We Dropped the A-Bomb. By Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer. 1946

We Dropped the A-Bomb.
By Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer.
Who can narrate such an act? A revolution in warfare,
Extraordinary rubbing shoulders with ordinary,
what was science fiction co-existing with the mundane.

We Dropped the A-Bomb.
By Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer.
Copyright nineteen forty six.
None of us knew for sure what the “gimmick” was, not even after the fire and smoke rolled up toward us from Hiroshima and it looked as if the sun had fallen out of the sky and was on the ground. Not until a few minutes later when we had broken away from the danger zone and Colonel Paul W Tibbets, our group commander and pilot of the B-29 that let go with the first bomb, said over the radio, Well, boys, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.

Even then it didn't sink in. I didn't know what an atomic bomb was or what it had done to the city of Hiroshima below or what a far worse bomb would do a few days later when we let it go over Nagasaki.

For me, the experience was a little like when we got in the war. That Sunday afternoon in December I was at the Polo Grounds watching a football game between Brooklyn and the Giants. During the game, over the loudspeaker, the announcer, every few minutes, kept asking Army officers to report to their posts. And all over the stadium men in uniform would rise, a worried look on their faces, and hurry away. I knew something was wrong, but I never suspected that it was war.
And when, on the bus on the way home, I heard somebody say that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, it still didn't mean much to me. I didn't know where or what Pearl Harbor was. After I got home, my wife Esta and I looked it up on the globe on top of the bookcase in our living room. But actually, I wasn't really convinced that we were in the war until the next morning when we listened to President Roosevelt's speech on the radio.

As far as the "gimmick" was concerned, it was weeks, even months, before I realized that on August 6, nineteen forty five, I had been part of a handful of men who'd unleashed a force that could, and may, destroy most of the people of the world and civilization itself, that might do more damage in an unrecorded split second of time than all the raids of all the bombers of all the nations in all the theaters of war since early September nineteen thirty nine. I know that now, and it frightens me.

Of course, I'd known our crew was in on something new and big since October nineteen forty four. I don't remember what day of the week it was, or even what day of the month. You don't pay much attention to things like that in the Army. All I knew was that Major Sweeney, our CO, called me in, and I saluted and kept wondering if I was going to be taken off my flying status and hoping not because it had been hard enough to get a waiver in the first place, because of my bad eyes.

The Major asked me to sit down; then he paused, a little dramatically, and said, "Abe, I thought you ought to know that this big thing we're testing is pretty important. If it's successful, the war will be shortened by at least six months, maybe more." He hesitated again. "And the chances are we'll be going overseas."

Actually, I don't think I believed him. I mean I couldn't imagine a bomb that would be as successful as he'd indicated. Besides, I'd heard so much talk for so long about how bombing alone would win the war in Europe, but our troops had still had to make an infantry landing on the Normandy coast.

But I did realize I was in on the ground floor of something pretty important, and I was glad.

But it wasn't until the Japs sued for peace that I knew we really had shortened the war by six months or more with our "gimmick." And it wasn't for about two weeks, when I began seeing the photos of the atomic bomb damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and began reading the newspaper accounts of what those two bombs had done that I realized what kind of history we'd made.

And I did a lot of thinking between then and the time I got out of the Army.

That's why, now, I spend most of my spare time making speeches, trying to tell people the atomic bomb has made another war impossible, that if we have one every city in the world may be wiped out, including New York, including my home and thousands of other homes in the Bronx and everywhere else in this country.

Lots of times people don't believe me, and there are a lot of people I haven't talked to yet, and won't ever have time to talk to. And some of those are the people who right now, every day, are talking about us getting ready for another war.

It's for them, especially them, that this book has been written, to tell them exactly what it was like over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And what the A-bomb means.

Chapter One.

THE sun was beating down on the tin roof of our Quonset hut, and we were sitting on our bunks or lying on them, not talking much, most of us not wearing anything but our "shorts", our issue khaki trousers cut off about six inches below the crotch. In one corner was a poker game, not a very interesting one; it was August 4, and most of our gambling money for the month was already won or lost. A couple of men were shooting craps, playing for pennies and nickels, and there were maybe one or two who were reading those pocket books the Army gives you, mystery stories, I suppose; that's about all most of us ever read.

Most of the men in our crew were just stretched out on their sacks; it was the middle of the afternoon, and, as always, it was unbelievably hot. There was "Nails" Kuharek, Master Sergeant John D. on the records, our engineer and a Regular Army man who never could quite get used to or approve of us "duration and six" men. "Nails", we called him that because he was tough and never had much to say and said that short and sharp, had his eyes closed, but he wasn't asleep.
I knew that because once or twice he'd looked over at me and opened his mouth as if he were going to say something; then he'd seemed a little disappointed because no words came out, and he'd changed his mind and shut his eyes again.

Next to Kuharek was Buck Staff Sergeant Ed Buckley, sometimes called "Muscles" because, as we told him, if he ever got out of a job a carnival would always take him on as a thin man. "Buck" was our radar operator, and I don't know what he was thinking about unless maybe it was the greyhounds he used to raise and race back home in Lisbon, Ohio, and his harness horses; he'd studied to be a veterinarian at Ohio
State and, later, at the University of Pittsburgh, and he loved animals and didn't care much about airplanes.
"I can't see why in hell anybody’d go around in one of these things when he could be riding horseback," he used to say. "Besides, I don't think the airplane's here to stay; I hope not anyway." And he meant it, too.
Or maybe he was thinking about his son, who was only a year old, or the fact that he was actually too old to fly; he was 32. Of course, at times I used to think the same thing about myself. I'm 34 now; I was 33 then.

Then there was Al Dehart, who was "Pappy" to all of us, especially the kids in the outfit. He had two kids back in Plainview, Texas, and was our tail gunner. He was a silent, lonely kind of guy, and he had a lonely job. A tail gunner is all by himself on a B-29, with hours of unbroken solitude, but "Pappy" didn't mind.
"It gives me time to think," he used to say, "and I've got a lot on my mind." "Pappy" had a birthday coming up, and he may have been wondering about that, although he couldn't have known then on what an historic day it would fall. He would be thirty on August 8. The three of us, Buck, Pappy, and I, sometimes called ourselves "The Three Old Bastards." As you can see, ours wasn't a crew of kids.

