But even Nagasaki's got cloud cover. We decided we couldn't take the bomb back to Tinian, so Sweeney says we've got to drop it by radar or drop it in the oceanand we sure as heck didn't want to drop it in the ocean. Ashworth walks off somewhere in the plane and comes back 10 or 15 minutes later and says if we absolutely have to drop it by radar, then we can. So that's what we were going to dobut about 30 seconds before the drop, we hear Beahan shout, "I think I've got it!" He'd found a hole in the clouds, so we didn't need to use radar. The bomb hit the city on the other side of these big hills around Nagasaki. Most of the people lived on the side where the bomb didn't go. It saved a lot of civilian lives.
As I was watching the same dust and mushroom cloud sweep over the city that I'd seen over Hiroshima, [Sergeant Raymond] Gallagher started shouting, "The bomb's going to hit the airplane!" That must have been what it seemed like back therelike the cloud was going to hit us. This one shook the plane more than the other did. We felt about three strong shock waves. Even as we were moving away from it, we could still see the mushroom cloud.
About a week or 10 days later, Tibbets and I flew a C-54 transport plane into Nagasaki to take some doctors and other civilians there. I saw people looking out their windows at us. I saw a lot of hatred in their eyes, but I could also see that they were glad the war was over. I went up to the top of a hill where a hospital was. I saw a poor guy begging by the side of it; it looked as if he was still bleeding, and his clothes were all ripped up. I felt so sorry for him. Inside the hospital I saw a shadow on the walla person had obviously been walking by that wall when the bomb went off. I had never really appreciated until then that this bomb could do something like that. All I could keep thinking was, I hope there is never, ever another time when we have to use one of these.