In order to maintain a respectful environment, we ask that all comments be on-topic, respectful and spam-free. View our Bockscar B-29 Superfortress Photo Gallery. The display includes a replica of the “ Fat Man” bomb and a simple sign bearing a concise and wholly accurate description: “The aircraft that ended WWII.” Today Bockscar is on permanent display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
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But when the Japanese surrendered and the war abruptly ended less than a week later, the matter was quietly dropped. Paul Tibbets, commander of the Enola Gay, wanted Sweeny disciplined for failure to command. He was reamed out by General Curtis LaMay, chief of staff for the Strategic Air Forces, upon arriving in Guam days later. There isn’t much written in the historical record about Gunner Ray Gallagher, although some interesting letters, including this one, have been preserved. As a result, Sweeny was warned to spend a maximum of 15 minutes at the rendezvous point, where Bockscar was to meet up with The Great Artiste and another B-29, The Big Stink. On the morning of the mission, Bockscar was found to have a faulty fuel transfer pump that made it impossible to use 625 gallons of fuel in the tail. Rather than take the time to refit The Great Artiste for bombing duty_,_ its crew, which had practiced the dropping of Fat Man in Bockscar, commandeered that airplane for its mission. But his crew couldn’t fly their own airplane, which had been outfitted with observation gear for the Hiroshima bombing run, in which they participated. The mission had been assigned to the crew of The Great Artiste, commanded by Maj.
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Frederick Bock, was indeed the B-29 that bombed Nagasaki – but it was flown on that day by a different crew. What gives? As Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story:īockscar, named after its aircraft commander, Capt. It was the mission that broke the will of the Japanese, and, as we all know, it marked only the second time an atomic weapon had been used in war after the Enola Gay dropped “ Little Boy” on Hiroshima three days earlier. Raymond Gallagher, a gunner on the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb “ Fat Man” on Nagasaki on Aug.
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My grandfather’s first cousin (and my first cousin twice removed) was SSgt. My interest in Superfortress naming arises from a familial link with the most famous (or second most famous, depending on how you rank them) B-29 mission of all. This is somewhat unusual since other bombers of the day, including the B-17 and B-24, were less likely to carry an individual name (although a great many did, Memphis Belle being perhaps the most famous example among many, many thousands). Virtually all combat B-29s had distinctive names, bestowed upon them by their crews. After all, attaching a name to a killing machine is merely an attempt to humanize the brutality of war, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s of benefit to our collective psyche since the airplanes in question were capable of raining such unfathomable destruction from above. 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.