Ray Gallagher, the assistant flight engineer and my best friend, was the youngest; he was only 23. Ray had been having a fitful afternoon nap, and a few minutes before he had awakened with a kind of start. I could tell he had been having a bad dream.

"What time is it?" he wanted to know.
"About two-thirty," I said.
"Still P M.?" he questioned.
"Still P M."
"Won't be long now, will it?"
"Nope. We’ll have to get dressed in about five minutes."
"Think it’ll be tonight, Abe?"
"Maybe," I answered, inadequately. "You never can tell."
"Ah," said Buckley, and there was disgust in his voice. "It probably won't be for weeks yet. You know the Army. Hurry up and wait."
"But the way they talked yesterday." Ray began.
"The way they talked yesterday, we're going to drop an honest-to-God “gimmick” on the Nips," said Buckley. "Sometime. Maybe. If nothing happens. And when we drop it, all hell is going to break loose. If it works. Probably."
Kuharek raised up on his elbow. "I don't think we ought to talk about it," he said, glancing around him somewhat nervously. "You know what they said."

A soldier from another crew who was lying nude on his bunk raised up and glared at us. "Why don't you guys pipe the hell down?" he wanted to know. We did.

The day before we had had a briefing at which we had been told that our crew would be one of the few to go on a mission which would drop the first "gimmick" in history on Japan. That was supposed to be great news, but it wasn't. We'd known it for months, since the October before in most cases, when, at Wendover Field, Utah, Colonel Paul W Tibbets, the group commander, had told us that the thing we called the "gimmick" would someday be the "real thing"; exactly what the "real thing" was he hadn't said, but it was obviously a new kind of bomb, and it was obviously going to be powerful, and obviously nothing could go wrong when we actually dropped one, we hoped. And ever since January 7, eight months before, there was no longer any doubt of it; we were one of the few teams that would do the job. January 7 was the day I was transferred to the three ninety-third Bomb Squadron.

So it wasn't news at all. There'd been too many dry runs both back in the States and since we got to our base on Tinian, six thousand miles from San Francisco but not far from Saipan and just a fairly pleasant flight from the Japanese Empire.

The day before we'd also been told that as soon as our super-duper egg was dropped over the Empire, Washington would release the news and we'd know what the secret was, along with everybody else in the world.
What's more, that we'd all be famous, IF it worked and IF, of course, we got back alive. Nobody mentioned the two "ifs" but we were all aware of them.

After our briefing, we'd been warned to keep absolutely quiet and had had our pictures taken and filled out long mimeographed forms giving our entire life history, for the newspapers, they said.
"Even the Bronx Home News?" I'd asked.
"Yeah," Major Moynahan, the public relations officer, had laughed. "Even the Bronx'll know about this one."
After that, we'd voted on the name for our ship, and the Great Artiste had won. The Great Artiste for Captain Kermit K Beahan, who was popular with the girls wherever he went. And with us. I was disappointed with the vote. Not that I said anything, but ever since May when we’d picked up B-29 Number 42-7353 at Omaha, Nebraska, it'd been My Baby Doll to me, for my wife Esta.

After the briefing the afternoon before, we'd wandered over toward the air field. I'd been going to check on the radio, just for the hell of it, but there was an MP standing by the plane, and he was armed. Then I was sure of it. There was a "gimmick" somewhere around; it wasn't just playing any more, no more getting ready. And we wouldn't have to guess much longer.
There were a couple of civilian scientists around the plane too and not far away the mysterious building which was always guarded, day and night, and which no one but the scientists ever entered, except maybe a general or so.

I wanted to rush up to one of the scientists and say, "What's cooking, chum?" And, too, I wondered what the hell scientists had to do with bombing missions anyway and why about 25 of them had arrived at Tinian a couple of weeks before and seemed to be working about 24 hours a day in that guarded building or in one of the also-guarded Quonset huts nearby.
But I didn't say anything, and we all turned away from the plane, a little disappointed.
"Maybe they're installing plush seats," said Ray.
"Or modern plumbing," Buckley added. The MP didn't reply; he didn't even smile.
That night I hadn't been able to sleep much. We'd had a few beers. It was still near enough to the first of the month for that. There weren't many; there never were. But we still had part of a bottle of whiskey that the officers of the crew had given us.
We'd sat around in our quarters and drunk and played a game of poker and tried to talk. But nobody had much to say. All of us were a little low.

I kept remembering how I'd felt in June when we'd flown over the Golden Gate, and I'd looked down at it and thought to myself, "Better take a good gander, Spitzen You'll probably never see it again." Then
I'd wished that I'd never kicked up so much fuss about getting on flying status; I could have stayed on the ground and kept my mouth shut. After all, I had weak eyes, and I wasn't supposed to fly, but I'd pestered Colonel Tibbets and Major Sweeney, our CO, so much that they finally said, "Okay, we'll try to get you a waiver."
And they had. Ray Gallagher was flying on a waiver, too. I'd never complain, of course, and actually I was glad, but every once in a while I'd say what you do say to yourself in the Army, if you're a combat soldier, that is: "It's better to be a live coward than a dead hero."

I didn't know what the "thing" we were going to drop was; okay, so it was just a better, more destructive bomb, but nothing like it had ever been used before, and regular bombs are bad enough, and it was a sure thing that nobody was exactly sure what would happen when we let this one go.
After all, I kept thinking, wars are for young men, especially aerial warfare; most of the men in the outfit were practically young enough to be kids of mine, or at least very much younger brothers; and when you're over thirty, you tire easily, getting up at six thirty, finishing after dark, trying to keep up with high school kids.
Hell, this was no war for me. This was no war for anybody with sense.
Thoughts like these had kept recurring all night, and I'd tossed and turned and sweated, along with the rest.

