- 6/22/2025
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00:01Previously, on the last days of World War II, in Europe,
00:05tensions eased as Soviet troops finally withdrew from the American and British sectors of Berlin.
00:13In the Pacific, a massive wave of carrier-borne fighter-bombers leveled Japanese airfields.
00:20And a mysterious German U-boat, believed to be carrying Nazi war criminals,
00:25was found abandoned off the coast of Argentina.
00:30This week, under a veil of secrecy, the United States tests the world's first atomic device in the remote desert of New Mexico.
00:43On the outskirts of Berlin, the Allied leaders convene.
00:47Truman and Stalin meet face-to-face for the first time.
00:51And in the Pacific, an Allied naval armada begins an all-out bombardment of the Japanese home islands.
01:00July 15th. Belgium.
01:10The cruiser USS Augusta docks in Antwerp.
01:13The cruiser USS Augusta docks in Antwerp.
01:27Aboard is the President of the United States, Harry Truman.
01:32Truman makes a brief stop in Brussels to meet with General Eisenhower.
01:36In 24 hours, he will arrive at Potsdam in Germany.
01:46Here, at this 18th-century estate in Potsdam's suburbs, about 17 miles from Berlin,
01:53Truman will convene with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.
01:56The Potsdam Conference was a continuation of the negotiations among the great powers, the great Allied powers,
02:05U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, that had begun at Yalta.
02:09Churchill and Stalin have met several times before.
02:12But Truman, who has been in office for just three months, will come face-to-face with the Soviet leader for the first time.
02:21The three men will discuss the most pressing issues currently facing the world.
02:26The re-stabilisation of post-war Europe and the war against Japan.
02:30July 16th, Potsdam.
02:36Formal talks between the Allies are set to begin.
02:40But Stalin has been delayed, the Soviets claim, by official business.
02:45Truman spends the day touring the ruins of Berlin.
02:49As he inspects the city, he is stunned by the level of destruction.
02:52I think they were all shocked by the amount of devastation.
02:59The city really, particularly the central parts of the city, were in ruins.
03:05Many people had fled, people were living in cellars, people were trying to simply survive as best they could.
03:13His motorcade passes women and children scavenging for food.
03:17Countless buildings and homes have been levelled.
03:22But as Truman witnesses the damage caused by conventional weapons,
03:26he quietly awaits word on the first test of a top-secret bomb,
03:30capable of destruction on an altogether different scale.
03:40July 16th, Alamogordo, New Mexico.
03:434am.
03:47After three years of research and development,
03:50scientists involved in the highly classified programme to build an atomic weapon,
03:55the Manhattan Project, are about an hour away from seeing their creation unleashed.
04:00They are to detonate an atomic device.
04:03The test is codenamed Trinity.
04:05A pair of B-29s circling above the New Mexico desert, 230 miles south of Los Alamos,
04:18report that the 30-mile-per-hour winds and heavy rains in the area have abated.
04:24The test is on.
04:25The original reaction was that we finally arrived. Here it is. Let's go.
04:32The news is a relief to the military director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves.
04:37The head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, was a big, tough-talking, no-nonsense army engineer.
04:50His assistant called him, quote, the worst son of a bitch I ever knew in my life.
04:54But that's the kind of man he was and he made the work happen.
04:59Groves was born in 1896 in Albany, New York.
05:03His father was a Presbyterian minister who later became an army chaplain.
05:08After studying at the University of Washington and MIT, Groves went on to West Point,
05:14where he graduated fourth in his class in 1918.
05:18In 1940, Groves was given the task of overseeing the construction of the Pentagon.
05:22Two years later, he was appointed head of what he himself would codename the Manhattan Project,
05:29America's top-secret atomic program of which Groves became the driving force.
05:39Groves was a very shadowy figure as far as we were concerned.
05:43And that was part of his intention.
05:45When he addressed various groups, you know, recruits of various kinds,
05:49they usually just introduced him as the general in charge of this thing,
05:54and they didn't even tell his name,
05:56because he didn't want to have his name floating around any wider than necessary.
