Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) (65 page)

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Authors: Douglas Niles,Michael Dobson

BOOK: Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)
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“We have reports of Russian tanks within a mile of Tempelhof airport,” reported the XO from the Forty-second Division. “They broke through in a couple of places, and we had to fall back—or we would have been surrounded.”
“What about your boys, Henry?” Patton turned his glare to the CO of the Nineteenth Armored Division. “How are things in Potsdam?”
“Sorry to say, but we were pushed to the outskirts of Potsdam by yesterday night, General. They’ve got the urban part of the city—but there’s a good bit of forest there; it was like a big park preserve. So Frank Ballard has his men set up with the woods for cover. As of twelve hours ago, and still holding, he’s fought the Reds to a halt.”
“Damn, they’re doing a helluva job. But shoot straight, Hank. How long can they hang on before they break?”
“Best guess is just that, General: a guess. These men have been through hell. They’ve had more shells dropped on them in the last few days than any division I’ve ever heard of. I can’t promise anything beyond another twenty-four hours.”
“That’s what I thought.” Patton nodded, the point of decision passed.
“Get Ike on the phone. Tell him we need help now! If he can’t give us anything, I’m not sure we can hold out for more than another day, before we lose both our airports. And once that happens, it’s all over.”
“General Groves? This is the Supreme Commander. Yes, General, this is a secure line. Listen, we’re going to need you to go into action on an emergency basis. Today, if possible, tomorrow at the latest. After that, I’m afraid it will be too late.”
“I understand, General Eisenhower. And please know that we’re doing everything we can. I’ve got my top men on this thing, and they’re swarming all over it. But we … well, I know you have no time for excuses.”
“No, General Groves. I understand about problems, about not having enough men, materials, time. But we all have to function anyway. And I tell you this, if we don’t get a big helping hand out of your boys, this thing might be all over. And it won’t be a happy ending.”
“I understand, sir. There are too many connections to be made, too much assembly, for this thing to happen today. I will lay down my life, and the lives of my men, to get it up in the air by tomorrow morning. Now what, exactly, do you want me to do with it?”
“We’ll get back to you with some target options, before dawn. I want to get General Patton’s opinions on that. Can you give me an idea of the … effects we can expect?”
“You understand, sir, it has never been tested?”
“Of course, I know that.”
“Then you understand these are estimates the whiz kids have come up with. But they know what they’re talking about. General, picture an area at least a kilometer across. That is vaporized.”
“Vaporized? You mean—?”
“Dust, General. Nothing left. Beyond that, for another kilometer perhaps, the blast will knock down buildings, toss trucks and tanks around, and burn like the fires of hell. Beyond that, it slowly fizzles out.”
“And this is a
guess?
”
“Yes, sir. A good guess, made by smart people.”
“Very well. I’ll give you a place, and tomorrow morning you can drop the son of a bitch. Okay?”
“I read you loud and clear, General.”
General Hap Arnold had said he wanted to be there when the balloon went up, which was certainly his privilege, so they waited until the olive drab Packard with the five-star flag arrived. The mission briefing wasn’t much. Tibbets and his crew knew their business. They got a weather update and some last-minute information about Soviet artillery dispositions, and all that was subject to update by radio anyway.
Leslie Groves thought he ought to say something, but all that occurred to him was “Good luck, fellows,” and that didn’t sound much like “Damn the torpedoes” or “Fire when you see the whites of their eyes.” From the look of it, Hap Arnold didn’t have any glowing words for the history books, either. He went around and shook everybody’s hand, and actually did say, “Good luck, fellows.”
The nose art, reading ENOLA GAY after Colonel Tibbets’ mother, was being painted on. Tibbets, as group commander, had pulled rank and assigned himself as mission commander and pilot, bumping the bomber’s regular commander and pilot, who was livid at the name change. Everything was fresh and shiny and as new as could be. Near to it was the loading pit, where the bomb would be made ready.
The assembly crew had rolled the package out on the tarmac on a dolly, and they were going about the ticklish business of getting it all put together and wired in. This was the test shot and the money shot all rolled into one. Groves hoped to hell it would work. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing he should be praying about.
They needed a hydraulic lift to take the bomb and its cradle from the dolly and lower it into the pit. As it engaged with the cradle, and lifted it six inches up, it suddenly jammed. The smell of burnt oil filled the air. “Shut the damned thing off! Now!” A crew of technicians swarmed over the lift, to no avail. A new machine had to be brought in, and then the problem arose of how to lower the cradle back onto the dolly. The solution, reached after fifteen minutes of argument, involved drilling into the hydraulic lines and draining fluid out. As the fluid drained, the forks dropped—but thudded down the last two inches. There was a sound of breaking glass, and a scream from one of the fusing technicians.
