Free Mr Two Bomb by William Coles

effects of their explosion.
    As for that five-ton bomb Little Boy, with its mass of electronics and Uranium 235; well, that had already been dropped. At that very moment, it was already whistling down towards Hiroshima at over 1,000kph, where after 45 seconds it was set to explode precisely 580 metres above the city.
    I think that Akiba must also have registered the sight of the planes. They had seemed to split off, each sheering away from the others. “Get out of here,” Akiba said, his face tilted up to the mountain-tops. “Get out now. I am sickened by your presence. Go! If it is permitted, I will shoot you with my own hand. Now go!”
    I closed the door behind me, and my last glimpse of that office was of Akiba still staring up at the sky. As of Hiroshima herself, she was like some sacrificial cow that had been gently led to the slaughter, unaware that her final moment had come.
    Outside Akiba’s office, I stare out of the window for a moment before pausing to press my forehead against the metal door. How refreshingly cold the door feels against my forehead and nose after the sweating heat of Akiba’s glasshouse. My cheeks, skull and shoulders are tender from Akiba’s blows. Watched by the serene portrait of our Emperor, I take the five steps across the common-room to the warehouse door; not a moment to lose now, not one single second. No time to tarry, not a moment left to admire the view. Hiroshima’s wheel of fate was finally gliding to a halt, and our entire lives hung on what we happened to be doing during a single split second of time.
    Two steps, one step, I stand at the common-room door. Through the door is life. To stay in the common-room for even two more seconds is death. I smoothly turn the handle. A last look over my shoulder at the green mountains. I pause for a moment, surfing that teetering cusp between life and death. And, not that it makes any difference, not that a single second could ever make any difference to the trajectory of our lives, fate makes its decision. I slip through to the cool of the warehouse. The door clicks firmly behind me.
    I can see very little in the gloom of the warehouse, but I can hear. I can hear Masanobu Furuta, that calm, soothing voice of Hiroshima Radio: “Chugoku District Army announcement: three large enemy planes proceeding ...”
    For many people, those were the last words that they ever heard.

CHAPTER SIX
    The Enola Gay. She was about to be immortalised and her name would for all time be inextricably linked with Little Boy and Hiroshima itself.
    I have always felt it odd that Colonel Paul Tibbets named his plane after his mother. I am told that on the day before our execution, Tibbets changed the name of his hand-picked B29 bomber. So now and forever more, Enola Gay will be remembered as a bringer of death and a shatterer of worlds. Thanks, Son.
    No-one remembers the name of the plane or the pilot that dropped the second bomb, Fat Man. Not one single person, that is, apart from a few old crones like myself who survived Nagasaki. But all the details of the world’s first atomic bomb, from its pilot to its plane, have gone into the history books.
    For many years, I had felt indifferent to Colonel Tibbets. He was, he claimed, just a man who was obeying orders. Given the chance, he would do it all over again. “I have absolutely no feeling of guilt,” he said, 20 years later. “I have learned in all these years of military service to follow orders, so I followed them without question.”
    Like millions of servicemen around the world, from the Nazi storm-troopers to the guards in the Japanese prison camps, Tibbets was merely obeying orders. But any respect I might have had for the Colonel evaporated when I heard what he did in Texas in 1976. Tibbets, by then aged 61 and a retired Brigadier General, took part in an air-show. He was flying a B29 identical to his Enola Gay, and there for the benefit of the 40,000 Texan spectators dropped a mock-up of Little Boy,