06:00At first, his aggressive management style upset many of the people under his supervision.
06:06Groves, seemingly unconcerned about his popularity,
06:09asked those under his charge to do whatever it took to get the job done.
06:13When you got to Los Alamos, you tended to fall into a place that tested the limits of your ability to perform.
06:25It was less what you knew in terms of schooling or background, but what could you do?
06:31During the war, you did whatever anybody asked you to do, whatever your background.
06:36Groves' commitment and energy would serve him well.
06:41He soon gained the respect of many of the bright minds recruited for the project.
06:45In 1942, Groves appointed physicist Robert Oppenheimer, a scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
06:55The two formed an unlikely but effective partnership.
06:58After the war, Groves was chief of the Army Special Weapons Project, retiring in 1948.
07:06He entered the corporate world as a vice president of Remington Rand.
07:11He died from heart disease in 1970.
07:20July the 16th, New Mexico.
07:22Today, the world's first plutonium-fueled atomic device, codenamed Gadget, will be detonated.
07:32Gadget has been hoisted to the top of a 100-foot steel tower.
07:36A 12-foot stack of mattresses has been laid at the base of the tower in case it fell prematurely.
07:44Early in the morning, after a rainstorm that scared everybody because there was thunder and lightning,
07:49the bomb was up on a tower. It was like a scene out of a Shakespeare play.
07:54They didn't know if lightning might hit the bomb and make the thing go off,
07:57so everyone was worried. There were guards at the foot of the tower
08:00who knew whether the Germans or the Japanese might come running in and do something.
08:08With the tempest now passed, many of Gadget's creators assemble in concrete barracks just 10 miles away.
08:14Other observers are positioned up to 20 miles away from the testing site.
08:20All wait with bated breath.
08:27No one knows for sure just how powerful the explosion will be,
08:32or if Gadget will even work.
08:34We were sitting there that very cold morning looking toward where the tower was.
08:40We knew where it was. We couldn't see it from 20 miles.
08:44But we knew where the tower was, and we had some sense of what the concerns were.
08:53Eager scientists place bets on the magnitude of the impending blast.
08:58I bet 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent on the test shot at Trinity.
09:04That was a fairly high bet. I'm a wild gambler. I bet $10.
09:10I mean...
09:12But Groves and Oppenheimer are increasingly concerned about the potential effects of nuclear fallout.
09:18Oppenheimer didn't want fallout to happen on some of the villages near the site.
09:25So he wanted the wind to be either in the right direction or no wind.
09:29Groves contacts the governor of New Mexico.
09:33He warns him that martial law may have to be declared,
09:37although he is not at liberty to explain why.
09:395 a.m. Spectators in the observation bunkers prepare for the detonation.
09:48Everyone was in trenches or lying flat on the ground.
09:52They'd been told to face away.
09:54They'd been given square pieces of welder's goggle glass to hold before their eyes
09:59if they were far enough away to actually look toward the explosion.
10:03I certainly didn't cover my eyes, and I certainly didn't look away.
10:05I looked directly at the place where I thought the bomb was going to go.
10:10And saw it go.
10:17July the 16th, 5 a.m. New Mexico.
10:21Just 30 minutes remain until Gadget, the world's first plutonium bomb, will be detonated.
10:28Gadget has been hoisted 100 feet above the desert floor.
10:32The moment General Leslie Groves, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer,
10:36and hundreds more of those working on the Manhattan Project have been waiting for,
10:40has finally arrived.
10:445.29 a.m. The countdown begins.
10:478, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, now.
11:025.30 a.m. The sky fills with a brilliant light.
11:07There was this unbelievable light all over the desert.
11:13Brighter, someone said later, than a thousand suns,
11:17especially because it had been night.
11:19It was as if there were two dawns that morning.
11:24It was awesome enough because, you know, you had to think about the fact that you were 20 miles away,
11:29and that all of that at 20 miles, my God, what was it like, close in.
11:36A vast fireball climbs into the air.
11:40It is visible for 125 miles.
11:43And then it got bigger and darker.
11:47It cooled as it cooled.
