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He flew in both atomic bomb missions over Japan. Now, Air Force Maj. Gen. Chuck Sweeney says he wants to set the record straight.

Was It Necessary?

[[image - black & white photograph of Hiroshima, Japan after atomic bombing]]
Top: Aftermath of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Nagasaki was bombed three days later. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15. The "Atom Bomb Dome" (right) still stands in ruins, a monument to nuclear devastation.

NASM/Sygnia

[[image - color photograph: cover of July 30, 1995 issue of Parade Magazine, featuring Chuck Sweeney sitting in airplane cockpit and the headline 'I Want Americans To Know The Facts']]


'OUR OVERRIDING desire was to shorten the war. I'd seen too many 22-year-olds come back white-haired from the terror of amphibious landings."

I was talking with retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Chuck Sweeney, who holds the historic distinction of being the only pilot on both atomic bomb missions over Japan, having piloted the instrument plane at Hiroshima and then having dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Today Sweeney has embarked on another mission: to help put that terrible time into context.

As the world goes through a succession of 50th-anniversary remembrances of history's most horrific global war, no issue has caused more controversy than President Truman's decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. Some historians argue that they were unnecessary to ending World War II and instead were the first shot of the Cold War, a clear warning to the Soviet Union. Others, including most veterans of that period, argue that the bombs were dropped in a successful effort to force a surrender before it became necessary to invade Japan's main islands.

Sweeney leaves no doubt where he stands on the matter. "The prospect of a ground invasion was never far from our minds," he noted. "We wanted to prevent it, and we did. We saved thousands of lives, we shortened the war, and we obviated an invasion."

Today, at 75, the big, bright-faced descendant of potato famine Irish immigrants still loves cigars, good food and trading sea stories. Having endured numerous interviews by "young reporters who don't even know the dates World War II was fought," he has become concerned about what he calls a "culture of ignorance" on many important issues of American history. At the same time, he regrets that even his own 10 children and 20 grandchildren "don't know very much about what really took place" during his historic World War II missions.

In the summer of 1945, Chuck Sweeney was stationed on the remote Pacific island of Tinian, training "to use a weapon system that had never even been tested, much less used before." The 39-square-mile island, captured in a Marine assault a year earlier, had become the largest operational

BY JAMES WEBB

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY EDDIE ADAMS

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PAGE 4 • JULY 30, 1995 • PARADE MAGAZINE

airport in the world, as fleets of B-29s conducted almost daily raids against Japan. Among the young airmen, there was an abiding sense of purpose: If their efforts did not bring Japan to its knees, a long a bloody ground campaign would ensue.

It is difficult for Sweeney and others to comprehend the allegations by some historians that Japan would have surrendered without this effort, embodied in the recent controversy over the Smithsonian

[[image - black & white photograph of President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson]]
UPI/Bettmann

[[image - black & white photograph of Chuck Sweeney in B-29 airplane cockpit]]

National Atomic Museum/Sygnia

'We wanted to prevent an invasion, and we did. We saved thousands of lives. We shortened the war."

[[image - black & white photograph o the Enola Gay in flight]]

NASM/Sygnia

Above left: President Truman (l), who made the final decision to use the bomb, with Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, on Aug. 8, 1945. Above: Chuck Sweeney in a B-29 in August 1945. Left: The Enola Gay carried the first atomic bomb.

Institution's now drastically scaled-back atomic bomb exhibit. In its original form, the exhibit downplayed the casualty estimates for a U.S. invasion given to President Truman prior to his decision to drop the bomb, provided more narrative space to anti-Asian racism in the U.S. than to the attack on Pearl Harbor, included only six sentences on Japan's nearly 10 years of aggression in Asia prior to the U.S. entry in the war, and showed 49 photos of suffering Japanese and three of Americans.

When asked about the exhibit, Sweeney may have spoken for a multitude who have had to endure the moral ambiguity of virtually every battlefield: "I don't need some '60s-type professor poisoning the minds of our kids about how terrible America was. Did any of these historians have the strength to make the decision that Truman had to make?"

By the time Sweeney took off to drop the second atomic bomb, we'd been fighting for more than three years to push back a Japanese military expansion that had conquered Korea, most of China, Southeast Asia and Pacific Oceania. Island by island, cave by cave, America and its allies had paid a heavy price to reverse this aggression.