A brief inspection suggested that no irreparable damage had been done to the fusing mechanism. The new hydraulic lift was inserted, and this time it worked.
As the bomb and cradle left the dolly, the crew rolled it away. Next, the aircraft had to be towed into the exact position, because there was very little clearance. Slowly, the bomb and cradle was lifted into the open bomb bay. Wires and antennae hung all around the bomb.
The actual explosive package, two small hemispheres of plutonium, nickel-plated against corrosion, had developed blisters from trapped bits of plating solution. To avoid exposing the plutonium, the metallurgists had ground down only part of the blisters and smoothed the bumps with gold foil. The charges were made snug with wads of tissue and cellophane tape. All this had to be fit in. Outside, Leslie Groves paced back and forth, muttering to himself. “This isn’t going to work. This isn’t going to work.” He drafted in his mind the letter of resignation he would have to write when the bombing mission had to be aborted.
There was a loud clank! inside the plane. “What the hell?” Groves shouted.
“Sorry!” came a voice from inside. “Dropped a screwdriver!”
Two hours turned into three. Three hours turned into four. The crew wandered back to the briefing room. The bombardier took a nap. Finally, the chief weaponeer, Deke Parsons, came over to Groves. “We’ve got it, but it’s being held together with spit and chewing gum. I don’t know if it’ll survive takeoff, much less a bumpy ride. The only thing I can think of is for us to all go along to nursemaid the damn thing. It’s the best chance we’ve got.”
Groves looked at him, looked at the product of years of work. It all came down to this. Spit and chewing gum. He threw the cigarette he’d been smoking onto the tarmac and ground it out with his heel. “What the hell. Let’s all go. This ain’t the goddamn Enola Gay, it’s the fucking Mickey Mouse Express.”
To the eternal annoyance of Colonel Tibbets, not to mention all the trademark lawyers of the Walt Disney organization, Groves had the nose art repainted on the spot. The Mickey Mouse Express it was, and forever would be.
“I need to give Ike the target decision, now,” said Patton. He was in a small conference room with Rommel and his division commanders. “They say that, if this thing goes off, it’ll be a blast like the world has never known.”
“Are they ready to take off in England?” asked Field Marshal Rommel.
“Not yet. They have some last-minute tinkering to do, and no one can even promise that the damned thing will work. I told them that it
has
to work! But they need to know: Where should they drop it?
“So, pertinent factors: We need to hit a concentration of Soviet forces, wipe out as many of the bastards as we can. A headquarters, a big one, might make a good target. Or artillery, one of those damn big concentrations of guns Zhukov is so fond of. And hopefully we need to secure at least one of our dangerous fronts.”
“Tempelhof is our key site,” suggested a general, CO of the Forty-fourth, the division that was being pushed pack toward that airport. “What about on the Third Shock Army?”
Instead of replying directly, Patton turned to his intelligence chief. “What does your information suggest, Cook?”
Zebediah Cook got up and went to the map. “Third Shock Army is pressing hard, but they’re spread out along this arc, nearly twenty miles of frontage. Even if the bomb destroys everything in a one-mile radius—and that might be wishful thinking—it would only blow a gap in a small part of their line.”
“No good. We need this to be hard-hitting, and decisive. Give me a better alternative.”
Rommel pointed immediately to the isthmus of Potsdam, at the southwest corner of the besieged army. “Here the city streets and the lakes are funneling three tank divisions on parallel roads. They’re going right past this green space—these are all palaces and resort hotels, above the lakeshore, but now their lawns have been turned into the biggest artillery concentration in the history of the world. If we can knock it out, we’ll break the momentum of the Soviet attack toward Gatow airfield, too.”
“Tempting,” Patton allowed.
Sanger pulled down a rollup black-and-white picture, an enlargement of an aerial recon photo, and placed it on the table. “Here’s a look at that part of Potsdam, taken yesterday. Reports overnight are that things haven’t shifted much.”
Rommel lifted a pointer and indicated a spot on the picture. “For a bonus, we’ve located the HQ of the Second Guards Tank Army, and the advance headquarters of Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, in these two hotels. Adjacent to each other, it turns out. If we aim right—say, make a target point on this plaza, right here; it’s white marble, with red-roofed buildings on three sides, and should be easy to spot from the sky—we’ll at least take out the HQs and most of the guns, and we might do serious damage to these columns of armor. Those, incidentally, are the guns that have been turning Nineteenth Armored into hamburger for the last five days.”
“Blow ’em off the face of the earth,” said Henry Wakefield, forcefully. “It can’t be soon enough to suit me.”
