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General Sweeney, a native of Lowell, Mass., became an Army Air Forces lieutenant on Dec. ''The true vessel of remorse and guilt belonged to the Japanese nation, which could and should call to account the warlords who so willingly offered up their own people to achieve their visions of greatness,'' he said. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood.'' ''I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation,'' he wrote. General Sweeney recalled that moment in his memoir, ''War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission'' (Avon Books, 1997), written with James A. But questions were ultimately raised as to whether the Truman administration needed to drop the bombs to end the war.Ī few weeks after the war ended, the two atomic-bomb pilots visited Nagasaki. The crews who flew the atomic missions were viewed after the war as the men who averted enormous casualties anticipated if an invasion of Japan had been launched. Six days later, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. Major Sweeney landed on Okinawa with only a minute or so of fuel remaining. A mechanical failure reduced the fuel supply, and both the primary target, the city of Kokura, and the secondary target, Nagasaki, were obscured from the air. The Nagasaki attack proved harrowing for the crew. ''It was a mesmerizing sight, at once breathtaking and ominous.'' ''It seemed more intense, more angry,'' he remembered in his autobiography. At 11:01 a.m., the bomb was dropped on the industrial city of Nagasaki, killing and wounding tens of thousands, heavily damaging a steelworks and arms plant and demolishing thousands of residential buildings, according to an American bombing survey.Īs Major Sweeney turned his plane to escape the blast, he saw a multicolor cloud ''rising faster than at Hiroshima.'' 9, Major Sweeney piloted the Bockscar, carrying a plutonium bomb even more powerful than the Enola Gay's bomb. When the Enola Gay dropped its uranium bomb on the city, unleashing the power of atomic energy for the first time as a weapon of war, the Great Artiste dropped measuring instruments. 6, 1945, accompanying the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Having the rank of major in the Army Air Forces at the time, he flew his bomber, the Great Artiste, to Hiroshima on the morning of Aug. The cause was pulmonary complications of congestive heart disease, his son-in-law Brian Howe said. General Sweeney, who lived in Milton, Mass., was 84. Sweeney, who flew the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the second atomic strike on Japan in the final days of World War II, died Friday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.