War's End; An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission

New York: Avon Books, 1997. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xiv, 290 pages. Illustrations. Index. Slight soiling and scratches to DJ. This book is an Association Copy--inscribed on 28 September 1997 by Captain Jeff Smiley, Aide-de-Camp, to a Major General, thanking him "for the opportunity to serve in a position of this level." The author recounts his World War II encounters with Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the revolutionary B-29 bomber who would eventually select him to lead the atomic mission to Nagasaki. Charles W. Sweeney served as a major in the 393rd Bombardment Squadron. He was regularly assigned to the Great Artiste as the aircraft commander and participated in the mission to bomb Hiroshima as co-pilot of the Great Artiste. Days later, he was the aircraft commander on strike plane Bockscar during the Nagasaki Mission. Then Major Charles Sweeney piloted the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the second atomic bomb in Nagasaki, for which he was awarded the Silver Star. He retired from the military in May 1976 with the rank of Major General. 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. On Aug. 9, Major Sweeney piloted the Bockscar, carrying a plutonium bomb even more powerful than the Enola Gay's bomb. 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. A few weeks after the war ended, the two atomic-bomb pilots visited Nagasaki. 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. and Marion K. Antonucci. ''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. ''Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood.'' '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. General Sweeney left military service after the war. He served with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, retiring in 1976 as a major general. Derived from a Kirkus review: Plainspoken reminiscences from the only man to fly both of the missions that dropped atomic bombs on Japan, bringing WW II to a close. A love of flying took Sweeney from his boyhood home in suburban Boston into the US Army as an air cadet well before Pearl Harbor. After winning his wings and a commission on December 12, 1941, he bounced about stateside commands until the fall of 1943. Desperate to secure an overseas assignment, the 23-year-old captain talked Lt. Colonel Paul Tibbets into giving him a billet with the 509th Composite Group. The 509th had been chosen to use the incredibly destructive weapons developed by the Manhattan Project against Japan. Following an intensive training regimen at well- guarded bases in remote areas of America's vast Southwest, Sweeney and his comrades-in-aerial-arms arrived on Tinian in mid-1945. By now a major, he piloted the instrumentation plane that recorded the effects when Tibbets conducted a picture-perfect strike that decimated Hiroshima on August 6. Three days later, Sweeney led the unescorted superfortress flight that laid waste to Nagasaki. While history's first A-bomb assault went like clockwork, the author and his crew had to overcome problems with their plutonium device, fuel shortages, and a host of other difficulties. Eloquent, engrossing testimony of an old-fashioned patriot at peace with his consequential place in military and world history.