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So what caused the “heavy ground haze and smoke”? (And I have managed to find a few useful things for him over the years, which have made it into his book as well - duly credited!) If you’re interested in the history of the Manhattan Project, you can’t not have a copy of John’s book… and if your copy is over 5 years old, considered getting an updated edition! All of these little details about times and planes and whatnot come from John’s book. John sent me a new copy a few months ago, and I have been impressed with how much new material he has added over the last 8 years. I first got a copy of John’s book in 2006 or so. I’m not just saying that because he says nice things about my blog, either.Īn aside: For anyone interested in the nitty-gritty details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, my go-to reference these days is John Coster-Mullen’s Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Insider Story of Little Boy and Fat Man. (It missed the intended target by a significant margin.) Bockscar circled the target once and then, at 12:05pm, took off for Okinawa, and from there, after refueling, Tinian.Ĭare about the details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings? Get John’s book.
Right at the last possible moment, the clouds parted just enough for the bombardier to site the target and drop the bomb.
They arrived at Nagasaki at 11:50am, which they also found obscured by smoke and clouds, to the degree that they made the target approach entirely by radar. Since Bockscar had limited fuel, Sweeney decided to continue on to the secondary target, Nagasaki. Visual bombing had been made a mandatory requirement (they did not trust the accuracy of radar-assisted bombing), so this made Kokura a failed mission. Three bombing runs on Kokura were attempted, but “at no time was the aiming point seen,” as the flight log recorded. The flight log records that “Target was obscured by heavy ground haze and smoke.” A crew member of Bockscar rated it as “7/10 clouds coverage – Bomb must be dropped visually but I don’t think our chances are very good.” 2 At 9:50am, the pilot of Bockscar, Charles Sweeney, gave up and continued on to Kokura, having waited some 30 minutes longer than he was supposed to. It rendezvoused with one of the other B-29s (the instrument plane), but did not spot the other one (the photo plane). They had arrived at a rendezvous point at Yakushima Island around 9:15am. It had taken off from the island of Tinian at 3:47am, Tinian time. Niigata, a third atomic bombing target, was not considered on this mission because of its great geographical distance from Kokura and Nagasaki.īockscar was being piloted by Major Charles Sweeney.
The weather planes would check out bombing conditions and then circle back, helping the bomber plane determine whether the primary or secondary target would be used. Lastly, there were two weather planes that flew out in advance, one to Nagasaki (the Laggin’ Dragon), the other to Kokura (the Enola Gay, the same plane that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima a few days earlier, but with a different crew).
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One other plane was a “standby” plane ( Full House) that was to serve as backup if the three bombing planes ran into air resistance - because they didn’t, it instead flew back to Iwo Jima instead of on to the target after a rendezvous with the bombing plane. 1 Two other planes ( The Great Artiste and Big Stink) were instrument and observation planes. One of them was the strike plane that carried the Fat Man implosion bomb ( Bockscar). There were a total of six planes involved in the mission, all B-29 bombers. The Kokura/Nagasaki mission (dubbed CENTERBOARD II), as with the Hiroshima mission before it (CENTERBOARD I), did not involve the bomber flying on its lonesome to the target, as is sometimes imagined.
Source: USAAF photos, via .īut first, let’s review the basics of the mission. Model of the Kokura arsenal made for targeting purposes, ca.