11:49The color of the exploding material changed from the bright white to yellow to red.
11:55And it swirled, and it tore, and this fireball, and it was literally a ball of plasma, of hot gas.
12:07As the spectators watch the events unfold in stunned silence, the fireball disperses,
12:13and a mushroom-shaped cloud of black smoke soars 40,000 feet into the air.
12:18A thunderous blast follows, shaking the earth with a force previously unknown to man.
12:26The steel tower that once held Gadget is vaporized.
12:33Only a smoldering crater, 1,000 feet wide and 9 feet deep, remains.
12:40The heat generated by the explosion is more intense than the temperature inside the sun.
12:47The desert sand melts and fuses into green glass that would be dubbed trinitite.
12:55It was as if someone had opened an oven door from 20 miles away.
12:59That's how much heat there was in this fireball that reached them finally.
13:05Gadget's blast is felt throughout southern New Mexico and parts of Texas and Arizona.
13:11The world's first atomic device, the equivalent of 18,600 tons of TNT, is successfully detonated.
13:19Everybody was amazed and awed at the power behind this.
13:24It was tremendous.
13:26Absolutely tremendous.
13:28The people in Los Alamos who were down there for the test were elated.
13:34They had been working literally night and day for two years.
13:40They weren't at all sure that this new invention of theirs was going to work.
13:44They were elated to see that it worked.
13:46It was, in a certain sense, a very large physics experiment.
13:52But as the reality of what's happened sinks in,
13:55some begin to consider the consequences of their creation.
14:02It wasn't like a National Football League game
14:06when people slap each other on the back and jump in each other's arms.
14:09Nothing like that.
14:11But, you know, we turned to each other and said,
14:12well, it was a good shot.
14:13It was a good shot.
14:15And some of us, certainly me,
14:19began to think afterwards, okay, so we've done this.
14:24Now what?
14:26Most of us thought that the bomb should not be used against a civilian target
14:31without giving the Japanese a chance to surrender by seeing it tested.
14:36They were all asked to write their impressions within 24 hours of the test.
14:42And one in particular, a very thoughtful Nobel laureate physicist named Isidore Robbie,
14:47wrote, a new thing had been born, a new relationship between man and nature.
14:53And he said, I thought about our little wooden houses back home in Cambridge, Mass.
14:57And I was afraid.
14:59Today's successful test in the New Mexico desert marks the dawn of the atomic age.
15:07At the turn of the 20th century, Albert Einstein predicted that mass could be converted into energy.
15:14John D. Cockcroft and Ernest Walton confirmed this theory experimentally in 1932.
15:23Two years later in London, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born refugee from Nazi Germany,
15:30discovered that splitting atoms, or fission, would set off a chain reaction,
15:35resulting in the release of massive amounts of energy.
15:37In December 1942, Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who had fled Mussolini's fascist regime,
15:46conducted an experiment on a squash court beneath the University of Chicago's football stadium,
15:52that resulted in the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.
15:56Fermi was clear about what his discovery could lead to.
16:00In January 1940, Enrico Fermi at Columbia University took me to the window, one of the top floors,
16:11and said, if this bomb really succeeds, it will destroy such and such a section of New York City, at least.
16:19He pointed out with his fingers the outline, and I was greatly impressed and scared at the same time.
16:25Alarmed by the destructive potential of atomic energy,
16:29Albert Einstein sent a personal letter of warning to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939.
16:35American physicists convinced the government that German scientists were already working on the development of atomic weapons.
16:43But it was not until 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor,
16:53that the U.S. started its own atomic bomb program in New York City, the Manhattan Project.
16:59Over the next four years, the U.S. government would funnel roughly $2 billion into the Manhattan Project,
17:05the equivalent of £11 billion today.
17:14Research and development was split between three main sites.
17:18Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium-235 was produced.
17:23Hanford, Washington, where plutonium was generated by nuclear reactors.
17:28And Los Alamos, New Mexico, which focused on bomb development.
17:36Two types of atomic weapons were developed simultaneously.
17:40One was the U-235 gun type, dubbed Little Boy.
