Excerpt from The Century by Peter Jennings, Todd Brewster, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By early summer 1945, the Japanese had just 800 functioning aircraft; the Americans, 22,000. American fliers were finishing the last of hundreds of firebombing sorties over Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama, obliterating every military target, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, too. Yet their devotion to Emperor Hirohito forced the people of Japan to fight on. Expecting an invasion force even larger than the one which hit the beaches of Normandy (in fact, fifteen divisions were in the blueprints for Operation Olympic, as the Allied invasion was to have been called, versus the nine that crossed the English Channel), civilians on Japan's main islands were mobilizing to repel the enemy with anything they could find: rocks, sticks, bamboo. Throughout the Pacific, the American forces were dreading the coming weeks, if only because they had seen the tenaciousness of the Japanese and feared that an invasion of the main islands could only create a gruesome battle fought to the last man, another Stalingrad.



The precious few who knew that America was testing a secret weapon in the summer of 1945 never referred to it as a bomb. To the boys at the assembly plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it was Project S-Y; to the Joint Chiefs, S-1; to the head of the Department of War, only "X" (though Secretary Stimson's diary entries also include references to "the thing" and "the dreadful"); to the scientists at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, test site, the ones with the best vantage point to the weapon's awesome power and destructive potential, it was "the gadget," "Thin Man," and "Fat Man." Such was the peculiar, humbling atmosphere around the first atomic weapon that the closer it came to reality, the more childish the appellation those near it gave it.

On August 5, 1945, "Little Boy," which was the name that stuck on the one that mattered, was loaded onto the bomb bay of Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets's B-29. Seventy-five crack fliers had been waiting for months for this moment, having volunteered for an assignment about which they knew only one thing: they would be doing "something different." During maneuvers, the fliers had been instructed to wear welder's goggles and never look back in the direction of their target (peculiar enough) but when they were told they would be dropping one bomb and only one bomb, they took the news as both perplexing and demeaning.

On August 5, the night before the historic day, the members of the 509th Composite Group learned that their "one bomb" would be delivering a destructive force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. By that time, it was obvious that something very different was at hand.

Excerpted from The Century by By Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprint.