Tuesday, August 09, 2005

On this day, part 2

60 years ago…

The plane, a B-29 Superfortress, the “Bock’s Car”, lifted off from Tinean in the Marianas with a faulty fuel selector switch (although they didn’t know it at the time). It was accompanied by two more B-29’s, one fitted out as a sensor platform, the other as a photographic plane.

Cruising at 17,000 feet to avoid turbulence, but that was a less-than-optimal height for maximum fuel efficiency (8-10,000 ft)…

The young pilot, Major Charles Sweeney, headed towards the plane’s target, Kokura. Upon arrival, he and the sensor plane circled around for forty minutes, wasting precious fuel waiting for the photography plane to show up. Unbeknownst to them (since all three planes had flown there separately under the strictest of radio silence), the photography plane was about four miles directly above them, at 39,000 feet.

Giving up, Sweeney looks at his target and cannot see the city adequately due to extensive cloud cover. He could have dropped the bomb anyway, using geographic landmarks to determine the target’s position via dead reckoning. (And let’s face it, you don’t have to be extraordinarily accurate with an atomic bomb. Hitting the right city would be close enough.)

But Sweeney’s orders were clear - he was only to release the bomb if he could see the target visually…

It’s at about this time that they realize that the fuel selector switch was broken, and they would not be able to use the 600 pounds of fuel in an auxiliary tank - which was now nothing more than parasitic dead weight.

He decides to head for his backup target, but it, too, is covered with clouds. These orders were clearer - DROP THAT BOMB! He had even told the crew that this was important enough that, if necessary, the crew would bail out and Sweeney would kamikaze the plane into the city.

The crew decided that this was important enough to risk using radar for the final run, but just before they powered it up, a break appeared in the clouds, allowing the visual observations necessary to align the bombsight and make a visual bombing run.

The bomb - “Fat Man”, a plutonium implosion weapon ("Little Boy” was a gun-style uranium bomb) - was released over Nagasaki, which was a major ship-building and shipping port, as well as a major center for ordnance production, releasing 25 kilotons of explosive power (fifty million pounds).

40,000 killed, 25,000 injured (thanks to a earlier conventional bombing run on the 1st of August - there was very little real damage from that earlier raid, but the city had been evacuated of many of its residents, including most of the women and children).

Five days later, the war in the Pacific was ended.

60 years ago today…