BOCKSCAR
Three friends, and I, were visiting the world famous Air Force museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Anyone interested in the history of flying will find every type plane or flying machine imaginable, there among the more than one hundred planes from the earliest Wright reproduction to the fast jets of our time.
I had visited this aeronautical center on numerous occasions, but on this trip discovered something I had failed to notice on all previous trips. Shadowed under the wing of a huge B36 is a B29 Super fortress.
While many such super fortresses were flown during World War II this one drew my intense interest. You see this plane, named the "Bockscar," gained its fame for dropping the second atom bomb on Japan on August 9, 1945. While the first atom bomb had been dropped three days earlier on Hiroshima killing 92,000, this plane had been used to destroy 40,000 more Japanese, August 9, on Nagasaki which brought the conclusion of World War II on August 10, 1945, only one day later. This day represented two celebrations. The war's end and my eighth birthday.
It would have been hard for me to understand the destruction of the bombs which were still under design since the very first atom bomb explosion had only occurred just days before in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16. In only twenty one days from its first experimental explosion the uranium bomb leveled four and one-half square miles of the Japanese city. Just hours later an improved bomb using plutonium would destroy one and one-half miles of the second city.
Hardly anyone, but a handful of physicist begun under the Manhattan Project started in 1939, would know the possibilities of such fissionable energy.
My thoughts about such renewed my vow to keep my promise to preach and warn every possible person about another fiery energy that is waiting millions of unexpected individuals.
“A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land;” - Jeremiah 5:30
Three friends, and I, were visiting the world famous Air Force museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Anyone interested in the history of flying will find every type plane or flying machine imaginable, there among the more than one hundred planes from the earliest Wright reproduction to the fast jets of our time.
I had visited this aeronautical center on numerous occasions, but on this trip discovered something I had failed to notice on all previous trips. Shadowed under the wing of a huge B36 is a B29 Super fortress.
While many such super fortresses were flown during World War II this one drew my intense interest. You see this plane, named the "Bockscar," gained its fame for dropping the second atom bomb on Japan on August 9, 1945. While the first atom bomb had been dropped three days earlier on Hiroshima killing 92,000, this plane had been used to destroy 40,000 more Japanese, August 9, on Nagasaki which brought the conclusion of World War II on August 10, 1945, only one day later. This day represented two celebrations. The war's end and my eighth birthday.
It would have been hard for me to understand the destruction of the bombs which were still under design since the very first atom bomb explosion had only occurred just days before in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16. In only twenty one days from its first experimental explosion the uranium bomb leveled four and one-half square miles of the Japanese city. Just hours later an improved bomb using plutonium would destroy one and one-half miles of the second city.
Hardly anyone, but a handful of physicist begun under the Manhattan Project started in 1939, would know the possibilities of such fissionable energy.
My thoughts about such renewed my vow to keep my promise to preach and warn every possible person about another fiery energy that is waiting millions of unexpected individuals.
“A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land;” - Jeremiah 5:30