Toward morning, I'd reached under my pillow, got my wallet and pulled out my wife's picture. I couldn't see a thing, of course, but it made me feel better just to have her picture in my hand.
A little while after that I'd fallen asleep, and it must have been about an hour and a half later when I'd been awakened. It was six thirty, and I wanted to make chow because we were going to have honest-to-God fried eggs instead of the usual powdered. Besides, it was Saturday, and there was an inspection, and, anyway, I couldn't have gone back to sleep; we were going to have a briefing at fifteen hundred, at 3 P M, and then we'd know the secret.
The briefing had been on my mind all day. There hadn't been much to do. First off, we'd failed the inspection. Ray or "Pappy" or somebody had six dust spots under his bunk, and somebody's shoes weren't properly shined. Okay, I'd thought, fine, wonderful. Gig us. Don't give us our three-day passes, not even an overnight pass for us kids; we're bad; restrict us to quarters, even. Fine. Wonderful. Great. Of course, we won't be able to go on the mission; too bad.
We'll have to call the mission off, or send somebody else, but that's okay. Our hut had six spots of dust, and somebody forgot to shine his shoes.
After lunch, as I said, I'd tried to rest for a while, but it wasn't much use. The time for the briefing had crept closer, as such things do.
"You guys really talk too much," the soldier on the other bunk repeated. "Try buttoning your lips."
I looked up to answer him. None of us had said a word for perhaps five minutes. But then I glanced at my watch; it was exactly 2:45.
I sat up and reached for my shirt, such as it was. I'd cut the sleeves off above the elbows, and it was dirty besides; it was impossible to keep clean on Tinian.
"Ray," I said. He looked as if he were asleep again.
"Ray, we'd better get ready." He sat up instantly. I should have known better; he hadn't been asleep.
Then a corporal from headquarters stuck his head in the door.
"All right, you Victory Boys," he said. "Off and on.
Let's get on the beam. You've got to be at the combat room at fifteen hundred. Extra special briefing for you Victory Boys." He smirked when he said the words "extra special." He was joking, I guess, but the way I felt right then I could have jumped up and smashed his face in. Ever since we'd arrived on the island, they'd called us that, the men in all the other squadrons. We were the "Victory Boys" or "Glory Boys" or the "Errol Flynns" or the "Guys Who're Going to Win the War for Us."

In the supply room they were almost always fresh-out of whatever we wanted, if they knew who we were. There was plenty of everything for everybody except us, the men of the three hundred and ninety third. And even on the hot coral roads, jeeps would pass us and the men in them would jeer, "Yah, you Victory Boys. Try getting a few blisters on your feet instead of your you-know-where."
Only their language was somewhat more colorful than that. We were probably the most unpopular squadron on the island.
You couldn't blame the other men, of course. When our ground crews had arrived at Tinian in May, about a month before those of us in the air echelon, they'd told everybody, "Wait until our guys get here; they're going to end the war in a hurry. They've got something brand new that'll finish off the Japs overnight.
You guys might as well go home."
This to men who'd been flying in six hundred, and thousand bomber raids over the Jap homeland and the occupied islands for weeks and months, men who had up to 35 missions and beyond, men who'd seen their buddies shot down and killed, or taken prisoner, which was worse, men who'd bombed Europe, too, and some from the China-Burma-India theater. You really couldn't blame them for being bitter.
The corporal shouted again. "All right, off your butts. You guys do more sack time than all the rest of the squadrons put together." I couldn't help wondering if the corporal had ever been in a plane at all, even on a sightseeing tour.
We were all up now, and we didn't have much time to get to the combat room, but nobody hurried much.
We all seemed to be taking our time, as if every minute we delayed now could put off the inevitable that much longer.
When we walked out of our Quonset, we all turned around and looked longingly back at our rumpled bunks, our sacks.
"Hope we get a little more sack time," said "Pappy" Dehart.
The rest of us, Kuharek, Buckley, Ray Gallagher and I, nodded.
Then we started for the combat room, walking as slow as we could. We'd be late, maybe, but that was all right. They'd wait for us. And the briefing would be one we'd never forget. It would be one for the books all right, the history books.

Chapter Two.

THERE was a guard at the door of the combat room, and he checked each of our names before he let us inside.
"We aren't Japs," Ray cracked. "Can't you tell?
We're on your side. Remember?" Most MPs would have grinned and cracked back, but this one must have had strict orders; he didn't. He just motioned us inside, one by one.

The long low room was already filled with cigarette smoke, and it was hot, the kind of enervating, tropical heat that's unknown back in the States. This was the time of day when the natives on Tinian, who were wiser than we in such matters, refused to do any work at all.
A siesta, they figured, was the only proper activity for an hour of the day when it was so hot just breathing was difficult. We found places on the hard benches, and I winked at Major Sweeney, our commander. Captain Van Pelt, the navigator, Captain Albury, our pilot. Lieutenant Olivi, the co-pilot, and Captain Beahan. Captain Beahan winked back at us and grinned, and the rest nodded, rather grimly, I thought. There were five other crews in the room besides ourselves, and, although the briefing hadn't started yet, no one was talking; there was just a little, almost inaudible whispering among some of the brass who were sitting up front, including a couple of Navy two-stars and some high ranking Army officers, none of whom I knew well enough to wink at or nod to; high brass is funny that way.

After we were seated, the Navy officer who had designed the bomb, a tight-lipped, balding captain from Chicago, William S Parsons, rose. He cleared his throat several times and shuffled the papers in his hands, then took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead before he began speaking. It was so quiet in the room that we could hear a jeep shifting gears somewhere outside and the motors of the planes, although that last was nothing new; there were very few minutes during the 24 hours of the day when you couldn't hear that.
"I guess you men know why you are here," the captain began, speaking slowly and very softly. Some of us nodded emphatically; we all knew.
"The bomb you are going to drop," the captain continued, "is something new in the history of warfare. It will be the most destructive weapon ever devised." I wished he'd get to the point; we knew all that. When would we drop it? That was what we wanted to know. "We think", and here he paused and cleared his throat again, "We think it will wipe out almost everything within a three-mile area, maybe slightly more, maybe somewhat less."
Parsons hesitated, then again took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his forehead. We could still hear the motor of that jeep, and it seemed so loud you would almost have sworn it was in the room.

"One bomb," the captain said, "one single solitary bomb will do all that. And maybe more."
I didn't have a handkerchief on me, but I could have used one; the perspiration was dripping off my forehead and falling on my shirt. Not that it would have been noticed there; my shirt was wet, too; my whole body was as wet as if I'd just stepped out of a shower.

"For more than three years," Captain Parsons went on, "scientists from all over the United States have been working on this instrument of destruction; the experiments that have been conducted have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and tens of thousands of workers have been employed to make only a few of these bombs." He stopped again. "After all," he added, "it won't take many." He laughed weakly, and so did a few others, none of them very heartily.
"On July 16," he continued, "in a remote section of New Mexico, one bomb was exploded from a steel tower. A not very tall steel tower. The flash of the explosion was seen for more than ten miles; a soldier ten thousand feet away was knocked off his feet; another soldier more than five miles away was temporarily blinded; a girl in a town many miles off who had been blind all her life saw a flash of light; several cows in nearby farms turned half-white.

