Sweeney, Charles William

▪ 2005

      American pilot (b. Dec. 27, 1919, Lowell, Mass.—d. July 16, 2004, Boston, Mass.), flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II. Sweeney joined the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941. In September 1944 he became a member of the group that was secretly training for the atomic bombing mission. He had been promoted to major by the time of the mission, and he flew a plane that accompanied the Enola Gay to Hiroshima to drop measuring instruments behind the bomb. On Aug. 9, 1945, he piloted the borrowed B-29 Superfortress bomber Bockscar, which had a malfunctioning fuel pump. Finding the initial target, Kokura, obscured by clouds, Sweeney flew on to Nagasaki and dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima; some 70,000 people were killed and nearly half the city destroyed. Japan surrendered six days later.

* * *