But the initial target for Sweeney and his twenty-fouryear-old co-pilot, First Lieutenant Charles Albury, was not Nagasaki but Kokura, the port city where we had landed in the hellship from Hainan. The young pilots made three passes on Kokura but found it clouded over and were unable to comply with orders to drop the bomb visually if possible. Running low on fuel and fearing they might have to ditch Fat Man in the sea, Sweeney and Albury turned their attention towards nearby Nagasaki. It was covered with cloud too. But suddenly from thirty thousand feet up Bockscar’s twenty-seven-year-old
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