"For those of us who were there," he went on, his voice monotonous, half-sleepy, "it was the beginning of a new age. I can't say more than that now, but later you'll understand."

He stopped again, and a Naval officer, an admiral, as I remember, who was sitting up front dropped a cigarette he'd been holding in his mouth and trying to fight.
The officer crushed the unsmoked cigarette under his foot and took out another but didn't light it either.
His hand was shaking, and his lips trembled.
When Captain Parsons went on, his voice had dropped to what was almost a whisper, and we had to strain to hear him.
"No one knows," he said, "exactly what will or may happen when the bomb is dropped from the air; obviously, that has never been done before." His face, too, was very white, but no one took particular notice.
I doubt if there was anyone in the room who wasn't pale.
He hesitated for a very long time, a full moment, I'd guess. Then, "I believe that's all," he said, and sat down, mopping his forehead again. His handkerchief was getting grimy, although it had been white and clean at first. I felt like applauding or something. The room was so damned quiet, and it had been a great speech. At that moment I couldn't have told you a word he said but I knew it had been a really terrific speech. He hadn't talked long but he'd said enough; he'd said plenty.

I looked at my wrist watch; it was only three twenty, but I'd personally have sworn we'd been there an hour already;
I even put the watch to my ear to see if it were still running.

It was.
After that, we listened to some of the scientists. I'd seen some of them around the place for days now and thought they were GIs; they were almost all very young, in their twenties. We'd even guessed that a couple of the huskier ones were FBI men, nosing around to check up on security, just as the men at Wendover Field in Utah had thought that about us when we first got there, and for the same reason, because there was something mysterious about us.
Well, the mystery was unravelling now, little by little, like the clues in a very-well written murder story; only we didn't know yet who the victim would be. The briefing continued for more than two hours, the scientists telling us, still without revealing exactly what the bomb was, some of the technical details about how it was to be carried, although we already knew that, too; to discover that had been the purpose of our dry-runs, how fast and from what altitudes it would be dropped and so on. The details of all this are still "top secret" even though the war's over. Why I don't know.
We're not fighting anybody now, or planning to, as far as I know. Maybe the brass in Washington know the answer to that one.

Again and again that afternoon we were warned that all the information they were giving us was "top secret," "extremely confidential," that we must not even discuss it among ourselves, that we were the "hottest" crews in the U S Army Air Forces and that the enemy was extra-curious about the bombs, partly because, we were told, Germany had been trying to make the same kind of bombs when the war ended, and, the scientists seemed to think, had very nearly succeeded.

After the scientists had finished, a G-2 officer explained what everybody had already guessed long before, that Colonel Tibbets, group commander, would pilot the ship that dropped the first bomb. We later found out that Parsons, Tibbets and Major Thomas W Ferebee, the bombardier on Tibbets' plane, were the only three men on the mission who knew exactly what we were carrying. Tibbets would fly his own ship, the Enola Gay, named after his mother.
The colonel, a short, rather muscular, easy-going man with a boyish smile, got up next. He didn't have to tell us why he had been chosen. All of us knew that he'd been in the Air Corps since nineteen thirty seven, that he'd been with the Eighth Air Force in England, that he'd piloted one of the first B-17’s to bomb Germany, that he'd flown
Original from Generals Mark Clark and Dwight Eisenhower to the conferences that preceded the North African invasion, and that he'd been one of the first pilots to fly the experimental models of the B-29, what's more, that General "Hap" Arnold had once called him "the best damned pilot in the Air Force."

The colonel began by saying that whatever any of us, including himself, had done before was small potatoes compared to what we were going to do now. Then he said the usual things, but he said them well, as if he meant them, about how proud he was to have been associated with us, about how high our morale had been and how difficult it was not knowing what we were doing, thinking maybe we were wasting our time and that the "gimmick" was just somebody's wild dream.
He was personally honored, and he was sure all of us were, to have been chosen to take part in this raid which, he said, and all the other big-wigs nodded when he said it, would shorten the war by six months.

"At least six months," he added emphatically. And you got the feeling that he really thought this bomb would end the war, period.
When Tibbets had finished, the G-2 officer rose again, and before he started he glanced at Major Sweeney, then at us and smiled. I'd always rather liked him before, but right then I hated his guts; I wished he hadn't smiled. Our ship, he said, would fly right wing to Tibbets to drop instruments and make records. Three scientists would be aboard. Major Sweeney would pilot the ship himself; Captain Albury would act as co-pilot. Lieutenant Olivi wouldn't be able to go along because there wouldn't be room.
Well, there we were. I'd known it was coming, almost exactly what was coming, but when I heard it and it was certain, once and for all, I began sweating again.
A third ship, the G-2 officer added, would fly on Tibbets' left wing to take pictures.

And that was all, brother. No thousand plane raids, no "massed aerial armadas," or "bombers blanketing the skies" such as we'd been reading about in the newspapers and seeing take off from our own base. No "swarms of fighter protection" either, in fact, no fighter protection at all. Just three B-29’s over the Empire with two 50-caliber machine guns in the tail of each, plus the most powerful bomb ever along for company, and for the Japs.
"Maybe they think the Japs will be away on a fishing trip," Ray whispered to me, and I tried to smile. Instead, I giggled foolishly, and several people turned around to stare at me nervously, as if they thought I'd gone off my nut. And right then I wouldn't have given any affidavits that I hadn't, or mightn't at any moment.

An hour before our take-off, the intelligence officer told us, three ships would take off, one to go over each of the possible targets, to make weather observations.
They would relay their reports back to Tinian, not to us on the strike ships. We, then, were to monitor the same frequency, decode the reports and inform the pilot over which target the weather was most favorable. I say "we" were to do all that; I really mean I was. As radio operator on the Great Artiste, that responsibility was on my shoulders, and I wished it weren't. I'd have traded places with practically anybody at that moment except maybe almost any Jap who lived anywhere near where our target was. It was too much for me. Why hadn't I stayed on the ground? My mother had always told me that if God had intended that men fly, he would have given us wings, and there wasn't much doubt in my mind but that she was perfectly right.

