“I’ve never had a man who was in combat ever say that to me,” he added. In 2001, when Sweeney lunched with a couple of fellow veterans and took in the Disney film “Pearl Harbor,” he told the Boston Globe that he was aware of strong criticism of America’s decision to use the atomic bomb. Sweeney’s co-pilot on the historic mission, Fred Olivi, who died April 8 in Chicago, had joined Sweeney in defending their bombing of the Japanese city, commenting in 1995: “While thousands died, I feel sure the bomb had to be dropped because, if the Americans had been forced to invade Japan, it would have been a bloodbath.” Shooting off flares to signal an emergency landing, the pilot lost two engines on the way down but landed safely with hardly enough fuel for one more minute of flight. Sweeney pointed the B-29 toward Okinawa, which the United States had wrested from Japan only a month earlier. Relieved of the 5-ton bomb, the lighter Bock’s Car with its 12-man crew still had too little fuel to return to its starting base on Tinian Island.
“Suddenly the entire horizon burst into a super-brilliant white with an intense flash - more intense than Hiroshima,” Sweeney said in his book. That secondary target also was overcast, and only a break in the clouds allowed the bomb to be dropped. Sweeney’s flight had fuel problems from the start, and clouds and smoke were covering the mission’s primary target, the industrial city of Kokura.Īfter making several dangerous passes over Kokura, Sweeney abandoned the primary target for Nagasaki. But its mission was more harrowing for the crew. “I hope my missions were the last ones of their kind that will ever be flown.”īock’s Car, now on display at the Air Force Museum near Dayton, Ohio, is not as well-known as Tibbets’ Enola Gay. I just wanted the war to be over, so we could get back home to our loved ones,” Sweeney told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 1995. Veterans’ protests, including Sweeney’s, forced changes in the exhibit, which originally stressed the suffering of the Japanese and questioned the necessity of the nuclear bombing. The renewed debate was sparked by a controversial Smithsonian Institution exhibit planned for the 50th anniversary of the bombings. The book, written with James and Marion Antonucci, who produced a documentary about his mission, and his speeches were designed to counter what Sweeney considered “cockamamie theories” that the bombings were unnecessary. It would be the first bomb Sweeney ever dropped on an enemy target. 6, Tibbets told Sweeney he would be flying the second atomic bombing run. When Japan failed to surrender by nightfall of that fateful Aug.
Sweeney was flying his own B-29, the Great Artiste, 30 feet off Tibbets’ wingtip, and dropped blast-gauge instruments by parachute. Paul Tibbets, drop a smaller uranium bomb called “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. Three days earlier, he had watched the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. The future general was a 25-year-old major when he piloted the borrowed B-29 bomber nicknamed Bock’s Car that dropped a plutonium bomb dubbed “Fat Man” on Nagasaki on Aug. Sweeney died of unspecified causes Thursday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Sweeney, a retired Air Force major general who was the only pilot to observe from the cockpit both nuclear blasts that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and brought World War II to an end, has died.