17:44The other was the plutonium bomb known as Fat Man, an implosion bomb.
17:50Nobody had ever made anything like that in the world before.
17:56Nobody would knew whether or not it would work.
17:59So we had to test it.
18:01Following the successful test of gadget, the plutonium atomic device,
18:06in New Mexico on July the 16th, 1945,
18:09scientists went back to work immediately,
18:12building the weapons that would soon shape the course of history.
18:15July 16th, New Mexico, the world's first atomic device,
18:25the equivalent of nearly 19,000 tons of TNT, has been successfully detonated.
18:31After witnessing the unprecedented blast,
18:34General Groves is certain he has produced a war-ending weapon.
18:38He turns to his deputy and makes a prophetic statement.
18:41The war is over, one or two of those things, and Japan will be finished.
18:47After three years of the highest tension,
18:51with difficult decisions dependent to great extent on Kerry,
18:56our minds were set at rest on July 16th,
19:00when the first atomic bomb exploded.
19:03It had to be witnessed to be realized.
19:05And it is the universal hope of all present,
19:09that no American citizen will ever witness it on United States soil again.
19:15Oppenheimer, however, is mortified by what he's just seen.
19:20He realizes the profound implications of this new weapon.
19:23We knew the world would not be the same.
19:29Few people laughed.
19:32Few people cried.
19:35Most people were silent.
19:37I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
19:41Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
19:49I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
19:55Born in 1904 to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants,
20:00young J. Robert Oppenheimer would become known as the father of the atomic bomb.
20:04He was extremely self-confident, with a great deal of reason to be self-confident.
20:10His stupid hat was always cockeyed for coming down,
20:15and half the time he was walking like he was in deep thought.
20:18If you had the responsibility that guy had on your shoulders,
20:21you'd walk in that deep thought also.
20:23Oppenheimer pursued his passion for physics at Harvard University.
20:27He went on to receive a doctorate from Germany's distinguished University of Göttingen in 1927.
20:32Oppenheimer then returned to the United States,
20:36and acquired a position teaching physics at the University of California.
20:43But it was the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 that captivated Oppenheimer,
20:51and led him down the path that would eventually cement his place in history.
20:56Early in his career, Oppenheimer had been sympathetic towards communism,
21:00and his politics drew the attention of the FBI.
21:05In late 1942, despite the misgivings of US intelligence agencies,
21:11as well as a few of his fellow scientists,
21:13General Leslie Groves asked Oppenheimer to become the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.
21:18He was chosen to direct the laboratory to everyone's confusion and consternation.
21:27He didn't seem like an administrative type at all.
21:31But he was also someone who, somewhat insecure in himself, was a great actor.
21:36He had a different face for different people.
21:40And in a way, this job as lab director was his finest role.
21:45I've known a lot of physicists in my long and checkered career.
21:50And I'm not sure I've ever met one that could have pulled off what Oppi did during the war.
21:59He had people doing things that didn't compete with each other, but complemented each other.
22:04Working round the clock with some of the brightest scientific minds,
22:09Oppenheimer eventually produced the weapon that turned the tides of the war in the Pacific,
22:14and shifted the balance of power around the world.
22:18After the war, he was appointed director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton.
22:23From 1947 until 1952, he headed up the Atomic Energy Commission.
22:28But with the Cold War heating up, Oppenheimer's past came back to haunt him.
22:34A secret report emerged accusing him of obstructing hydrogen bomb research,
22:40and alleging a connection to communism in the 1930s.
22:43There was no hard evidence to substantiate the claim, but the damage was done.
22:48In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism and America's paranoia of communist infiltration,
22:54he was designated a security risk, and stripped of all security clearances.
23:01In 1963, however, his reputation was restored,
23:05when US President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Atomic Energy Commission's highest honour,
23:10the $50,000 Enrico Fermi Award,
23:13for his lasting contribution to theoretical physics,
23:16and for his outstanding work on the peaceful use of atomic energy.
23:20Oppenheimer remained at Princeton until his premature death from throat cancer at the age of 63 in 1967.
23:30Following the successful Trinity Test, differing views among scientists and soldiers emerge regarding the use of atomic weapons.
