A Pacific Island's Tribute to the Atomic Bomb

Story and photographs by Arin Greenwood / Oct. 29, 2004

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An island called Tinian recently excavated the pits that stored two atomic bombs during WWII.

About 140 miles from Guam—and thousands of miles from everywhere else—is an island called Tinian that is exactly the same size and shape as Manhattan. In fact, the American troops who were stationed on Tinian during World War II laid out a grid of streets and avenues to mimic Manhattan.

Tinian's Broadway is as different from New York's as Miami, Florida is from Miami, Ohio—take, for example, the utter dearth of Starbucks or hit musical theater productions on Tinian and the scarcity of cows in New York City.

Aside from one flashy casino, Tinian is a low-key island that hasn't made a big deal out of its role in history: The B-29s that carried Fat Man and Little Boy—the atomic bombs dropped on Japan—were launched from Tinian.

Still, every year, veterans of World War II come to Tinian, and a lot of these visitors want to see where the bombs were stored. Until this past summer, what visitors would find when they traveled north on Tinian was not exactly tourist-friendly. North Field, the airstrip the American military built on Tinian, used to be the busiest airstrip in the world but in recent years has become overgrown and derelict.

Fat Man and Little Boy were launched from two "pits," specially engineered holes seven-and-a-half feet underground on North Field. These pits were necessary because the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, the planes carrying the bombs to Japan, had bellies that were very low to the ground. The bombs were lowered into the pits, and then the planes were driven over the trenches. The planes' bellies were opened, and the bombs were hydraulically lifted inside the 27-and-a-half-foot long, 18-foot-wide pits.

In the late 1940s the Army instructed Alfred F. Fleming—a man from Tinian who worked for the Public Works division—and several other people to fill the pits with backfill. So what was there for visitors to see, mostly, were two rectangular patches of grass flanked by signs that read "Atomic Bomb Pit #1" and "Atomic Bomb Pit #2." One small and somewhat bedraggled coconut tree stood in the middle of each pit.

As you might imagine, some returning veterans felt dissatisfied when they saw what became of North Field and its bomb pits. The Tinian mayor's office became concerned that Ret. Gen. Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay's pilot, would become one of those disgruntled veterans. Tibbets was scheduled to visit Tinian last June for the 60th anniversary of the Battles of Saipan and Tinian, major Pacific Theater battles that most historians believe secured the United States' victory in the war (Saipan is Tinian's closest neighbor; both islands are part of what is now the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands).

"The excavation was for the 60th anniversary," says Doug Fleming (Alfred's son), who works for the Tinian Mayor's Military Liaison Office. "Paul Tibbets was going to be here, and it's an honor for him to see it."

The pits were covered with Plexiglas in June.

In early June 2004, the Tinian Mayor's Office teamed up with Saipan's historic-preservation office to make some improvements. In two weeks, workers removed all the dirt from the pits. During the excavation, people noticed that the pit marked #1 did not look like photographs of pit #1. The pit that had been marked #2, on the other hand, looked a lot like photographs of what was known to be the real pit #1. When General Tibbets got to Tinian, he confirmed what the excavators had begun to suspect: the pits had been mismarked. (They're correctly marked now.)

According to Genevieve Cabrera, staff historian for the historic-preservation office, historians and civilians bent on conspiracy theories have long thought that there would be doors leading to a secret underground laboratory in the bottom of the pits. "There was no door at the bottom of the pit," says Cabrera. "There was a concrete slab that looked like a cover. We didn't have time to lift it, so we don't know what's underneath."

Why were the bomb pits sealed in the first place? It might have been because a foreign submarine was spotted near Tinian at around the same time that three men wearing odd and unfamiliar clothing—perhaps SCUBA gear—were seen looking at the pits; this is the theory that Alfred Fleming put forth to Genevieve Cabrera in an oral history Cabrera recorded in May 2004. The pits, then, could have been covered to prevent enemy spies from discovering something about the deployment of nuclear weapons.

"Maybe the guys in weird clothes were checking for radiation," Cabrera says. If the men were scientists who found that the pits were radioactive, says Cabrera, then the sealing may have been intended to prevent radiation from contaminating other parts of the island. Many locals observe that near the pits, foliage grows strangely—the coconut trees, for example, grow fruit but the fruit never matures.

The third and least sexy theory holds that the open pits were a menace to cows. The pits filled with water, and cows, which have miserable senses of spatial perception, fell in the pits while trying to drink, and drowned. It was because of this third theory that the now-uncovered pits have been covered with Plexiglas pyramids that allow one to peer—but not fall—into the pits.

Plans to sell dirt excavated from the pits have been put on hold until good, reliable radioactive testing is conducted, says Cabrera. There is plenty of gravel around, so in the meantime, says Doug Fleming, "People can just pick up some of this from the runway."

Arin Greenwood is a freelance writer and lawyer living on Saipan, an island near Guam.

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