Why no Hollywood movie on Nagasaki A Bombing?

In the 1952 movie ‘Above and Beyond’, movie idol Robert Taylor played handsome Col. Paul Tibbetts, straight out of Central Casting, who piloted Enola Gay to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 75 years ago this Thursday. We all grew up in awe of Tibbetts, Enola Gay and the perfect mission which incinerated Hiroshima from the first A Bomb dropped in anger. My awe eventually turned to revulsion from a horrendous war crime.

But who piloted what plane that dropped the second A Bomb on Nagasaki just 3 days later? The American Story has largely erased the saga of the Nagasaki mission for good reason. It was a colossal screw up that almost got the pilot court martialed; indeed, nearly detonated Fat Man over the Pacific en route.

Trouble began early on. Paul Tibbetts, fresh from his Hiroshima success, picked his friend Charles Sweeney to pilot the drop plane ‘Bockscar’ instead of its regular pilot Fred Bock. Sweeney was unfamiliar with both combat and the plane. Preparing for takeoff, Sweeney was unable to operate the reserve tank containing 640 gallons of fuel needed to get Bockscar safely back to its Tinian takeoff point. Bock may have had the familiarity with the plane to accomplish that. Regulations required the mission be scrapped so Sweeney and crew exited Bockscar. But Tibbetts overruled them and the mission was on with insufficient fuel.

Three hours in, worse trouble. Fat Man’s red detonation lights began blinking wildly. Chief weaponeer Dick Ashworth frantically searched the blueprints and realized 2 switches had been reversed in the pre flight assembly. Solving that problem, everyone relaxed till Bockscar failed to rendezvous with the second of two back up planes, one for photography and one for instruments. The instrument plane, The Big Stink, was 9,000 feet above Bockscar. Instead of pushing on to original target Kokura, Sweeney wasted 45 minutes of precious fuel trying to link up. Big Stink pilot Hoppy Hopkins broke radio silence frantically calling Tinian asking “Is Bockscar down?” Mission officials only heard “Bockscar Down” and freaked out believing Bockscar, Fat Man and the 13 member crew were in Davy Jones Locker.

Ashford was frantic that all was lost. As tension mounted between the weaponeer and the pilot, he finally persuaded Sweeney to proceed to primary target Kokura. But a smokescreen put up by Japanese defenders responding to the Hiroshima attack caused Sweeney to go around for a second and third bomb run, wasting fuel. More trouble. Flack and approaching Japanese Zeros forced Sweeney to abandon Kokura to flee 100 miles to alternate target Nagasaki.

The drop made, Sweeney made a desperate dive to avoid the mushroom cloud that nearly engulfed them. But his previous delays made the return trip to Tinian impossible. Low on fuel, Sweeney began a treacherous 450 mile flight on dwindling fuel for Okinawa. All aboard Bockscar prepared to ditch. Approaching the Okinawa airfield unable to radio the tower of their emergency, Bockscar had to drop in to a forced landing amid numerous other flights without control tower clearance. Bockscar bounced 25 feet in the air landing at 30 MPH over the maximum landing speed, nearly colliding with a row of fuel laden B-24’s. One engine quit on the approach and another upon touchdown. Thinking Bockscar was lost, airport personnel inquired who this strange plane was that descended out of the sky unannounced. ‘We just dropped an atomic bomb’ was the reply.

There were no celebrations for the crew of Bockscar. Officials considered a courts martial for Sweeney for his life and mission threatening delays but considered the embarrassment it would cause and decided against. Why mar the mission-perfect first nuking of civilians by Paul Tibbetts and Enola Gay?

