The Airplane that Ended a War

Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 10:43 PM ET

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The crew of Bockscar, which dropped the atomic
bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Maj. Charles
Sweeny is standing in the dark jacket. SSgt. Raymond
Gallagher is in the front row, second from the right.

Key Takeaways:

Unlike other bombers, B-29 Superfortresses were commonly named by their crews, creating historical ambiguity around which B-29 delivered the "Fat Man" bomb to Nagasaki.
"Bockscar" was the B-29 that dropped the Nagasaki atomic bomb, but it was flown by the crew of "The Great Artiste" led by Maj. Charles Sweeny, who switched aircraft due to their original plane's prior configuration for observation.
The Nagasaki mission was plagued by severe difficulties, including a critical fuel pump malfunction, extended delays, cloud-obscured primary and secondary targets, and a perilous, fuel-starved emergency landing in Okinawa.

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_Enola Gay. FIFI. The Great Artiste. Kee Bird. The Big Stink.
_

It was an airplane dubbed “Superfortress.” Yet many of the most famous Boeing B-29 bombers that plied the skies during the latter days of World War II carried strangely meek-sounding individual names. Perhaps that’s of benefit to our collective psyche since the airplanes in question were capable of raining such unfathomable destruction from above. After all, attaching a name to a killing machine is merely an attempt to humanize the brutality of war, isn’t it?