And despite contemporary argument to the contrary, those who would be invading Japan if the war continued had no doubt that casualties would be immense. As Bruce Lee notes in his book Marching Orders, President Truman had been briefed to the effect that an invasion would mean 600,000 U.S. casualties in the first 30 days alone.

To preclude such slaughter, the U.S. military in early 1945 began a massive bombing campaign to break Japan's spirit and force an end to the war. Firebombs were dropped on predominantly civilian targets. "They'd run 16,000 pounds of napalm per plane," recalled Sweeney. "Hundreds of planes a night, for months on end. By August there was no reason to put the atomic bomb on Tokyo, Osaka or Nagoya. They were already reduced to rubble."

American leaders and citizens alike were strongly behind such bombings. But even after the first atomic bomb was dropped, Japan did not surrender. Just the day before Sweeney's flight, a strong faction in the military, led by Japan's War Minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, still wanted to fight one more great battle on Japan's main islands, regardless of cost.

Sweeney recounted that by the time they departed on the Nagasaki mission, he and his crew had been through nearly a year of rigorous, highly secret training. The 509th Composite Group—commanded by Col. Paul W. Tibbets, who piloted the first atomic bomb mission—was organized outside normal military chains of command, reporting only to the highest authorities. The mission was so classified that crew members were forbidden even to talk to each other about it. Upon arriving on Tinian, they were instructed to tell other airmen they were merely developing a new "blockbuster" conventional bomb.

On the morning of Aug. 9, Sweeney took off from Tinian, banking over the island of Saipan, where some of the bloodies fighting of the war had taken place. Because of bad weather, the mission's three planes flew over Iwo Jima, where more Marines had died than would perish in the entire Korean war. If the mission were aborted or they ran out of fuel, they would be diverted to Okinawa, where the bloodies battle of the Pacific had been waged. The dead there had included 150,000 civilians—more than the number of military deaths on both sides.

The mission became treacherous for Sweeney and his crew. Weather forced them from Kokura, their principal target, to Nagasaki, a secondary one. Once the bomb was dropped, fuel was so low that Sweeney canceled a damage-assessment turn over the city and headed for Okinawa, at the same time preparing to ditch in the sea. When Sweeney landed on Okinawa, he and his crew had been flying for 12 hours. "I was exhausted, physically and mentally," he recalled.

After the war, Sweeney combined running a business with a career in the Air National Guard. He rose to the rank of major general before retiring in 1976. Sweeney has made few public statements regarding the atomic bomb missions, mostly due to his deference to Paul Tibbets. But as he looks back a half-century to the conflict that shaped both him and the world in which we live, those last few days of the war still rankle.

"People should spend more time talking about the Russians, who after a week of war moved in and took the spoils," said Sweeney, pointing out that Russia has yet to return the Kurile Islands to Japanese sovereignty. "We left whatever spoils the Japanese wanted and shipped more to them. We saved five times as many lives as we took, and then we rebuilt their country."

James Webb, former U.S. Secretary of the Navy, received the Navy Cross and the Silver Star for his service in Vietnam. He is the author of four novels.


The Argument

In 1945, after the U.S. dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein warned, "The world is not ready for [nuclear weapons]." As time has passed, the bombings have come to be seen by some as crimes against humanity. This March, Nagasaki's mayor, Hitoshi Motoshima, called the nuclear attacks the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.

No one disputes that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inflicted a horrific number of civilian deaths. (70,000 were instantly killed in Hiroshima, 40,000 in Nagasaki, and still more died later of radiation sickness). But Japan also killed civilians when it bombed Chinese cities, and it has been asserted that if Japan had had nuclear weapons, it would have used them.

Although some historians believe that the U.S. should have tried harder to negotiate a surrender, more U.S. historians agree that Japan was committed to fighting to the end. Experts note that an invasion of Japan and recapture of Japanese-held territory (in China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia) would have cost many lives.

If the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities, it has been argued, so were Japanese actions such as the Bataan Death march, the "medical experiments" performed on Chinese prisoners and the torture and starvation of prisoners of war.

PARADE MAGAZINE • JULY 30, 1995 • PAGE 5

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