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Enrico Fermi, chief experimentalist and one of the major designers of the atomic bomb. Rachel Fermi is a resident of England but is in the United States to complete the book. She obtained my name and address from Roger Mead, Archivist/Historian of the Bradbury Science Museum.

My first assignment was to photograph Nagasaki which had been destroyed by the second bomb, the plutonium bomb "Fat Man" on 9 August, 1945. Colonel Fulcher was personally going to fly me in a Stinson L-5 observation plane. Another high ranking officer who was a friend of Col. Fulcher and happened to be at the field wanted to go along. Since the plane was a tandem two seater, the Colonel authorized my regular pilot to prepare a second L-5 while he and his friend flew on ahead. I had never driven a truck, much less a semi-trailer tanker, but I managed to get it started, circled tight, and ended up right by the nose of the L-5. Within half an hour we were off the ground. We circled Nagasaki at 500 to 1,000 feet altitude while I took 39 views.

Nagasaki was a major port with one of the world's largest shipbuilding yards. Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works was at the southern end of the industrial valley and the torpedo plant was to the north. The hypocenter was in between, about 150 yards north of Mitsubishi Steel which was the aiming point. There were also four big Mitsubishi aircraft plants. The shipbuilding yards were far to the south on the west side of the harbor and the city business district was on the east side of the harbor with the residential area farther east in a pocket of small mountains. Those mountains had protected the greater portion of the population and reduced the death toll. The pre-bomb population had been 195,000. "Fat Man" was dropped from about 32,000 feet and detonated at 1,750 feet with a force of 23 kilotons of TNT. Approximately 36,000 were killed and injuries later claimed 39,000 more lives.

Upon returning to the base airfield we noted that the Colonel wasn't back yet. It took almost an hour before he showed up. He told us that he was flying low, forgot to turn on the carburetor heat , the gas line froze up, and the engine quit. He found that he was heading almost straight into a runway which our troops had made within a city block of the hypocenter. We had not noticed them but my pictures show their plane on the ground and they were waving their arms at us.

The next mission was to Hiroshima. This time we chose to use a Canadian built Norden Norseman, a rather large single engine plane. We had two of them but one was down with an engine problem. The normal ^[[550]] H. P. engine in the plane we took had been replaced with a ^[[500]] H. P. Curtis-Wright American engine so we were 50 H.P. short for maximum performance. Flying the plane was a Senior Command Pilot with thousands of hours flying time. We also had a co-pilot and two or three others who sat back with me on canvas bucket seats that ran fore and aft on both sides of the plane. As we approached Hiroshima, I unbuckled my seat belt,

^[[6.]]