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He joined an Army air cadet program in April 1941 and became a second lieutenant on Dec. "I knew my life would never be the same." "The sense of breaking away from the bounds of the earth filled me with awe," he recalled. In the summer of 1939, while living in North Quincy, Mass., and working as a salesman for a leather-goods company, he and a friend paid a pilot $2 for a five-minute ride in an open-cockpit plane that soared 1,000 feet over the Squantum Naval Air Station. General Sweeney was born in Lowell, Mass., the son of a plumbing and heating contractor. "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. The crews who flew the atomic missions were viewed in the war's aftermath as the men who averted enormous casualties anticipated if an invasion of Japan were to be launched.īut in the decades to come, as questions were raised as to whether the Truman administration needed to drop the bombs in order to end the war, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki crewmen found themselves called on to defend their deeds.Ī few weeks after the war ended, the two atomic-bomb pilots visited Nagasaki. Six days later, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. Major Sweeney nonetheless delivered his bomb, then 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, Nagaski, were obscured from the air. The Nagasaki attack proved a harrowing affair 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 pumpkin-shaped bomb called Fat Man was dropped on the industrial city of Nagasaki, killing and wounding tens of thousands, heavily damaging a steelworks and arms plant and demolishing an estimated 14,000 residential buildings, according to an American bombing survey.Īs Major Sweeney made a difficult and repeatedly practiced 155-degree diving turn enabling his plane to escape the blast, he saw a multicolored cloud "rising faster than at Hiroshima." 9, Major Sweeney piloted a B-29 called 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 awesome power of atomic energy for the first time as a weapon of war, Major Sweeney's plane dropped instruments to detect the heat, blast and radiation. 6, 1945, Major Sweeney, his rank at the time in the Army Air Forces, flew his bomber the Great Artiste to Hiroshima, accompanying the Enola Gay, piloted by Col.
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.