Charles Sweeney
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Charles W. Sweeney (1919 - 15 July 2004) was the pilot who dropped the A-Bomb on Nagasaki.
He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts and began flying while attending North Quincy High School. After graduation in 1937 he attended classes at Boston University and Purdue University.
He joined the Army Air Corps on April 28, 1941, and trained for two years at Jefferson Proving Grounds in Indiana. He served as an operations officer and a test pilot at Eglin Field, Florida. In 1944 he became a major in the Army of the United States, and was a B-29 pilot instructor at Grand Island, Nebraska.
He trained in the atomic missions training project, code-named "Silverplate", at Wendover Field, Utah.
On 4 May 1945 Sweeney became commander of the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, and in June flew to Tinian in the Mariana Islands.
On 9 August 1945, three days after he had flown an instrument plane in the bombing of Hiroshima, he piloted the Bock's Car, a B-29 Superfortress that dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki, having diverted from the initial target, Kokura, because of weather conditions. It was the first bomb he had ever dropped on an enemy target. The bomb was equivalent to 22 kilotons of TNT, and about 70,000 were killed in the initial explosion. About 60% of Nagasaki was destroyed. Japan surrendered six days after the bombing.
In November 1945, Sweeney returned to Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico to train the aircrew for a third, peacetime atomic mission. He was discharged from active duty with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Throughout his life Sweeney remained convinced of the appropriateness and necessity of the bombing, and wrote War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission to defend the action in light of subsequent historical questioning.
Sweeney became a wing commander on 21 February 1956, and a brigadier general (the youngest, at that point in time, to have achieved the rank) on 6 April 1956. He retired in 1976.
Sweeney died at age 84 on 15 July 2004 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.de:Charles_Sweeney fr:Charles Sweeney ja:チャールズ・スウィーニー pl:Charles Sweeney ru:Суини, Чарльз sv:Charles W Sweeney