Besides, just to make my job tougher, there was to be no interplane communication. The radio operator, that's me, was to make sure he got the message that the weather ships relayed to the ground station at our base and make no break in the radio silence. Absolutely. Unequivocally. And without question, said the G-2 brass.

Ray patted me on the back playfully. "Up to you, boy," he said. "It's all up to you, Abe boy." This time I didn't try to smile at him. I just stared straight ahead, keeping my eyes on Major Sweeney. The major tried to look unconcerned, but not very successfully. Irishmen, in general, I've found, have a hell of a time covering up their feelings. Sure, he was a good pilot; Tibbets had chosen him for the mission and for our squadron because he was one of the best, and he had about three thousand hours in the air with no accidents, not even minor ones; he wasn't a newcomer to the game, and he was as dependable as a commercial airlines pilot. Still, the back of his shirt was dark with sweat, too. And Beahan, who had flown 12 missions in Europe and 19 in North Africa, who'd been shot down twice in the enemy's front yard in the European Theater and in the
Mediterranean, who had a Purple Heart and a cluster and God knows how many other medals, had his lips pursed as if he were whistling. Only no sound came out.

"Just a couple things more," the intelligence officer continued. "One ship will fly to Iwo Jima and stand by in case one of the three strike ships has to abort. And, oh, yes, the group identity on the tail of your ships will be replaced, and you will not be allowed to carry the name of your ship; that will be replaced by a number, and your call letters will be changed. Just in case. In case anything happens, I mean. And he paused. "We can't take any chances, any chances at all."

Just in case of what? I wanted to shout. What the hell do you mean, just in case anything happens. Explain yourself, sir, and be damned quick about it. What will happen? To whom and when and for what purpose? A few simple, meaningful, all-important, explanatory words will do. But, please God, those words. And now and quick.
Naturally, as always, I said nothing. You never do at a time like that.
That was all except that Captain Parsons repeated the security warnings, and so did Colonel Tibbets, and so did the G-2 officers.
"You're hot," they said. "You're the hottest crews in the U S Air Forces. No talking. No talking to anyone. No talking, even among yourselves. Loose lips sink ships. The enemy may be listening. Silence.
Silence.
SILENCE.
Be quiet.
Say nothing. BE QUIET. SAY NOTHING." And over again, each phrase half a dozen times.

We were to stay by ourselves until the take-off, no conversation, not even with our best friends in the group and in the squadron, not even to each other.
And no letters. No writing home. No mentioning even the possibility of a mission. Not to anyone, our wives, our mothers, our brothers, our sisters. No one.
The news, when it was released, would come from Washington, from President Truman himself. But that would be after the bomb was dropped. Meantime, we were not even to speculate, not aloud anyway; we were on an unprecedented alert. We were the "Glory Boys" for sure now.

And then, the usual words of personal warning.
Only this time they were more than usual. No mission anywhere at any time had been so thoroughly briefed on the precautions being taken to assure its safety. We couldn't even consider the possibility of capture; we knew too much. That again, was not said, but thoroughly understood.

Off shore from the Empire would be "Super dumbos", B-29’s whose job was not to drop bombs but to warn our base and air-rescue facilities if we ran into trouble; they would also hover in our area to fight off possible enemy opposition. In addition, there would be "Dumbos", Navy flying boats which would be able, if we were both lucky, to pick us up, in case we had to make a water landing; submarines, called “lifeguards” not far off shore either and also alerted to pick us up if we had trouble. We were told where all air-sea rescue facilities might be expected and how to get in touch with them. Finally, within two hundred miles of the Empire, would be surface vessels, mainly destroyers and cruisers, waiting for us, watching for us, again "just in case something happens." The young Navy officer who told us repeated, again and again, and always in nearly identical words, "Not that anything will happen. This is just to keep the Navy busy. There's nothing for you Army boys to worry about. Nothing at all."

At that moment, I wished he would shut the hell up and would look less like a Navy officer in the movies.
And also, and of course and without saying, didn't have all the self-confidence that it's so easy to have when you're not going on a mission yourself.
"I guess you'll all be famous," the Navy officer added as we got up to leave, and he grinned, like the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland." Only he didn't disappear.
And I wished he would.

"I envy you," he concluded. "I really envy you boys. This is a real opportunity."

Somebody behind me said several short, meaningful but unprintable words in a loud, rasping voice, and the Navy officer blushed. He was blonde, and he blushed easily.
"We'll be famous," repeated someone else, "if we live. Or maybe we'll just be famous corpses. Very famous corpses indeed."
I turned to see who had spoken, but whoever it was, was silent.

When we got outside, it was nearly dark, and the lights were going on all over the tiny island, and you could hear the waves beating against the coral rocks and the shouts from the beach where they were still unloading the ships, and the airplane engines, some of them revving up, some quieting down. And the indescribable, familiar, never-to-be-forgotten sounds of an evening, any evening, in the tropics. Plus, nearby and more familiar, shouts and laughter and a radio from a mess hall.
"God, I'm thirsty," said "Pappy." "I could use a brew."
"Or two, or three or more," said Ray.
"Don't worry," said Buckley. "There won't be any beer left. We've had our beer for the week. And for the next week, too, probably. Plus the week after that. It'll be T. S. for anybody that's thirsty tonight."
Kuharek was silent, and his face looked drawn and, suddenly, old. "What you thinking about, Nails?" I asked him.
"Be quiet,” he answered, I’m speculating. But don't tell." It was a joke, the kind of joke nobody laughed at, and Kuharek didn't expect us to. It was a half-hearted, and completely unsuccessful, attempt at humor.
We started back to our quarters, and far off we could hear somebody singing the Air Corps song, very loud, making like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra at the same time and doing it very badly and very loud: "Off we go. Boo, boo, boo, into the bright blue yonder. Riding high, ta-ta-ta ta, into the sky.”
None of us felt like singing. None of us felt like talking either. And we didn't.

Chapter Three.

