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officials had immediately gone into overdrive to contain and spin the story of the A-bomb aftermath. Both in Washington, D.C., and in General MacArthur’s Tokyo, U.S. government had been put on the defensive after the initial Hiroshima press reports came out, during the chaotic first days of the occupation. The American journalism world was very close-knit then, and many of Hersey’s correspondent friends had been posted to Japan to cover the occupation. It is unclear whether Hersey and Shawn knew the extent of the restrictions that had been imposed on Tokyo-based reporters, but they likely had some idea. When Americans opened their newspapers each morning, they instead saw news of the homecomings of American troops, the reconstruction of Europe, the Nuremberg trials of war criminals in Germany, and, of course, the escalating antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union, among other international developments. Other stories had since edged out front-page Hiroshima and Nagasaki headlines. Yet no one had yet followed up with a major, comprehensive story on the true fallout there, and what Hiroshima had looked like under the “impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke masked the target area,” as the New York Times put it.įurthermore, what initial coverage there had been was now tapering off. Months had now passed since the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and still very little had been published on how the atomic bomb had affected its human victims.Ī few early-arriving Allied reporters had managed to get out some distressing dispatches about the fate of Hiroshima, and there were dozens seasoned, ambitious foreign correspondents now based in Tokyo. While it seemed like the coverage had been comprehensive, most of the information had actually dealt with landscape and building destruction. “Most of the reporting up to that time had to do with the power of the bomb and how much damage it had done in the city,” Hersey later recalled. They identified what had seemed so disturbing and incomplete about the coverage so far. The New York Times, the only news outlet to have an eyewitness reporter on the Nagasaki bombing run, would boast to advertisers that it had scooped the world on the story of the atomic bomb and the dawn of the atomic age it remained, as one New Yorker writer put, “the biggest news story in the history of the world.” But for Hersey and Shawn, something essential was missing from the reporting that had initially surrounded the August 6 and August 9 atomic bombings of Japan. He retired in 1976.At lunch, as Hersey and Shawn went through possible story ideas, they discussed Hiroshima. He became a brigadier general in 1956, and at the time was the youngest man in the Air Force to reach that rank. Sweeney was a graduate of North Quincy High School who traced his passion for flying to a local airfield. Only a break in the clouds allowed the bomb to be dropped, Mr. The flight had fuel problems from the start, and clouds and smoke were covering the mission's primary target, the city of Kokura.Īfter making several dangerous passes over the city, he abandoned the primary target and flew to Nagasaki. Sweeney's B-29, the Bock's Car, was harrowing for the crew. Sweeney also played a role in the bombing at Hiroshima, where he flew an instrument plane that accompanied the Enola Gay during that attack. "I hope my missions were the last ones of their kind that will ever be flown." I just wanted the war to be over, so we could get back home to our loved ones," he told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy in 1995. Sweeney also wrote a book, "War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission," to counter what he considered "cockamamie theories" that the bombings were unnecessary.
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He was an outspoken defender of the bombings, appearing on CNN and speaking at colleges and universities. 9, 1945, three days after the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and six days before Japan surrendered.Ībout 70,000 people were killed in the explosion of the bomb, dubbed "Fat Man." It was the first bomb Mr. Sweeney was 25 when he piloted the B-29 bomber that attacked Nagasaki on Aug. Sweeney died Thursday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, hospital spokeswoman Christine Johanson said. Charles Sweeney, 84, a retired Air Force general who piloted the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki in the final days of World War II, has died.