Once again, by the time I got to the window, the city was gone. In about 45 seconds there was the now familiar bright flash, and the rapidly ascending mushroom cloud. The airplane lurched as the bomb was released, and Sweeney put it into a tight turn to the left to give us some distance from the explosion. Kermit Beahan had about half a minute to get a visual sighting before releasing the bomb. Finally, a hole broke in the clouds, and bombardier Capt. The crew was under orders to drop their bomb only after visually sighting the target, but chose to come in over Nagasaki using radar, as the city was covered with clouds. So Bockscar headed for Nagasaki, which, a generation earlier, had been the setting of Puccini’s opera “Madame Butterfly.” (“Kokura’s luck” became a Japanese expression for inadvertently escaping disaster). When they arrived, the city was obscured by smoke from the firebombing of Yawata, known as the “Pittsburgh of Japan,” by more than 200 B-29s the night before.
Before Bockscar‘s early morning takeoff, he wrote in a 1988 memoir, “There was a decided absence of the ‘Hollywood Premier’ atmosphere and most everyone was quite subdued.” The mood of the second A-bomb flight was far different from the first, recalled Jacob Beser, the only man to fly in the strike plane for both missions. Before leaving, the crew discovered a malfunction in a fuel pump that severely limited their range, and put in doubt whether they’d have enough fuel to return to Tinian. Unlike the Hiroshima mission, Sweeney’s flight was tense and plagued by problems. There was no fighter escort, so as not to draw attention. Fewer people, though, can identify Charles “Chuck” Sweeney as the pilot of the bomber that left Tinian for Japan early on the morning of August 9, accompanied by five other B-29s, including Enola Gay. The Enola Gay and its pilot, Paul Tibbets (who commanded the 509th Composite Group responsible for nuclear missions), have become familiar names to the public over the years. The story of the Hiroshima bombing, just three days earlier, is better known. Our inside view of Bockscar, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the second atomic weapon used in wartime, got me reading about the Nagasaki bombing of August 9, 1945, which helped put an end to World War II after six long years of bloodshed. A Nagasaki temple after the second atomic bomb was dropped.