← Back to the front page

A Downed Pilot Who Ran Away in a Stolen Enemy Plane and Other Historic Escapes

Khalid Elhassan September 13, 2020 28 min

A P=51 making a low level pass on a German airplane. Art Station

3. Saved by the Weather

Bockscar, the B-29 that took off with an atomic bomb intended for Kokura. National Air and Space Museum

Big Stink, the B-29 with which Bockscar was scheduled to rendezvous, was nowhere to be seen when the bomber with the atomic bomb reached Kokura. So Bockscar circled around, waiting for the film plane to show up. After 40 minutes of flying around, Major Sweeney gave up on Big Stink, and proceeded to Kokura. By then, however, clouds, plus smoke from a conventional bombing raid on a nearby city, had combined to obscure Kokura.

For the next 50 minutes, Bockscar crisscrossed the skies above Kokura, hoping for enough of a break in the cloud and smoke to drop its bomb. Below, the Kokurans went about their daily lives, oblivious to the death circling above. After three failed bombing runs, Sweeney finally gave up and flew at a new heading for his designated alternate target in case he was unable to bomb Kokura: Nagasaki. One city’s salvation proved to be another city’s doom.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.