“At 25 years of age, I was to be the only pilot who flew both atomic missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I piloted the B-29 carrying the instruments to Hiroshima on the right wing of the Enola Gay. I watched as the Enola Gay’s bomb bay doors snapped open and the 9,000-pound uranium bomb was released. I thought, ‘It’s too late now. There are no strings or cables attached. We can’t get it back, whether it works or not. But if it works, it might just end the war.’ None of us, I remember, was entirely sure what that bomb would do – to its target or to us. . . Three days later, I commanded my first combat mission, to Nagasaki, this time carrying a 10,300-pound plutonium bomb, a weapon that had never been tested free-falling from an airplane before it was loaded into the bomb bay of Bock’s Car on August 8, 1945. The Japanese military surrendered six days later, and World War II came to an end. It was as simple and as complicated as that.” 

Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney, USAF, “War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission,” 1997

Sweeney Talks About Squantum

“We pulled up to the road and turned at the entrance to Dennison Airport. Dennison was a private airport that adjoined the Squantum Naval Air Station. It was only a postage stamp with half a dozen or so open-cockpit airplanes. A sign offered a five-minute airplane ride for $2.00 in an open cockpit biplane. As we lifted off the ground, a feeling of elation overwhelmed me. The sense of breaking away from the bounds of the earth. We climbed [to about 1,000 feet over Wollaston Beach] and I had a wondrous perspective of the earth below. Familiar places in Quincy were unfolding as a single whole. My sense of place was expanding. I was flying! . . . All too soon I felt the weight of gravity pulling us back to the ground as the pilot brought the plane to a landing.I stepped onto the Squantum strip feeling weightless, like I wanted to get back in the air. I looked up at the sky and knew my life would never be the same.”  

Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney, USAF, “War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission,” 1997