23:41The primacy of scientific discovery, which once overshadowed everything else, now gives way to moral concerns.
23:53There were a lot of people in the military who weren't keen about the dropping of the atomic bomb,
23:58including Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, of course, was in Europe, but...
24:00who, you know, really felt Japan was defeated, and that this was an unnecessary use of the weapon.
24:09But there was no guarantee.
24:12Ultimately, the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Japan will be made by one man,
24:18the President of the United States.
24:21July 16th, Potsdam, Germany.
24:23President Truman receives a coded message from General Groves.
24:28The message reads,
24:30Operated on this morning.
24:32Diagnosis not yet complete, but results seem satisfactory, and already exceed expectations.
24:40Truman now knows the Trinity Test was a success.
24:44He displays little outward emotion.
24:46When he learned that the atomic bomb had successfully been detonated,
24:52it probably began to occur to him that the war could be ended quickly.
24:56It had been estimated that Allied casualties from an invasion of Japan would be in the hundreds of thousands.
25:03And despite the devastating effects of General Curtis LeMay's incendiary bombing,
25:09Truman knows the war in the Pacific could drag on indefinitely,
25:12a prospect that has weighed heavily on his mind for months.
25:18Upon receiving the news, Truman would remark that the U.S. has an ace in the hole and an ace showing,
25:25describing her secret atomic bomb and her public military might.
25:33In just three days, Truman would approve the production of 20 more plutonium-type bombs.
25:39But first, he would come face to face with Joseph Stalin.
25:44I don't think he yet knew enough about the atomic bomb,
25:48or knew enough to think about it as the fundamentally different kind of weapon that in fact it was,
25:56the kind of world-changing weapon.
25:59He wasn't yet convinced that the atomic bomb would make the Soviet Union unnecessary to him.
26:04July 17th, Potsdam. Stalin finally arrives at the conference one day late.
26:11Some believe that Stalin is late not because of official business, as the Soviets claimed,
26:17but that he may in fact have suffered a minor heart attack.
26:21Others think he is simply trying to upstage other leaders.
26:23Over the next several days, Allied leaders will hammer out details for the division of Germany,
26:31and the fate of refugees from Czechoslovakia, Austria and Italy.
26:36They will also demand the unconditional surrender of Japan.
26:39July 18th, Allied leaders hold their second formal session.
26:47Truman has informed Churchill of the successful Trinity test.
26:56Churchill later wrote,
26:58From that moment, our outlook on the future was transformed.
27:03In the eyes of both world leaders,
27:05the atomic bomb not only changes the balance of power between the US and Japan,
27:10but also the balance of power between Stalin and the West.
27:14Churchill and Truman hope to pre-empt Soviet imperialism in the Far East
27:18by bringing a swift end to the war in the Pacific.
27:21Unbeknownst to both men, however, Stalin knows all about Truman's secret weapon.
27:26Information about the Manhattan Project had been leaked to the Soviets by German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs,
27:33one of the scientists working at the Los Alamos laboratory.
27:39Truman will not inform Stalin about the Trinity test for another week.
27:44The reaction of the Soviet leader will leave Truman in stunned disbelief.
27:48July 20th, Potsdam, Germany.
27:55The Allies continue their conference and agree that all Nazi war criminals in custody
28:01will be put on trial in the city of Nuremberg,
28:04the site of many of Hitler's greatest and most spectacular rallies.
28:07Occupation forces in Germany continue to hunt Nazi officials and SS men in anticipation of the trials.
28:20The same day, Truman attends a flag-raising ceremony in Berlin.
28:23The stars and stripes that flew above the Capitol building in Washington on December 7th, 1941,
28:30the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, is hoisted above US headquarters in Berlin.
28:35In his speech, Truman tells Allied occupation forces that the US has no imperial ambitions in Europe or in the Pacific.
28:45Let's not forget that we are fighting for peace and for the welfare of mankind.
28:54We are not fighting for conquest.
28:57There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war.
29:06We want peace and prosperity for the world as a whole.
