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Journey of a Dead Man: CDR Abbott, Journal Entry - March 11th 1945

Tokyo Japan March 11th 1945. The Firebombing over two days from 279 bombers killed 100,000 people and destroyed 25% of the city.

The introduction to this series can be found here.

Previous entries:
March 9th, 1945.

Log Entry, Bart Abbott's Personal Journal, March 11th 1945

Hot today. Not Georgia swamp, moldy mildew hot, oh thank the lord, but good old, dry desert “welcome home Bart” hot. Had coffee at sunset out on the porch on Dr. Daghlian’s house. Caught up with a few niceties and particulars that happened during my absence and got welcomed back to camp by Dr. Daghlian’s wife, who took up the opportunity to make a small coffee cake to share. I always feel a bit like the out of town relative when I’m around some of the professors, but a few of them are the kind of folks you could meet anywhere. Daghlian and his wife are that kind of folk. If you met him and her, you would think he made watches for a living and she was a housewife in suburban Chicago playing canasta with the girls on Tuesday afternoons and doing the shopping every Thursday like clock work. It was an informal bunch of “us folks” out on the patio tonight, no ties, all relaxed and neighborly, only half the men had nobel prizes and a fair number of the wives had Doctorates in advanced mathematics. I sat there on the porch in the company of these men like a Neanderthal with his spear,capable only of the occasional "head nod" and polite grunt in response to some question. We sat outside and enjoyed the sunset while Mrs. Dahlgren tuned in the radio. Out here in the desert in the evening you’d be surprised what we can pick up, New York, Los Angeles all the way out here. At 6:00, we heard an announcement from the War Department that Tokyo had been heavily bombed during the last few days, largely destroying the Capital city of the Empire of Japan. It seems this sort of thing is happening fairly regularly; last month it was Dresden’s turn and now its Tokyo’s turn. General LeMay and the B-29’s are now able to act with impunity against even the best defended the Japanese cities. At this rate, the Germans and Japanese are losing a city the size of Chicago every 15 days. Yet, the war goes on and the dying continues.

Had a funny thing happen out there on the patio, as the sun went down, and Mrs. Daghlian turned down the radio, you could just hear a bit of what sounded like some sort of “drumming” out on the hills. Some of the professors were saying that it was “injun joe” again, somehow giving the sound a persona and story all of its own; their european-born imaginations run wild now that they are here at work in the “wild west”. I suspect it gives them something exotic to tell their wives when they go back to their cosmopolitan New York lives since so much of what they actually do is unspeakable and top secret. I smiled when I heard the various theories to the nature of “injun joe”, they were quite elaborate, each one outdoing the other with some layer of assumed knowledge of the local indian tribes, to which they really didn’t know a damn thing but acted like experts to each other. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the “injun joe” they had created out of whole cloth was really just our Dick Feynman with his bongo drums, working off a little steam in his own unique Feynman way of doing things.

I got word today that I will be going out to Wendover next week to meet with Deak and Col. Tibbets. Col.Tibbets needs to review readiness for the 509th. I will try to take some time and visit the folks back home in Elko while I’m out there. It would be wrong to be that close to home and not make a little effort to stop by. Wendover is a hell of a place for the uninitiated and its quite a kick when some of the Air Corp folks find themselves dealing with life in the high desert for the first time. As a native of those parts myself, there’s few guilty pleasures I enjoy more than watching some east coast ivy league 90 day wonder shavetail, who thinks he knows everything about anything and never shuts up telling you so, and 30 minutes after he touches down at Wendover he’s telling you everything he knows about it like you never saw it before, which is always wrong and always in a superior-than-thou voice and sure enough, you take you eyes off him for 30 seconds and he’s passed out flat on his back from the heat in mid sentence. Welcome to High Desert, picklehead! Now pick up your bag and get over to the flight surgeon so he can treat you for heat stroke, you silly bastard.

In preparation for this meeting next week, I went over some details on the gadget arming process with Dr. Daghlian over at his lab. When I went over today, I found him outside, shaking like a leaf with no color at all in his face. I helped him light a cigarette and he just smiled like his just had the literal hell scared out of him by something like it. I don’t know what he does in the lab, but whatever it is, it made Dr. Daghlian looked like a schoolboy sitting in the principals office getting read the riot act, but the principal doing the reading was in fact, Mephistopholes himself. He gave me a weak smile and a pat on the back when I came over this evening, it was as if I had shared some deep personal event with the doc, and I had no idea what it was that happened in the lab. He knew, and frankly I think it scared the hell out of him.

Tensions are high around camp, people slamming down books and just snapping at the wrong time and saying the wrong thing. There’s a real rush on to get the test going to see if the damn thing actually works. Funny thing is, even the folks at the top of the pyramid have no idea if it will work or even what it will do. In light of what we are already doing in places like Tokyo and Dresden you have to wonder what the big deal is about this thing. It’s a bomb (I think?), but so what? Don’t we have a hell of a lot of those already and don’t they work pretty damn good? I think the folks in Tokyo and Dresden could give us an assessment on that if we really wanted one.

Posted @ March 11, 2008 10:34 PM | Blog-novel

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