Charles W. Sweeney (1919 – 2004) was the pilot of the B-29 Bockscar, which carried and dropped the atomic bomb called Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, during World War II. He was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
Charles Sweeney was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on December 27, 1919. His father was a plumber. Sweeney began flying while attending North Quincy High School. Having graduated from High School in 1937, he attended classes at Boston University and Purdue University. In April 1941, he enlisted as an aviation cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps. When he received his pilot wings and a commission as a second lieutenant, Sweeney trained for two years at the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana. In 1944 he was promoted to major and assigned as a B-29 Superfortress pilot instructor at Grand Island Army Airfield, Nebraska.
Sweeney spent most of the war as an instructor and test pilot. He was selected to be part of the 509th Composite Group, under the command of Col. Paul Tibbets, and was named commander of the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron on January 6, 1945. At the beginning his squadron used C-47 Skytrain and C-46 Commando transports on hand to conduct the top secret operations to supply the 509th, but in April 1945 it received five C-54 Skymasters, which had the range to deliver personnel and materiel to the western Pacific area.
On August 6, 1945, Sweeney piloted B-29 The Great Artiste, which was the instrumentation support aircraft of the B-29 Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On August 9, 1945, Major Sweeney commanded the B-29 Bockscar, which dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. On the August 9 mission the main target of the atomic atack was Kokura, but Sweeney had to change course because of bad weather conditions and headed for Nagasaki. The Bockscar dropped a plutonium weapon with a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. Approximately 70,000 people were killed in the initial explosion and 60% of Nagasaki was destroyed. Japan surrendered six days after the bombing.
In November 1945, Sweeney returned with the 509th Composite Group to Roswell Army Air Base in New Mexico to train aircrews for the atomic testing mission, Operation Crossroads. He became a brigadier general in 1956, and at the time was the youngest man in the Air Force to reach that rank. He retired in 1976. Charles W Sweeney died on July 16, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts.
