The flight commander, Major Sweeney, found that one of the fuel pumps on the B29 was not working. The crew of ‘Bockscar’ gathered for their takeoff at 03.40 hours, August 9th, at Tinian Island. Both ‘Bockscar’ and ‘Enola Gay’ were B29 Superfortress bombers. Whereas the ‘ Enola Gay‘ had had a relatively uneventful journey to her target at Hiroshima, the same was not true for the plane picked to drop the next atomic bomb – ‘Bockscar’.
However, fate and the weather was to be Nagasaki’s undoing. The city was also broken up with stretches of water. Also, the way Nagasaki had grown as a port meant that the impact of a powerful bomb might be dissipated as the city had grown across hills and valleys. But it was not a favoured target as it had been bombed five times in the previous twelve months and any damage caused by an atomic bomb would have been difficult to assess. Nagasaki was a major shipbuilding city and a large military port. Therefore, the Americans were left with just two targets – Kokura and Nagasaki. The third potential target was Niigata – but this was withdrawn from the list as the distance to it was considered to be too great. Nagasaki was only added to a list of potential targets when Kyoto was withdrawn (it had been the secondary target for a second bomb) because of its religious associations. The three potential targets for a second bomb were Kokura, Kyoto and Niigata. Nagasaki was not America’s primary target.