29:10Far removed from the power struggles unfolding in Berlin,
29:16the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis is about to set sail on a critical mission.
29:25July the 15th, San Francisco.
29:28Unbeknownst to its captain and crew, the USS Indianapolis is being loaded with the components of an atomic bomb.
29:34All we were told was that we were carrying a secret weapon.
29:40The captain didn't even know what it was.
29:43The best rumour that I heard on the way across the ocean was that we were carrying 20,000 rolls of scented toilet paper for MacArthur.
29:54After a brief stop at Pearl Harbor, the ship is to proceed to the island of Tinian to make the top secret delivery.
30:02We were told that every hour that we could save going across the Pacific to the island of Tinian, we could possibly shorten the war by that much.
30:12July 16th, 8am. With nearly 1200 sailors and marines on board, the Indianapolis sets sail on the first leg of her voyage.
30:22The same day, the Japanese submarine I-58 stealthily pulls away from her moorings in Kyure, Japan.
30:34In less than two weeks, the two ships will cross paths in the waters of the Pacific, resulting in the US Navy's worst disaster at sea.
30:42Back in the US, war-weary Americans looking for inspiration find an unsuspecting hero.
31:02July 16th, Audie Murphy, a poor Texas farm boy and highly decorated veteran of the war in Europe, appears on the cover of Life magazine.
31:10He is instantly transformed into a national icon.
31:21During World War II, an America hungry for heroes turned to Audie Murphy.
31:27His courage in combat earned him the respect and admiration of his fellow soldiers and countrymen.
31:34Deserted by his father at the age of 10, Murphy was orphaned six years later, when his mother died.
31:40He joined the army at 18 to help support his impoverished siblings.
31:46Murphy was posted to the 3rd Infantry Division, which was preparing to invade Sicily and fight its way to Rome.
31:57In the ensuing campaign, Murphy proved himself in combat and earned a Bronze Star.
32:02On January 26th, 1945, during the Battle of the Colmar Pocket in eastern France, Murphy's company was attacked by six German tanks and 250 infantry.
32:15Murphy ordered his men to fall back to the nearby woods.
32:18Murphy ordered his men to fall back to the nearby woods.
32:22He, however, stayed forward.
32:24Directing artillery fire and manning a machine gun, Murphy was wounded in the leg, but killed 50 enemy soldiers.
32:30In June, just shy of his 21st birthday, he was awarded the nation's highest award for gallantry in action, the Congressional Medal of Honor.
32:42Murphy would receive 33 medals, including three Purple Hearts.
32:46He returned to his hometown of Farmersville, Texas, a hero.
32:53But this July 1945 Life magazine cover would turn him into a national icon.
32:59At the urging of James Cagney, Murphy turned his newfound fame into an acting career.
33:04He eventually starred in more than 40 films, including the adaptation of his autobiography, To Hell and Back.
33:14He would receive the best reviews of his career for his role in The Red Badge of Courage.
33:19As the Allies welcome home heroes returning from the European War, halfway around the world, an Allied armada prepares to assault the Japanese home islands.
33:38July 15th. The Pacific Ocean.
33:42A thousand US fighters take off from the carrier decks of Task Force 38.
33:46The carriers hone in on Hokkaido, Japan's northern island.
33:53Aboard the battleship Missouri, overall command of the Allied naval force is held by Admiral William Bull Halsey.
34:04They didn't call him Bull for nothing.
34:07Commander of the largest and most powerful naval group ever to be assembled in the Pacific.
34:11The press nicknamed Admiral Halsey Bull because of his tough, aggressive attitude.
34:17The son of a naval captain, Halsey was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1882.
34:22Trained at Annapolis, he won the Navy Cross commanding Atlantic destroyer escorts during the First World War.
34:28In 1935, at the age of 52, Halsey qualified as a Navy pilot.
34:35Three years later, he was appointed commander of Carrier Group 2 and later promoted Vice Admiral.
34:41Thirsty for revenge after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Halsey led his carrier task force in the Doolittle Raid on Japan in 1942.
34:55Halsey's mantra was kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.