While we’ll never get a Hollywood treatment of the Bockscar A Bomb mission, it would be a lot more exciting than ‘Above and Beyond’. An appropriate title? ‘Nearly Down and Out Over Nagasaki’.
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Note: this post is based on a question I posed to nuclear historian Ellen Bradbury during a weeklong trip to study the Nuclear Age at Alamogordo, NM in 2018. Bradbury, daughter of a Manhattan Project director, lived there during the bomb's development as a child. I asked her why we never hear about the Nagasaki nuclear mission. Her knowledge stems from her interview with Dick Ashworth, the weaponeer on Bockscar, shortly before he died in 2005. Her answer lasted a half hour and should be as widely known as the Hiroshima bombing story

161,000 dead makes it manslaughter

In a just America, President Trump would be arrested, tried and convicted of manslaughter; recklessly responsible for tens of the 161,000 deaths from covid-19. Anyone going 90 MPH the wrong way down a one-way street posted at 30 MPH, who killed a pedestrian, would suffer that fate. But Trump, going 90 MPH the wrong way done the one-way street of pandemic protection, gets to continue his criminally negligent behavior till his possible removal from office next January 20. Maybe.

Repeatedly claiming our infection numbers are high because of testing that should be curtailed is like telling persons with cancer symptoms to not seek medical attention. Calling pandemic a Democratic hoax represents seeking re-election over the bodies of untold thousands. Publically labeling your best pandemic medical advisors ‘pathetic’, ‘out of touch’ and ‘mis-informed’ is helping fill up cemeteries and crematoriums with bodies otherwise destined for additional life. Dismissing the 161,000 dead from 5,000,000 infections is just 7 months as something that will “just go away like other things go away” is the horrifying response to a populous seeking moral and intellectual sanity from its leader.

With 167 days till Inauguration Day, 2021, the death toll, at a thousand of largely unnecessary deaths daily, will more than double to 328,000. Americans should not have to wait till January 20, 2021, to end the criminally negligent behavior of the president. Republican leaders must, like Sen. Barry Goldwater and others did in 1974 to Richard Nixon, make that fateful trip to the White House to tell the president he must resign forthwith. It’s not an indictment, trial and conviction for manslaughter. But for the sake of those hundreds of thousands being given a death notice every 80 seconds in Trump America, it will suffice.

Many top military leaders opposed atomic bombings

Every year the four day period August 6 – 9 brings to mind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. This year is especially poignant. It marks the 75th anniversary of those horrific acts. Given recent U.S. withdrawal from several nuclear treaties and U.S. boasting about spending a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear stockpile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 80 seconds to midnight. That’s the symbolic closest we’ve come to nuclear winter in the entire nuclear age.

I learned of the atomic bombings 69 years ago at age 6 and have been haunted by them ever since. For the first decade afterward I swallowed whole the US fairytale that the military and political elite were unified in dropping the bombs to prevent a U.S. invasion and its estimate of a million U.S. casualties.

Few if any reputable historians buy that version today. They point to a number of top military leaders who opposed the nuclear attacks, for good reasons. Most prominent was U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall who argued not using the Bomb would strengthen America’s prestige and position in post war Asia. He even advocated for inviting the Russians to view its July 16, 1945 test. Navy Secretary and later Defense Secretary James Forrestal argued the bombings would impede our post WWII relations with the Soviet Union. Fleet Admiral William Leahy, senior US military officer on active duty in WWII, called the proposed bombings “barbaric”. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy told Truman that neither invasion nor atomic bombings were necessary. Japan would surrender if we avoided terminology ‘Unconditional Surrender’ since any surrender would amount to that without saying so. McCloy even advocated telling Japanese leaders we had the Bomb as additional incentive to quit the war.

Tho not involved in the Bomb decision process, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was furious we dropped them, telling Secretary of War Harry Stimson shortly after the attacks “I voiced my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”

Ike, McCloy, Leahy, Forristall, Marshall and others were right; Truman and his supporters were wrong. Seventy-five years on America is still the only country to explode nukes in anger. Current belligerency against maintaining nuclear agreements, routinely threatening imagined enemies with “all military options are on the table”, spending a trillion dollars to upgrade our nukes, all bode ill we’ll make another 75 years nuclear attack free.