bockscar planes dropped bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki.
planes that dropped bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki?
bockscar
along with raf group captain leonard cheshire, he accompanied the american team to tinian island from which the hiroshima and nagasaki missions were flown. on 9 august 1945 he witnessed the bombing of nagasaki. the us authorities had controversially stopped them seeing the hiroshima detonation, but at the last minute penney and cheshire were granted permission to fly in the b-29 "big stink", one of the observation planes that accompanied the nagasaki weapon delivery bomber "bockscar". due to the belated permission, "big stink" missed its rendezvous with the bomber at nagasaki. they saw the nagasaki detonation from the air at a distance. as the leading expert on the effects of nuclear weapons, penney was a member of the team of scientists and military analysts who entered hiroshima and nagasaki following the japanese surrender on 15 august 1945 to assess the effects of nuclear weapons.
william penney, baron penney
in its attacks on japan, the usaaf abandoned its precision bombing method that was used in europe before and adopted a policy of saturation bombing, using incendiaries to burn japanese cities. these tactics were used to devastating effect with many urban areas burned out. the first incendiary raid by b-29 superfortress bombers was against kobe on 4 february 1945, with 69 b-29s arriving over the city at an altitude of , dropping 152 tons of incendiaries and 14 tons of fragmentation bombs to destroy about . the next mission was another high altitude daylight incendiary raid against tokyo on 25 february when 172 b-29s destroyed around of the snow-covered city, dropping 453.7 tons of mostly incendiaries with some fragmentation bombs. changing to low-altitude night tactics to concentrate the fire damage while minimizing the effectiveness of fighter and artillery defenses, the operation meetinghouse raid carried out by 279 b-29s raided tokyo again on the night of 9/10 march, dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries from altitudes of , mostly using the e-46 cluster bomb which released 38 m-69 oil-based incendiary bombs at an altitude of . a lesser number of m-47 incendiaries was dropped: the m-47 was a jelled-gasoline and white phosphorus bomb which ignited upon impact. in the first two hours of the raid, 226 of the attacking aircraft or 81% unloaded their bombs to overwhelm the city's fire defenses. the first to arrive dropped bombs in a large x pattern centered in tokyo's working class district near the docks; later aircraft simply aimed near this flaming x. approximately of the city were destroyed and 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting conflagration, more than the immediate deaths of either the atomic bombings of hiroshima or nagasaki. after this raid, the usaaf continued with low-altitude incendiary raids against japan's cities, destroying an average of 40% of the built-up area of 64 of the largest cities.
firebombing