THE night following the briefing was my second without sleep.
Early in the evening, we'd walked down to the movies and stood in the back for a while, trying to absorb what was happening on the screen; but we couldn't concentrate on a film, some silly thing about the war in which everyone fought with a clean-shaven face and wore a dress uniform without any wrinkles and in which no one was ever frightened or got killed. We hadn't been there for more than ten minutes when "Pappy" Dehart said, "I think I’ll wander back and hit the sack. I’m sleepy." We took off with him, and before we returned to our quarters, we hitched a ride to the air field again, not that I’m meaning to imply that was difficult; Tinian was practically all air field; the field itself was bigger than La Guardia. There were searchlights on, and the ground crews were working on the "Enola Gay" and the "Great Artiste," and there were a lot of MP’s around, almost a small regiment, it appeared, looking as if they expected a ground attack from the Japs at any moment.
We tried to walk up to our plane, but they turned us back.
"The hell with it, then," said Buckley.
"That's right," I agreed, "the hell with it."
"You know," said "Nails," "the trouble with real life is it's not enough like the movies. We ought to make life more like the movies, and then everything'd be fine.
We'd all be rich, and nobody'd ever get out of work, and we'd all be tall and handsome, and we'd have beautiful wives and drink champagne and sing songs and have five dames each, and all of them would look like Lana Turner, except two. And they'd look like Ingrid Bergman and Hedy Lamarr.
"That's the trouble with life," he repeated. "Practically nobody's built like Lana Turner."
When we got back to our hut, the radio was turned on loud, and some military "expert" was saying how what he called "the situation" would probably be worse before it got any better and that when we landed on the coast of Honshu there'd be more casualties than there were in Normandy and how what he said was "the main bulk" of the Japanese Army hadn't even fought a battle yet and how the war would probably last at least a year yet. Maybe more. "Maybe much more,” he added pessimistically.

"I guess he don't know about you Victory Boys," someone in the hut from another group jeered. "I guess he don't know when you guys complete your hotshot mission, it'll be all over but the shouting. If you go on your super-special mission."

None of us answered him, and he turned around and went back to his card game, still smirking.

After we hit the sack, Ray and I talked a little, and he reminisced that if he were back home in Chicago, he and his girlfriend would be at the Trianon about now, maybe dancing to Wayne King's music. After that was over, he continued, they'd have a chocolate soda some place (he'd never had a drink until after he got in the Army) and then they'd probably walk along Lake Michigan before taking a streetcar home.
"Abe," he said, suddenly, "if anything should happen and you come out okay, will you stop off in Chicago and tell my sister and the girl friend?"
"Don't talk like a damned fool," I answered. "Get the hell to sleep."
"No, I mean it, Abe," he answered. "I really mean it."

I closed my eyes and pretended to go to sleep, and after awhile he must have dropped off because I could hear his heavy, regular breathing.
After about an hour, they turned off the lights in the hut, and I thought I could go to sleep then, but I couldn't. I kept trying to count sheep then, but that didn't work. Later a raft of planes came in from a mission; I didn't know how many, and I tried to count them from the sound of their engines, but I couldn't go to sleep on that one either.
Like the night before, it was nearly dawn when I finally dropped off, and when the whistle blew, I was dreaming that I was flying over New York City in a plane without any wings, and I had a small bomb in each hand, either of which was capable of blowing up the entire city. My hands were getting sweatier and sweatier, and I couldn't hold on the bombs, and I knew what would happen if I dropped them. Then I woke up, and I found I really was perspiring.

That morning we had a short test hop, nothing much, the same kind of thing we'd been having ever since we got on the island; die only difference was that we had a Navy commander, Richard Ashworth, who was a Massachusetts man and talked like it, with us; he was going on the real thing, whenever that was.
In the afternoon, I walked down toward the enlisted men's beach and thought I'd go swimming. On the way I passed the officers' beach. It was a stretch of sand and water and sunshine that, when we first arrived on the island, had been open to everyone, officers and enlisted men. Then the jagged and dangerous coral had been blasted away; bathhouses had been built and lockers installed and a loudspeaker put in on which dance records were played. After that, it was like Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, only the water was bluer, or like Manhattan Beach in New York, only less crowded. The enlisted men, naturally, had done the work, but also naturally, in the Army and Navy, when it was completed, the beach was for officers only plus, of course, Army nurses, USO girls, Red Cross workers, and any other assorted civilians who happened to drop in for the week end.

I stood for a while near the sign that said, "Officers' Country." "Officers' Country", a kind of never-never land for enlisted men, a place for whose inhabitants, there was whiskey, transportation for pleasure trips, clubs, mess boys, bowing and scraping servants, and whatever other luxuries could be imported by plane or ship. “Officers' Country” And no enlisted men or dogs allowed.
What a crock.

I turned and walked back to our hut. Right then, I would have chucked the whole thing, mission and all, Army and all. It was a feeling I'd had many times before, and since, even after becoming a civilian again.
It is not a good feeling for a soldier in what is supposed to be a democratic army.
In the hut, most of our crew was sleeping; they must have had the same trouble I'd had the night before and were exhausted now. I lay down to rest for a few minutes. When I awakened, it was dark, and I'd missed chow, and it was time for the pre-mission briefing.

I knew what this one would be; this was the McCoy.
It didn't last more than half an hour, and I don't think any of us minded it much. By now we were pretty well geared for the take-off and could even joke about it.
"You better let me hold your wallet this time, Abe," Ray kept saying.
"No," I'd reply. "You let me hang on to yours. You won't be needing it after this one, and I'm broke."
Well, there wasn't much of anything else to be said.
Our primary target was Hiroshima, and we examined some pictures of the town, aerial photos that showed it in considerable detail. We were told that it was a city with a population of about three hundred and eighteen thousand, that it contained a large quartermaster depot for the Jap Army, the largest in the empire, that it was a port of embarkation and a manufacturing town. Large guns and tanks, machine tools and aircraft ordnance parts were manufactured there. And it would be brimming with Jap soldiers when we arrived; our G-2 had the dope on that.

The take-off was to be at oh three forty five, and, again, the weather ships would take off an hour earlier than ourselves, and there would be a spare plane at Iwo in case anything happened. When the bomb was dropped, we were told to wear the special arc-welders' glasses we'd been issued, to keep our eyes turned toward the interior of the plane and our faces down.
And especially, the intelligence officer said this not once but three times, the three pilots were warned to make a fast break as soon as the bomb was released.
"Get the hell away fast," he said. "You can't tell what will happen. Just get the hell away as quick as you can."

Then Colonel Tibbets rose. He looked a little tired, too, and tense, although he smiled. "'Well, fellows," he said, "this is the night we've all been waiting for.
We’re going on a mission to drop a bomb that's different from any you've ever seen or heard about. Get this, one bomb contains a destructive force that's about the same as twenty thousand tons of TNT." He paused and added, "One bomb." Then, "Are there any questions?"

