With the Pacific war in its third year, William Parsons wanted—indeed expected—to be commanding ships at sea at this point in his career. But fate, and his own special capabilities, prevented that. Now, in the pre-dawn darkness of an August morning, he was instead rather unceremoniously lugging two metal cans—together weighing just under 138 pounds—across a runway. Even before the sun had risen, the late-summer heat was evident as beads of sweat formed on the Navy captain's balding pate.
"Deke," as he was known to his friends, wrestled the two cans into an aircraft and squeezed into the sweltering compartment already occupied by his "Little Boy," which—at nearly 11 feet long and weighing 9,700 pounds—took up much of the available space. Eleven other men manned their stations in the aircraft, and soon they were airborne and headed northeast. Parsons was technically a mere passenger in this Army Air Forces, bomber named after the pilot's mother, but with his two cans of uranium 235, he was an important one.
Deke had last been to sea as gunnery officer in the USS Detroit (CL-8) in 1939. With the "winds of war" gathering strength, he had been pleased to play a key role in the development of the proximity fuse for combat use. But he was not so pleased when his technical prowess caught the eye of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's science adviser, Vannevar Bush, and Parsons soon found himself drafted into a top-secret project—code-named Manhattan—that would keep him ashore for the duration of the war.
As Enola Gay winged its way at high altitude toward an unsuspecting city in Japan, Parsons worked in the now-frigid bomb bay with the two uranium masses inserted in the weapon, separated by a hollow tube less than five feet long. Amid bucking turbulence in the extremely cramped space, with his fingers close to frost-bitten, Deke carried out the tasks he had rehearsed hundreds of times in the 100-degree heat on the ground. Sometimes lying under the giant bomb, sometimes straddling it, he tested barometric switches, wired complex circuitry, removed various pins, and gradually transformed the tungsten cylinder into the most deadly weapon yet devised by man.
Parsons was arming the atomic bomb in flight because of the very real possibility that an electrical discharge or a sudden jolt could cause a premature detonation. Better to lose 12 men and a single B-29 than the entire island of Tinian.
With less than five minutes to target, Captain Parsons completed his work. The rest was up to "Little Boy." At 0915, the bomb dropped from the belly of the silver aircraft and plummeted toward Hiroshima. At less than a thousand feet above ground, a great cataclysmic burst of fission changed the world forever.
Deke only lived to the age of 52, dying from a heart attack in 1953. While other naval officers had brought about the great victory at sea in the Pacific theater using guns, periscopes, and tailhooks, Captain William Sterling Parsons had done his part with a slide rule. Yet, in one of those great historical ironies, while thousands would die as a result of Parsons' handiwork, countless thousands of others would live, because "Little Boy," and a second bomb called "Fat Man," would convince the Japanese to surrender, ending the war without a bloody invasion.
In 1977-78, then-Lieutenant Cutler served as operations officer in the USS Parsons (DD-949), a guided-missile destroyer launched in 1958 and named for Deke.