“That’s the place. All right. I’ll send word to Ike, pronto,” Patton said decisively, standing up and bringing the meeting to a close. Then he looked at Wakefield. “Better get a warning to your men, Hank. Even pull back a bit, get
’em under as much cover as possible beforehand. We’ll set up a communication channel, patch us in to the plane, so we can give you a minute by minute countdown. All right?”
“General, one more thing,” Zebediah Cook said, raising his eyebrows meaningfully.
“Oh, yeah,” Patton remembered. “There’s another warning, passed down from SHAEF. Hank, be sure your men know that you don’t want to be looking at the son of a bitch when it goes off.”
Twelve B-29s stood ready on the tarmac of the huge airfield, the silver shapes looking like some kind of futuristic space-travel machines against the rows of olive-drab B-24s in the background. The sleek bombers were divided into four groups of three, and as trios they would fly four similar missions—each group traveling to a different target in the vicinity of Berlin. Three of the missions were decoys; one would carry the real gadget.
The charade was carried out even to the deployment of three of the pumpkins, the dummy bombs, so that if any enemy agent was somehow spying on the activity at the airstrip, he or she would not be able to identify the real mission aircraft. Now the dummies and the real gadget had each been loaded into its respective aircraft. The crew and weaponeers and General Leslie Groves all came along, walking out into the sun. The ground crews withdrew so that the mission could begin.
Like the other B-29s, the Mickey Mouse Express carried plenty of fuel for the trip, though much less than would have been required on the long Pacific Theater missions for which the plane was designed. With the bomb cradled in the large forward bomb bay, the crew prepared to climb in. Ladders led to hatches through both the forward landing gear bay and the bomb bay.
When Groves had announced his intention to ride along, Hap Arnold, of course, had tried to put his foot down, grounding the general on the grounds of everything from weight requirements to national security considerations. Groves had rebutted the first charge when the pilot assured them they had plenty of fuel, and even a half-dozen hefty officers would not have jeopardized the mission.
He dealt with the second by insisting that his expertise was crucial to the success of the mission. Arnold, even newer to the atomic warfare business than Groves, had lacked the in-depth knowledge that would have allowed him to dispute the claim. In the end, he had dourly insisted that Groves, if he had to bail out, would take steps to see that the Russians didn’t capture him alive.
The general had willingly, and sincerely, agreed.
Standing below the silver metal belly of the plane, Groves confronted his dilemma. He could pull rank and take one of the seats in the cockpit, where the round dome of the B-29’s nose was all windows. The view promised to be spectacular. But the access to the bomb bay, where the weapon would be prepared and armed while they flew at low altitude, preparatory to climbing to their bombing altitude of about thirty thousand feet, was limited to a hatch from a small “waist” compartment, aft of the bomb bay. The crew could get back and forth through the length of the plane—that compartment was connected to the cockpit by a long tunnel. Groves had been up there; he had seen the tunnel.
And there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that at his current weight of three hundred pounds he would fit through it.
In the end there was only one choice, of course: He would ride in the back, with the gadget he had been shepherding along practically since he’d wrapped up the Pentagon project. He and the two weaponeers, Parsons and Freeman, climbed into the waist compartment and buckled themselves into ridiculously tiny steel chairs. They wore helmets with earphones and mikes, and quickly passed through an intercom check; Groves had to fiddle with the connecting cord before he could get sound in his earphones, but eventually everything functioned.
Then they waited, as the engines started, one by one. They could feel the vibration of the big power plants, the pulse of the propellers starting to spin, and then they could hear wind blasting against the thin aluminum skin of the aircraft. Groves pressed his face to the compartment’s sole window—looking not outside but into the bomb bay, where the bulging device rested in its cradle. To him it would always be the gadget, but others had taken to calling it Fat Man, and the name seemed apt enough.
Then the power of the engines became momentum, slowly but perceptibly pulling them back in their seats as the Mickey Mouse Express started down the runway, rumbling faster and faster, until finally there was a sense of lightness as they took to the air and—not to say that it got quiet—an easing of noise as the landing gear retracted and the outer doors swung shut.
“Okay, fellas. We’re at five thousand feet with the English Channel coming up.” Tibbets’ voice came over the intercom, distant and tinny. “Time to go to work.”
Freeman and Parsons squeezed through the narrow hatch, each going onto one of the catwalks above and to either side of the bomb. Groves watched nervously, biting back bits of pointless advice that kept coming to mind. Both were steady men who knew what they were doing. They checked connections and adjusted the instrumentation, for the time being leaving the bomb still plugged in to the bomber’s power supply. There were batteries that would power the bomb’s sensors and detonators during the drop, but they wouldn’t activate those yet.
“What about that target, now?” Groves asked into his microphone, his mind looking forward as they droned through the sky.
The bombardier came on. “It’s outside of Berlin, just to the southwest. Lots of water around. Should be easy to pick it out. A place called Potsdam.”

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