product of this herculean effort, the first atomic bomb, was assembled at Los Alamos and detonated at Alamagordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Code named “Trinity”, the detonation was a weapons proof shot in preparation for its future use on Japan.

The Construction of Air Fields

The construction of the airfields on Tinian was the largest building activity the United States Naval Construction Battalion (Seabees) had ever undertaken up to that time. They built 6 huge bomber strips, each a mile and one-half long and a block wide, along with eleven miles of taxi ways with “hardstands” sufficient to park 300 aircraft.

The Seabees dug, blasted, scraped and moved eleven million cubic yards of earth and coral on Tinian. This quantity of material would fill a line of dump trucks 900 miles long. Piled on a city block, the earth and coral they moved could form a pyramid two-thirds of a mile in height. Their equipment was kept busy 20 hours a day while welding crews worked to repair bulldozers, shovels and trucks damaged as a result of the rough construction activity. One Seabee had a Marine tank team fire armor-piercing shells into the side of a hill so dynamite charges could be placed to break up the coral. The 15,000 Seabees on Tinian operated equipment and constructed facilities of all types. They operated a wide assortment of cranes and other equipment including asphalt plants to pave the airstrips. In addition to the airfields they built Quonset huts and other service buildings. Every airstrip was completed on time and none required more than 53 days to build.

The Seabee’s motto, “We Build, We Fight” and their “Can Do Spirit” distinguished this group as being able to do any kind of work, any place, under any conditions. The efforts of the 6th and 107th Construction Brigades were remarkable.

Many Seabee groups would “adopt” an aircraft and when they did so the quality of life for the crew of the plane improved considerably as the Seabees provided the crew of “their” Super fortress with better Quonset huts, washing machines, better mattresses, ice cream and other comforts of life.

The men, equipment and construction material sent to this one island required a degree of logistical support almost beyond comprehension, all of which had to be planned, coordinated, assembled and safely transported across the Pacific in hundreds of ships.

By 1945 the airfields on Tinian were among the busiest in the world.

The B-29 Delivery

A delivery system was needed and by 1944 the United States had produced a long range bomber that had the capability of flying the round-trip distance from the Mariana Islands to the Japanese home islands. In June 1944 the islands were assaulted by U. S. forces for the purpose of obtaining airfields from which to launch the new B-29 Super fortresses against Japan. Once the islands were secure airfields were constructed on Guam, Saipan and Tinian to accommodate the aircraft which had a range of 3,700 miles at 33,600 feet. Built at a cost of $639,000 each 3,970 were constructed.

The Enola Gay lifted off Tinian at 2:45 a. m., August 6, 1945 for the six and one half hour flight to Hiroshima. At 30,700 feet, with a ground speed of 328 m.p.h., a bomb weighing 9,000 pounds, measuring 129 inches in length, with a diameter of 31.5 inches, containing less than 50 pounds of Uranium 235 was released and split into two sections. After falling to an altitude of 1,890 feet, nuclear fission began in one fifteen-hundredth of a micro-second. The firebomb that erupted was the equivalent of thirteen thousand tons of T.N.T. and thousands of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. It melted granite and vaporized people leaving only their shadows on the few remaining buildings left standing in the city after the blast. This single bomb left 118,661 dead, 30,524 severely injured, 48,606 slightly injured and 3,677 missing. It exploded with the temperature of the fireball at the outer edge reaching 1,800 degrees centigrade 15 milliseconds after the explosion, with the velocity of the shock at 100 meters per second one thousand meters from the epicenter. When released over the city the temperature at the instant of the detonation reached several million degrees. A few millionths of a second later the surrounding air reached the point of white hot heat and in 1/10,000 of a second an immense fireball was formed with a uniform temperature of about 300,000 degrees. In less than one minute the atomic cloud had reached a height of more than one half mile. At the hypocenter, iron melted. Within 900 hundred feet of the hypocenter the surface of granite melted. Within one mile, railroad ties, fences and trees ignited spontaneously. The heavy black clay tiles which were an almost universal feature of the roofs of Japanese houses bubbled from the heat at distances up to a mile from the epicenter. The fireball as seen from a distance of five and one half miles from the point of burst had a luminosity ten times that of the sun.

On August 9th, a second bomb, code named “Fat Man”, which was a plutonium device and carried by the B-29, Bock’s Car, had as its primary target the city of Kokura but bad weather forced the pilot to the alternate target of Nagasaki.

It was this second device detonated over Nagasaki that finally convinced the Japanese that the war was lost and surrender followed on August 15, 1945. The formal ceremonies aboard the Battleship U. S. S. Missouri occurred on September 2, 1945 in Tokyo Bay.

After the war the U. S. undertook a strategic bombing survey of Japanese cities. It was estimated that the damage and causalities caused at Hiroshima by one atomic bomb dropped from a single aircraft would have required 220 B-29’s carrying 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high-explosive bombs and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs—if conventional weapons— rather than an atomic bomb had been used.

There has been much discussion as to whether it was necessary to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The attacks did convince a recalcitrant Japanese military to abide by the decision of the Emperor to accept the nation’s unconditional surrender. No one knows the number of American and Japanese lives saved as a result of the conclusion of hostilities. It was estimated that one million American lives might have been lost had it become necessary to invade Japan. It is believed by many that the Japanese would have fought on to the last man, women and child and that Japanese civilization would be lost forever. The lives sacrificed in those two cities may have, in a strange, obscene twist of fate, saved the world as it provided human beings with undisputed evidence of the horror of a future nuclear conflict and is the only experience mankind has had with the dreadful terror of “doomsday.” It provided a macabre and appalling reference point where there was none before. The lessons learned in August 1945 kept the world from a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War confrontations for almost one half century following the conclusion of hostilities. One prays that the lives lost were not in vain and in God’s infinite wisdom their sacrifice brought some sanity to the world that such terrifying weapons never again be used.

Today, Tinian holds the somber distinction of forever being linked with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (William H. Stewart)