A few men shuffled their feet noisily, and the colonel waited for a minute or so for someone to speak, but no one did. He grinned, and went back to his seat.

After he sat down, the chaplain rose and said the usual things in the usual way, only tonight I said them with him, and so did most of the others. I could hear them mumbling. Any other time somebody would have squirmed or maybe laughed or talked, but now it was so quiet you could hear everyone taking in his breath and letting it out again.
"In the Lord's name, Amen," the chaplain concluded, and after he was finished, there was maybe a half minute of silence before any of us opened our eyes and looked up.
“Good luck” the intelligence officer said. "God bless you and good luck," and he smiled the way a father smiles at a son taking out the family automobile for the first time, although he must have been five or six years younger than I was.

Back at the hut, somebody had found another bottle, and we all had a sip or two and sat there and talked, feeling free and easy for the first time in days, feeling relaxed in a way I know I hadn't felt in forty-eight hours at least. It's a little difficult to explain the emotions experienced just before a mission, when you know you're going and at what time and how far it is and what opposition is expected and when, if, of course, always if, although you never admit that, even to yourself, especially to yourself, you'll return. It's a little like going to the dentist's office. Once you've made the date, you relax a little. Not completely, but half-way at least.
You know it's just a matter of sweating out the patients ahead of you, and you can't, or won't, run away; everything's set. It's irrevocable, and you accept it. Well, that, on a larger scale, is the way you feel before a mission. As I say, not completely relaxed, but half-way relaxed. No use doing any more worrying. You know what you're going to have to do, whether you like it or not. There's nothing then but to wait for the signal to leave.

That night we discussed almost everything soldiers ever do discuss, except, strangely, women. No one mentioned women. Why? It would take a philosopher to answer that one. I don't know, except that you talk about women when you're just sitting around, nothing to worry about, nothing coming up, just smooth sailing ahead. I can only explain how I felt; maybe nobody else shared my feeling; perhaps all of them did.
I don't know. All I know is that I kept seeing Esta's face, hearing her say, "Take care of yourself, honey"; and, "Don't worry about me, Abe; just keep your chin up. I'll be all right." Or, last and softly and tenderly, "I'll miss you, darling. Hurry back."
The radio was playing very softly, and we mostly talked about what we were going to do after the war and how long it would last and how we'd all met and how we'd have a reunion every year at this time and about the few days the year before when we'd been in Cuba and how much fun we'd had and about the close scrape we'd had the time we were coming back to Wendover from Seattle and got in a storm and thought we'd never make it.

The hours passed very quickly, and I was sure it was still before midnight when, shortly before oh two hundred, the truck arrived to take us to the line. A few minutes before we'd eaten; I don't remember what, a Spam sandwich each, I suppose, and I drank two large cups of coffee, strong, black coffee without sugar.

We were at the ship by oh two fifteen, and it was a little like what I'd pictured as a Hollywood premiere, although without any crowds. Compared to most missions, the field was pretty well deserted. But there were flood lights and cameras and a lot of high brass and some of the scientists. They put recording machines in Colonel Tibbets' plane as well as in our own, and we cracked about what we'd say when the bomb was unloaded.
"Hello, Mom. Hi everybody, hope we won," said Buckley.

At oh three twenty we climbed aboard. At oh three thirty the engines started. I kept thinking maybe something would happen, maybe one of the engines would konk out while we were still on the ground; maybe we wouldn't be able to go after all.

But all four engines turned over like in a dream, steady and comfortable, whirring slow, then faster, revving up, getting ready. No turning back now.
No turning back now. No turning back now.

I remembered again what my wife had said when I'd last seen her, just before I left for overseas. "Take care of yourself, honey," she'd said. "Take care of yourself."
And I wondered how. What did you do to take care of yourself? Be sure you wore your rubbers when it's raining? Button up your overcoat? Look both ways when crossing the runway? You could do all that; that was easy, but what did you do now; the chips were down now, way down, really low down. How did you take care of yourself when you were in one of three planes against all the Japs in the world, the three prettiest targets anywhere for the Japs, and six 50-caliber machine guns between you and no fighter protection and the most dangerous bomb ever made at your elbow?

How did you take care of yourself under those circumstances? I couldn't answer that one because there wasn't any answer.
Exactly at oh-three-forty-five, the Enola Gay started rolling down the runway, slow, very slow indeed, then lifting up, and suddenly she was in the air.
A minute later we followed, down the runway, slow, very slow indeed.
Okay, so I prayed then. I admit it. I wished to God I were just ten hours older, just ten, and we were rolling in, putting down our wheels, lowering toward the runway instead of climbing above it. Just ten hours off my life; I'd have given ten years to avoid those next ten hours, and done it gladly.

But if God heard my prayer, he paid no attention. It may have been that the motors were too loud for anyone to hear what I was mumbling. And, anyway, I wasn't praying by myself. I had plenty of company. An entire plane load of company. I could see that.

Chapter Four.

The stars were out, all of them, it seemed to me, and very close too, so close that you'd have sworn you could have reached out and grabbed one, a small one to take home or to wear on your lapel when, and, of course and naturally, if, you were ever wearing a blue serge suit again. We must have been flying at more than fifteen thousand feet, and the clouds, looking very white, were far below, and there was no break in them; they were like a very soft white carpet, thick and luxurious, as in, maybe, Rockefeller Center.

It was cold outside, about 33 below Centigrade and 30 below Fahrenheit, but inside it was comfortably warm, room temperature, maybe 65 degrees Fahrenheit so warm, in fact, that I felt a little drowsy. My eyes actually closed once; then I jerked awake. Albury was at the controls. Sweeney, Beahan, and Van Pelt were on their sacks on the flight deck, actually sleeping. I didn't see how it was possible. There was too much to think about, too many other star-filled nights to remember and too much hoping that there'd be another such night. And not being sure that there would be.
Earlier, I'd heard Captain Beahan, we sometimes called him "Honey Bee," not to his face; to his face, he was "sir" or, more often, "captain", talking into the recording machine, but I couldn't tell what he was saying.
I tried to imagine what it would be like if we were Japs, with a bomb like the one in Tibbets' ship, speeding, say, toward San Francisco, or even New York. But I couldn't think about things like that very long; it would have driven me off my nut.
I kept remembering the aerial photos of Hiroshima we'd seen at the briefing, the detailed pictures of the bridges, the factories, the houses, and even, in some cases, the dots that were the people. I wondered if those people were sleeping now, and if they had any idea what was coming their way. Of course they didn't.
I think it's safe, and accurate, to say that no one in the world, except, of course, the scientists who'd made it possible, could have imagined the effects of the "thing" we carried, easy as you please, in a single B-29. And even the scientists had said at the briefing, they repeated it later, that they didn't think they'd be successful until the very end of their experiments. And when they knew they were going to succeed, they wished they wouldn't; they kept hoping, as I had before the mission, that something would happen to make their task unnecessary or impossible. But nothing did. Of course not. Don't be silly. Such a thing would occur only in books.

