History

     The United States, Soviet Union, and other allied forces were all in a nuclear arms race. They all desired a supremacy in nuclear warfare, the United States began before World War II in an effort known as the Manhattan Project. During World War II the pressure was on to create the first atomic bomb. Whomever could create the atomic bomb would have the whole world in his hands. to be used as a staging area. At this meeting, they used the casualty death rates at Okinawa as a model to formulate a casualty figure for Operation Olympic. They came to the conclusion that about one million lives would probably be lost. 

     As the war with Germany drew closely to the end, the Allies were also in another battle against Japan. The Allied forces held the Potsdam Conference to discuss the best ways to go about winning the war in the Pacific. It was agreed that if they were unable to be victorious, they would drop the atomic bombs in hopes that they would get the Japanese to surrender.


     Allied forces learned their lesson at the Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg. It was an eighty-two day long battle where the ferocity of the battle couldn’t be described. The battle resulted in one of the highest number of casualties and it was here that the Japanese were using kamikaze suicide attack methods. Japanese civilians were even committing suicide because they could not deal with the shame of admitting defeat. Since the United States knew that Japan would rather commit mass suicides than admit defeat, they were put in a tough spot. The person who was put in the toughest spot of all was Harry Truman.

On June 8, 1945 Truman was in a meeting with his military advisers. Here they discussed Operation Olympic, which was intended to capture the southernmost main Japanese island, with the help of the recently captured island, Okinawa.

     Harry Truman decided the best thing to do would be to drop the end all be all atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two cities were not chosen because they had a large population, they all had to meet a certain criteria. This criteria stated that the selected targets must have a high military strategic value and the site must have been relatively untouched by previous bombings.

     They chose Hiroshima because it was a military city that harbored Japan’s Second Army Group command, the Fifth Division command and dozens of military equipment factories. Nagasaki was chosen because the Americans believed it contained great military value to Japan. Nagasaki had valuable war materials that were being produced and any interruption in the flow of these materials would prove to be very detrimental to the Japanese war effort.

     On August 6, 1945 a B-29 bomber nicknamed Enola Gray dropped the first nuclear bomb nicknamed “Little Boy.” The pilot of the plane was Army Air Force Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. Three days later on August 9^th the second bomb, nicknamed "Fat Man" was dropped on the city of Nagasaki by Major Charles W. Sweeney. Five days after dropping the second atomic bomb, Japan asked for an armistice, or ceasefire. On September 2nd, 1945 Japan signed an unconditional surrender.
　



“Fat Man” is the codename for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, at 10:47 PM. The name also refers more generically to the early nuclear weapon designs of U.S. weapons based on the “Fat Man” model. It was an implosion-type weapon with a plutonium core, similar to the Trinity device tested only a month earlier in New Mexico.

 　

Bockscar is the name of the United States Army Air Forces B-29 bomber that dropped the “Fat Man” nuclear weapon over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the second atomic weapon used against Japan.The name painted on the aircraft after the mission is a pun on “boxcar” after the name of its aircraft commander, Captain Frederick C. Bock.