At various points during the Bockscar’s nineteen-hour odyssey, many of the crew apparently despaired of surviving, assuming that their airplane was going to crash or ditch at sea—and the commanders on Tinian were left wondering whether the strike plane with its precious cargo had already gone down. Bockscar survived only by making a wild emergency landing on Okinawa, engines running on fumes, where it nearly took out a row of parked B-24s. Many of these issues did not come to light until decades later. When they did, acrimonious charges were exchanged in print between various participants,
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