On a bright but cloudy morning on 9 August 1945, a B-29 bomber, named “Bocks Car”, of the US Army Air Force, flew over the Japanese port city of Nagasaki and dropped a highly radioactive Plutonium implosion bomb onto the city, 300 yards from the second largest Roman Catholic cathedral in the Far East, Urakami Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The bombing was personally ordered by US President and Democrat Party leader, Harry Truman.
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The story is now partly the subject of a major new film named after the US scientist who led the Atom bomb programme – called the Manhattan Project – namely Dr J Robert Oppenheimer.
It is said that the pilot of Bocks Car, Major Charles Sweeney, an Irish-American, brought up Roman Catholic, had not had a clear view of the initial target, Kokura (now Kitakyushu), and, running out of fuel, headed back over Nagasaki when he spotted the turret of the Cathedral. Concluding that must mean there were people nearby it, he decided to drop the bomb more or less on top of it.[1]
Whether he knew it was a Roman Catholic Cathedral or not is unclear. What is clear is that, ever after, and long after he learned that Urukami Cathedral was Catholic, Sweeney continued to claim that dropping the bomb was necessary and good.
The bomb exploded at 11:02 in the morning and blew most of the Cathedral, most of the city, and most of its inhabitants to smithereens in a blinding flash.
The remains of the city were engulfed in a massive emission, and the consequent dust cloud of toxic radiation caused large numbers of the few that survived the blast to die over the next days, months and even years – some even 20 years later – from acute radiation poisoning.
Bocks Car had dropped what is known in the nuclear trade as a “dirty” bomb, meaning that, upon exploding, it would release a very high emission of poisonous nuclear radiation.
This was the nuclear bomb that went on giving for years after it was dropped – giving to the people of Nagasaki the horrible after-effects of nuclear radiation that slowly kill victims for years.
The vast majority of the people obliterated and vaporised by this fearsome weapon were civilians, children, women, elderly – almost all of whom had nothing to do with the war save to endure the constant air attacks of Allied bombers and the loss of their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons in the conflict. Children were blasted to tiny pieces of mangled flesh and fractured bone by a huge bomb dropped right on top of them.
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The US Target Committee, chaired by Brigadier-General Leslie Groves on the appointment of General George C Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the US Army, consisted partly of military officers, and partly of scientists from the Manhattan Project.
They were deeply unqualified to choose targets in Japan for any kind of bomb, let alone an atomic bomb. However, Kyoto was originally on the target list but was taken off by order of US Secretary of State, Henry L Stimson.
According to Edwin Reischauer, a US Army Intelligence officer and Japanologist, “the only person deserving credit for saving Kyoto from destruction is Henry L Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, who had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier.” Stimson had discovered that the historic city of Kyoto was one of the great artistic centres of the world.
But this came about by pure chance. The Target Committee was otherwise unequipped to understand such issues and focussed only on city size and population numbers.
