Charles Sweeney; pilot dropped Nagasaki A-bomb
As concentric circles of extremely hot, clear air raced toward the B-29 he was piloting, Charles W. Sweeney watched smoke blanket the city of Hiroshima, a mushroom-shaped puff of smoke emerging from a multicolored cloud just below him. Three days after he and his crew looked on from their instrument plane as the Enola Gay dropped the bomb that changed the face of international warfare, Mr. Sweeney, then an Air Force major, headed up the crew that dropped the second atomic bomb, this time on Nagasaki, effectively bringing an end to World War II.
On Thursday, the Milton resident died at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 84.
"It was the same sensation you would get coming out of a theater in the afternoon and looking directly into the sun," Mr. Sweeney recalled of the Nagasaki bombing in published reports, describing the thousandth of a second it took for a radiant white to take over the dark blue sky.
Family members remembered Mr. Sweeney as an easygoing man.
"I never saw him get rattled over anything," said Brian Howe of Marshfield, his son-in-law.
His calmness came in handy during Mr. Sweeney's mission over Nagasaki. He learned he would be leading that sortie from his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets, at a welcome-home party for the crews of the planes that flew the Hiroshima mission on August 6, 1945.
"We want the Japanese to believe that we have a lot of these things, so we're going to do another on the 9th, and I want you to run the mission. We're going to use the same tactics," Mr. Sweeney recalled Tibbets telling him, according to a 1995 Globe interview.
"Same tactics?" the pilot asked
"Same tactics," his commander told him.
"Yes, sir," the young major said.
The mission was fraught with problems. One of the planes on Mr. Sweeney's mission went to the wrong coordinates, leaving his B-29 Superfortress hovering for about 40 minutes. The pilot of the other plane was 9,000 feet above him, and asked "Has Sweeney aborted?" over the radios. Those listening at the US base on Tinian Island in the South Pacific, however, heard "Sweeney aborted," and figured he had abandoned the mission.
"Somewhere out there was a 10,000-pound nuclear weapon and they didn't know what I might have done with it," Mr. Sweeney recalled later.
Headed for their primary target, Kokura, the crew immediately encountered severe visibility problems, forcing them to move on to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
At 30,000 feet, bombardier Kermit Beahan shouted, "I've got it, I've got it," after locating Nagasaki's arms factory.
"You own it," Mr. Sweeney said, and the plutonium bomb nicknamed Fat Man plummeted to the ground.
"I was only 25 years old, and I had a $2 billion weapon in the back of the plane. I was thinking that I better not screw up," he told the Globe in 1991.
Then there was the fuel problem. The B-29 ran short of fuel, forcing a landing in Okinawa, rather than Tinian Island, with a mere 7 gallons left in the tank. Unable to reach Okinawa via radio to alert the air base there to their whereabouts, Mr. Sweeney's crew fired every flare they had.
"It looked like the Fourth of July around our plane," Mr. Sweeney recalled of the "hot and high" landing, during which he slammed on the emergency brakes midway down the runway, coming to a halt 10 feet before its end.
After the war, Mr. Sweeney, a 1937 graduate of North Quincy High School who briefly attended Boston University, returned to civilian life. There he rejoined his wife, Dorothy, an Army nurse he had met and married in 1943 while working at a Florida base.
But it did not take long for him to get back in the cockpit of an Air Force plane. He joined the Massachusetts Air National Guard in 1947 and 10 years later became brigadier general of the 102d Tactical Fighter Wing.
Meanwhile, he started the Boston-based Kelley & Sweeney Leather Co.
In 1961, Mr. Sweeney led a flight of 78 F-86 fighter jets to France, where they waited on call during the crisis over the Berlin Wall. That year, he was named Boston's director of Civil Defense, helping the city form contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.
He retired from the Massachusetts Air National Guard in 1976.
At the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1995, Mr. Sweeney began working on a project to document his experiences. The result, "War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission," was published in 1997. He also became an outspoken defender of the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, arguing that the bombings saved hundreds of thousands of lives by bringing the war to an rapid conclusion.
"Through the whole thing, we were just thinking 'how can we get this war over?' " Mr. Sweeney told the Globe in 2001. On nuclear weapons in general, he told the Globe, "I hope we never use them again, but that we cannot afford to eliminate them and stay strong. The best defense, I think, is the strongest offense."
Mr. Sweeney leaves his former wife, Dorothy W. of Naples, Fla.; his companion, Muriel Murphy of Franklin; three sons, Charles W. Jr., of Milton, Terence M. of Mission Viejo, Calif., and Joseph P. of Milton; his daughters, Patricia O'Neill of Cheshire, Conn., and Middletown, R.I., Marylyn A. Howe of Marshfield Hills, Carol Sweeney-Boyd of Milton, Michele Saulnier of Quincy, Rosemary J. Gunning of Norwell, Elizabeth S. of Stratham, N.H., and Falmouth, and Bonnie of Boston; two brothers, Arthur of Scituate and William of Hingham; a sister Marylyn Burns of Nantucket; and 24 grandchildren.
A funeral Mass will be said Tuesday at 11 a.m. in St. Agatha Church in Milton.