But those weren't exactly the kind of thoughts with which to while away a pleasant evening, either; so for a while I tried, and almost succeeded in, not thinking about anything at all, just concentrating on my radio, tinkering, trying to discover if there were anything wrong with it, although I knew there wasn't, wondering if it wouldn't be my typical luck to miss the all-important message, about the weather and what our target would be. But nothing was wrong; everything was fine.

I talked for a minute to Ray, in the left blister.
"How's it going, kid?"

"Quiet. All's quiet on the pre-bomb front. I've been watching the flame up there on the propellers."

The propellers were enveloped in the eerie blue flame that almost always appears on a flight in that part of the Pacific, something to do with the atmosphere, I guess; Saint Elmo's fire, they call it. There was more on the plexiglass covering the nose, but that was nothing to worry about. Unless, maybe, on Tibbets' ship the flames might creep in and get to the bomb. Pfui. Again I tried not to think about anything at all, and I think this time I even dozed a little. I don't know; time passed, and when I looked out again, it was nearly daybreak. Little shots of light were creeping up under the clouds, and I knew that we must be getting close to Iwo Jima, where we were to rendezvous at dawn with the other two strike ships.

Dawn comes slowly in the middle of the Pacific, and you can see all of it, in every direction, in a way you never would in New York, not in a lifetime. First just a little light speckling the sky, then more, like the walls at Radio City Music Hall when the show has ended.
Then the purple changes to a very dark blue, and after that a lighter blue, a kind of cobalt with a few pink speckles around the edges. Then, suddenly, as if someone had gotten tired of playing around with slow, indirect lighting, it's morning, and we are circling over Iwo, waiting for our aerial companions. After the other two ships arrived, separately, but within a few minutes of each other, we swung into formation and took off toward the Empire, to the north. Our Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) over our target was nine ten, Japanese Time.
Nine ten, August 6, nineteen forty five. A time and a date I'll never forget. Neither, for that matter, will the rest of the world.
Now there was just one big thing for me to worry about. The weather report. On that would depend where we would drop the bomb, whether we could get in to our primary target or have to head for the secondary or, even, the third possibility, or whether we might even have to turn back, return to Tinian with the bomb still unexploded. It had happened before, to us, when we had a regular bomb load, turning back when we were practically on top of the target.

The minutes after 8 o'clock, when the report was scheduled to arrive, were the longest of the mission and of my entire life. I had hoped the report might come in early, but, naturally, it didn't. Eight oh two, eight oh four, and my wrist watch continued ticking. Funny thing, it was warm enough in the plane, and I was nervous, more nervous than at either of the briefings, but this time instead of perspiring, I had chills; I shivered, and I hunched my shoulders up. Waited. Eight ten, eight twelve, eight fifteen. Still no message. Was it possible that I'd missed it? Could the radio be dead? Had the other two ships already received the crucial message?
If I didn't get it, was it possible to break our interplane silence and check? I knew the answer to that one, an emphatic No.

Eight Nineteen, eight nineteen twenty, eight nineteen forty. Then. My ears perked up, something was coming in. I tensed forward in my seat. It was the call signal all right; the primary weather ship was reporting to the ground station. I grabbed a pencil, and my hand was shaking so much that I could hardly hold it. I dropped the pencil, and it rolled to the floor and out of reach. I picked up another, and this time my hand was steady enough to translate the code into: "Target clear. Visibility unlimited." Then again, "Target clear. Visibility unlimited." that meant okay to bomb. It meant Hiroshima was doomed; it meant the immediate death of tens of thousands of people, exactly how many no one ever knew, or said. And it meant the slow, agonizing deaths of hundreds of others, those with only a scratch, a minor burn, an abrasion that might go unnoticed for days.

I leaned back and sighed my relief. The reports from the second and third weather ships followed almost immediately; they were the same. It was time, now, to go ahead. I passed the message along to Major Sweeney, who was at the controls, then relaxed for a moment before putting on my flak suit and the rest of my gear. When I was dressed for the "bombs away" flash, I turned on the interphone.
"It's okay, boys," I said, "Clear sailing. Hiroshima it is.
"How much longer?" "Pappy" Dehart wanted to know. "I've aged at least another thirty years already."
"It won't be long now," I said. "I can almost taste that whiskey well be getting back at the base." My voice sounded confident, almost cocky. I didn't feel that way. I felt that the end of the world was approaching, and fast, the end, at least, of my own personal world.
In front of us and slightly to the left was the colonel’s ship, its silver fuselage sparkling in the bright morning sunlight. What a perfect target, I thought; you wouldn't even have to go to a gunnery school to hit that.
At that moment it looked as big as a freight car, and easily as vulnerable.
It was nearly nine now, and I began getting that familiar feeling, the one you almost always have on a mission, just before you reach the target, the feeling that your stomach has fallen out of the plane some place, and then a chill begins down in your feet and travels right up to your shoulder blades, and you shiver, and the chill goes back down to your feet. Back and forth. Several times. After that, you begin sweating, and at the same time your teeth chatter a little.
"God," I said, loud enough for anybody to hear if anybody was listening. And again, "Oh, God."
We were over the Japanese coast now, flying so low that in my imagination, at least, I could see the houses, the rivers, the railroad lines, even the grass on the lawns and in the fields. Technically, that's impossible; actually, from our altitude, all I could see was a grey shadow that might or might not have been a coastline and breaks in the shadows that might, maybe, have been houses. But I saw all the rest, clearly and simply.
The hand, is as everyone knows, quicker than the eye, and, it goes without saying the imagination is much stronger than the eye. Always.

Nine o'clock. People were going to work now.
They were opening up their offices; the factories were already going full blast. School had begun, housewives were dusting, and people were using telephones and telegraphs and writing letters and mak