BOCKSCAR'S BASH

Flight Journal, Aug 2005 by Albury, Charles Don, Busha, James P

The second atomic bomb mission almost failed!

On Augusts, 1945, calamity afflicted a U.S. Army Air Corps B-29 bomber as it was readied for the second atomic flight over Japan. Here is the story from the copilot who flew in the right seat of a B-29 called Bockscar.

Charles Don Albury remembers: As far as I was concerned, the Army Air Corps couldn't build an airplane big enough for me-the bigger the better! I was grinning from ear to ear when they sent me to Kansas to fly the new stateof-the-art, war-ending bomber called the YB-29 Superfortress. God, it was awesome!

The B-29 was just less than 100 feet long and had a 141-foot wingspan. Bolted to its wings were four 2,200hp Wright R-3350 engines that turned four-blade Hamilton Standard full-feathering propellers, all of which rested on tricycle landing gear. We flew in pressurized comfort surrounded by glass, aluminum and every new bell and whistle invented. This wasn't a B-17 as I had trained in, but the B-29 did have some teething problems.

Most of the problems were with the engines, as they tended to overheat and catch fire. With engine lives of only 10 hours before meltdown, the initial YB-29s that I flew were considered unsafe. We didn't fly them much, and to conserve the 10-hour TBO [time between overhaul], we were towed to the end of the runway where we did our startups. After takeoff, we had to stay at 300 feet AGL to cool the engines until the needles settled back into the green.

As B-29s began to roll off the assembly lines, Boeing worked out most of the bugs. After scrounging as much stick time as I could, I was sent to Eglin Field and became one of a cadre of men who tested and modified the B-29's central fire-control system. My boss was Col. Paul Tibbets. He was a great commander and a superb leader; I had a lot of respect for him. I would have gone to hell and back with him and almost did near the War's end.

As B-29 production increased so, too, did the need for pilots to fly them. A small problem soon developed: the Air Corps found that they were almost out of instructors. I was sent back to Pratt, Kansas, where I rejoined Tibbets along with my future squadron commander Maj. Chuck Sweeney. I took my turn in the ring and helped train new pilots. Despite the moments of sheer terror as I wrestled the controls back from excited student pilots, it was a good life.

One morning, I was called to see Tibbets in Operations, and he asked whether I would like to join him in Wendover, Utah. I had never heard of it, but if Tibbets was going, I would go, too! We soon boarded a brand-new B-29 for the long flight to Utah. In the air, Tibbets told me he was getting an outfit together to take overseas, and he asked whether I wanted to go along. My beaming smile and the nod of my head were acknowledgment enough.

Tibbets then said, "I can't tell you where we are going or why we are going." I sat in stunned silence, wondering what he was talking about. I found out soon enough.

When we touched down at Wendover, I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore. The place was desolate. A couple of runways ran smack dab into the side of a mountain-not a good place for a fully loaded B-29. It had a never-ending runway-the "salt flats." I, along with the rest of the 509th Composite Group, called this godforsaken, inhospitable desert "home."

I was part of the 393rd Bomb Squadron and the pilot in command of a B-29 named The Great Artiste. It was named after our bombardier Kermit Beahan. We had been sent to Cuba on a training mission before we went overseas. We were to drop 20, 200-pound practice bombs on a target in the Atlantic Ocean. We approached the target, and Beahan dropped 10 of the bombs on one side of it and the rest on the other. All of us in the cockpit roared and shouted over the intercom, "Hey, that was a great drop!" Beahan answered back, "That's the Great Artiste!" We named our aircraft to honor him-a great and likable man. He was a hell of a bombardier, too!

Kermit, along with the rest of us, got plenty of practice over the desert as we dropped large, rotund bombs called "pumpkins." These pumpkin flights tested the bomb casings and tail-fin configurations that the scientists in Los Alamos' Project Alberta developed. Eventually, the right combination was found. They named the longer, thinner one "Little Boy" and the large, round one, "Fat Man."

We left Wendover AAF base in mid-1945 and flew 17 brand-new identical Superfortresses that had been stripped of all defensive guns (except the twin .5Os in the tail) to our new base. We had highly modified equipment that included reconfigured bomb bays with new doors installed to accommodate the unusually large bombs they carried. We also had fuel-injected engines that turned full reverse-pitch propellers-a feature that later saved my bacon on Okinawa.

Early on in our training, we had been briefed by Col. Tibbets and high-ranking intelligence people that "What you hear here stays here. Understood?!" I never asked questions about what we were doing, and I never talked to anybody about what they were doing. So when I got my briefing on Tinian about the new project, the intelligence guy didn't believe me when I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.