Enola gay crew regret
His marriage to Dorothy Sweeney ended in divorce.
He is survived by three sons, Charles Jr., Joseph and Terence seven daughters, Patricia O'Neill, Marylyn Howe, Carol Sweeney-Boyd, Michele Saulnier, Rosemary Gunning, Elizabeth Sweeney and Bonnie Sweeney two brothers, Arthur and William a sister, Marylyn Burns and 24 grandchildren. He was an owner of a leather company in Boston and served with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, retiring in 1976 as a major general. General Sweeney left military service after the war. Nagasaki was shrouded in clouds when the Bockscar arrived, but a hole in the clouds finally appeared, and the bomb was dropped on the industrial Urakami Valley, rather than the flat area downtown near the shipyards, the preferred target. After three passes over the city, Major Sweeney headed for Nagasaki, an hour and a half behind schedule. When the Bockscar arrived over Kokura, the prime target, the ground was obscured by smoke from a firebombing raid. As the plane headed for Japan, a malfunction in the bomb's circuitry had to be repaired. Shortly before the Bockscar took off, a pump malfunctioned, depriving Major Sweeney of 600 gallons of fuel. Fred Bock, because the Great Artiste, the plane Major Sweeney flew to Hiroshima, would again be carrying measuring equipment. Major Sweeney took command of the bomber Bockscar, which was borrowed from its pilot, Capt. When Japan still refused to surrender, a second nuclear strike was ordered. 6, Colonel Tibbets, piloting the Enola Gay, flew a perfect mission to Hiroshima. On July 16, an atomic bomb was successfully tested at Alamogordo, N.M. Major Sweeney supervised training, and in June 1945 he arrived with his flight crews on the Pacific island of Tinian. In September 1944, after extensively testing the new four-engine B-29 Superfortress, he joined the 509th Composite Group, which trained in Utah under extraordinary secrecy to provide the crews that dropped the atomic bombs. 12, 1941, five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. General Sweeney, a native of Lowell, Mass., became an Army Air Forces lieutenant on Dec. ''The true vessel of remorse and guilt belonged to the Japanese nation, which could and should call to account the warlords who so willingly offered up their own people to achieve their visions of greatness,'' he said. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood.'' ''I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation,'' he wrote. General Sweeney recalled that moment in his memoir, ''War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission'' (Avon Books, 1997), written with James A. But questions were ultimately raised as to whether the Truman administration needed to drop the bombs to end the war.Ī few weeks after the war ended, the two atomic-bomb pilots visited Nagasaki. The crews who flew the atomic missions were viewed after the war as the men who averted enormous casualties anticipated if an invasion of Japan had been launched. Six days later, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. Major Sweeney landed on Okinawa with only a minute or so of fuel remaining.
A mechanical failure reduced the fuel supply, and both the primary target, the city of Kokura, and the secondary target, Nagasaki, were obscured from the air. The Nagasaki attack proved harrowing for the crew. ''It was a mesmerizing sight, at once breathtaking and ominous.'' ''It seemed more intense, more angry,'' he remembered in his autobiography. At 11:01 a.m., the bomb was dropped on the industrial city of Nagasaki, killing and wounding tens of thousands, heavily damaging a steelworks and arms plant and demolishing thousands of residential buildings, according to an American bombing survey.Īs Major Sweeney turned his plane to escape the blast, he saw a multicolor cloud ''rising faster than at Hiroshima.'' 9, Major Sweeney piloted the Bockscar, carrying a plutonium bomb even more powerful than the Enola Gay's bomb. When the Enola Gay dropped its uranium bomb on the city, unleashing the power of atomic energy for the first time as a weapon of war, the Great Artiste dropped measuring instruments. 6, 1945, accompanying the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Having the rank of major in the Army Air Forces at the time, he flew his bomber, the Great Artiste, to Hiroshima on the morning of Aug. The cause was pulmonary complications of congestive heart disease, his son-in-law Brian Howe said. General Sweeney, who lived in Milton, Mass., was 84. Sweeney, who flew the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the second atomic strike on Japan in the final days of World War II, died Friday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.