Obituary: Fred Olivi

Just after 11am on Thursday August 9 1945, a United States army air force B29, Bock’s Car, dropped an atomic bomb, codenamed Fat Man after Winston Churchill, on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. It came three days after the first A-bomb, Little Boy, had been dropped on Hiroshima. By the time of that second detonation, the world was struggling to comprehend a new era, while the Japanese were wrestling with the implications of waging war while confronted with such an appalling weapon.

Fred Olivi, who has died aged 82, was a crew member on what is, to date, the world’s last A-bomb attack. Alternating with the B29’s commanders, Major Charles ”Chuck” Sweeney and Captain Donald Albury, Olivi was Bock’s Car’s third pilot. He had been commissioned as a second lieutenant just 12 months earlier.

The crew of Enola Gay, the B29 that devastated Hiroshima, were greeted by a media fanfare on their return; not so the 13-strong crew of the troubled Bock’s Car mission. Return for them meant a re-fuelling stop at Okinawa, partly because the B29 had lingered over Japan searching for a target. At Okinawa, Olivi had to let off flares to clear the runway for Bock’s Car’s landing. Back at base, at Tinian, in the Marianas Islands, there was merely a photograph to be taken in front of their giant aircraft, a debriefing, dinner, a drink — and a dressing-down for Sweeney.

After Hiroshima, the second attack had been planned for on or after August 10, but bad weather reports brought the date forward to August 9. The proposed target was Kokura, now part of Kitakyushu. But there were problems with the bomb, storms en route, one of the plane’s escorting B29s never caught up, and Kokura was obscured by haze, smoke and clouds. So Bock’s Car headed for Nagasaki, where a cloud break was seen. Through it went the bomb. It exploded 1 500ft above the Mitsubishi sports stadium, not far from the port’s Catholic cathedral. Nagasaki is the focus of Christianity in Japan.

At 22 kilotons (the equivalent of 22 000 tons of TNT), Fat Man was a more powerful weapon than the 12,5 kiloton Little Boy, but Nagasaki was built around valleys and shielded by mountains. Thus, the toll of casualties was less than at Hiroshima.

A decade ago, interviewed by Lane Earns, of Crossroads, a journal about Nagasaki’s history and culture, Olivi recalled that August morning, when bright light had been followed by debris that, with the cloud, almost totally obscured the city below him. Earlier this year, he said that he could still see, in his mind, the mushroom cloud that rose over the city.

Miles below him that day, Geoffrey Sherring, a British prisoner-of-war, had been sitting in a covered trench, puffing a dog-end. Interviewed by the Imperial War Museum, he recalled ”a bluish light that you get from an electrical welding operation … It came in exactly the opposite direction from the sun’s rays, it completely eclipsed them.” A continuous shaking of the air and earth followed, then darkness, fog, and, later, out of the mushroom cloud, ”a shower of most peculiar rain. It was in very, very large droplets, about as big as grapes, and it was almost entirely mud.”

Sherring crossed the city to where the brick-built cathedral was one of the few buildings left partially standing. He also encountered kites, whose plumage had been burned off in mid-air, stalking the city. They were, he observed, a peculiarly horrific sight. Five days later, Emperor Hirohito announced the Japanese surrender. By the end of 1945, more than 70 000 people had died in Nagasaki; by 1950, there had been a further 70 000 deaths.

Olivi was born and educated in the Pullman district of Chicago, the son of Catholic Italian immigrants. At the time of Pearl Harbour in December 1941, and the entry of the US into the second world war, he was working, in the absence of his father, to support his mother and sister. Despite pleas from his mother, he enlisted in October 1942.

In November 1945, three months after the end of the second world war, the crew of Bock’s Car were flown to Roswell, New Mexico. In 1947, Olivi left the air force and, after failing to find work as a civilian pilot, took a job as a draftsman with Chicago’s city bridge division, rising to the post of manager of bridge operations and maintenance for the city in 1973. He retired in 1986, having continued to serve with the US air force reserves until 1972.

Until incapacitated by a stroke last August, he remained active, touring the US, talking about the raid, and promoting his (self-published) book, Decision At Nagasaki: The Mission That Almost Failed. Like the other crew members, he did not regret the bombing — neither did Sherring — which they saw as speeding the end of the WWII. But Earns described a man opposed to xenophobia, and a veteran who spoke out against residual US anti-Japanese sentiment.

Olivi his met future wife, Carole McVey, when they were in high school in the mid-1930s. They married in 1965. She died in 1998.