Bockscar ~ Salt Lake > Nagasaki > Dayton

Bockscar ~ National Museum of the USAF , Dayton Ohio

One of the most impressive museums of any type that I have ever visited is the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. I've visited it on 3 different occasions.

What I find absolutely mind-boggling about the place is 2-fold.

1.) the sheer number of things that fly - first the earliest to the latest, from very small to incredibly large, from history-making to ordinary, from planes to missiles to spacecraft - that are displayed indoors is incredible. It is quite simply rather staggering.

2.) the indelible and spine-tingling emotional impact of the place and some of the craft displayed therein.

Consider the photo displayed here of Bockscar - that is the very plane - a B-29 Superfortress - that dropped the atomic bomb - Fat Man - on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Just standing next to and under its open bomb bay doors was both awe-inspiring and horrifying. I was literally overcome by both emotions. Actually touching it with my hand was, and I mean this quite literally, hair-raising on the back of my neck.

FYI, Bockscar was named after Capt. Frederick C. Bock, the aircraft commander who was the plane's regular crew commander. He did not fly the plane on its bombing mission. During that mission, he flew another B-29, The Great Artiste, which observed and recorded scientific measurements of the effects caused by the nuclear weapon. The 2 plane's flight crews were swapped just before the mission and it was Major Charles Sweeney who commanded Bockscar over Nagasaki.

Or, how about standing next to and peering inside of the Apollo 15 Command Module. If that doesn't float your boat, how about stepping inside of the Boeing VC-137C SAM 26000 - better known as Air Force One. Not just any AFO, the AFO which transported JFK to his death in Dallas and on-board of which LBJ took the Oath of Office that same day.

Objects such as these create vivid, emotional, gut/mind-wrenching experiences for me. It is not inaccurate to state that I react to them in manner quite similar to the way I do to good pictures.

At first impression, I am tremendously impressed with the physical object. In the case of those things to be found at the NMUSAF, the sheer weight and complexity of the technology involved is overwhelming to me. Especially so considering the historical context. In most cases these things were at the bleeding edge of humankind's creative and innovative endeavors.

The fact that all of this creative and innovative human energy was/is devoted to the act of killing is what reaches me on a much deeper level than the objects themselves. In the case of Bockscar I find it absolutely impossible to look at it without having a picture in my mind's eye of Fat Boy falling to earth and of the 40,000 or so human beings who would simply cease to exist in one single moment of instantaneous and unimaginable destruction.

I also see in my mind's eye the flight crew as they went about their mission - again, human beings being required by the force of war to act in ways that are nearly unimaginable to me. And then, my mind falls victim to a cascade of thoughts about lives saved by this event.

All of that said, I no longer have to visit the NMUSAF in order to experience these thoughts - this Polaroid picture incites the experience quite well.