34:59At the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, he fell for a Japanese ruse and sent part of the US 3rd Fleet chasing a decoy.
35:13Admiral Kincaid's 7th Fleet was left to do most of the fighting and save Halsey's career.
35:19Although Halsey did destroy four Japanese carriers.
35:22For Halsey, anything less than Japan's total defeat was unacceptable.
35:32July 16th, Halsey's task force 38 meets task force 37, the British Pacific Fleet.
35:40A contingency plan for the impending invasion of Japan is formed.
35:44British warships will join the US in a combined air and naval assault.
35:48July 18th, several hundred carrier-borne aircraft take off from Halsey's 3rd Fleet.
35:57Once again, they score several important hits.
36:01The most rewarding, the Japanese battleship the Nagato, the largest ship remaining in the Japanese fleet.
36:08As the bombardment of Japan from the waters of the Pacific intensifies,
36:12the US Army Air Force announces that more than 100 square miles of Japan's cities have been destroyed by bombing raids.
36:21July 19th, Japan.
36:33Raids of approximately 100 B-29s hit the four cities of Choshi, Okazaki, Fukui and Hitachi, unloading nearly a thousand tons of incendiaries over each one.
36:45For Japanese civilians on the ground, there is no respite from the relentless wave of destruction.
36:52A US 5th Air Force intelligence officer has declared the entire population of Japan is a proper military target.
36:59There are no civilians in Japan.
37:01Our firebombing was not discriminatory.
37:04There was no distinction between industry and civilian residents when we dropped tens of thousands of pounds of firebombs on cities and burned out whole cities as we had been doing.
37:13It is claimed the raids will spare American lives, shorten the agony which is war and bring about an enduring peace.
37:23The US issues an ultimatum to Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki.
37:29Surrender unconditionally or face total destruction and a dictated peace.
37:33Japan does not heed this threat.
37:38In the midst of the death and devastation, the Japanese Supreme War Council is deadlocked and can still not agree on surrender.
37:45A mission aimed at shattering the Japanese will to fight on is now in preparation.
37:57July 20th, Tinian Island.
38:01The 509th, relocated from their base in Utah, continue their top secret training over mainland Japan.
38:11Flying specially modified B-29s, the crews simulate high-level raids carrying oblong shells the same shape and weight as the Fat Man atomic bomb.
38:20For lack of a better term, they are called pumpkins.
38:24Today, ten of the specially modified planes of the 509th fly pumpkin missions over the Japanese cities of Koriyama, Fukushima, Nagaoka and Toyama.
38:38Before long, these training exercises would draw suspicion and criticism from other B-29 units at Tinian, who have been flying dangerous and non-stop missions over Japan.
38:51There was a lot of not-so-good-natured ribbing of the 509th, which had its own special place on the island and its own special privileges on the island.
38:59This, after all, was the base for another 2,000, some number like that, crews that were living under considerably harder conditions than the 509th.
39:09The rest of the B-29s there, every night or every other night, they were on their way to the Empire dropping incendiary bombs and all that.
39:19And they'd come back and here is the fancy gold-plated airplanes of the 509th still sitting there.
39:24At its peak, the 509th had a total strength of 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men, all working under a veil of secrecy.
39:37Despite the disparagement, the pilots continue their cryptic drills over Japan.
39:43They have still not been told what their true purpose is or when they will be called into action.
39:47Tibbetts made it crystal clear, you people are on a special mission. Don't necessarily ask me what it is. It's very important and he's even went so far, he says,
40:01I think what we're going to do is end the war. And from a security point of view, he was absolutely forbidden to tell them what their ultimate experience was going to be.
40:13Next on the last days of World War II, in Europe, President Truman makes the call. The atomic bomb will be used against Japan.
40:26The final release message that we got from Washington said, we released it to you to use, but not before the 2nd of August.
40:35In the US, a plane crashes into the Empire State Building, causing panic on the streets of New York City.
40:43And in the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis will continue its long and dangerous voyage across the Pacific, rushing at full speed towards her tragic fate.
40:53There were 1197 men aboard the ship. We ended up with only 317 survivors five days later.
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