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The Great Artiste

From wikipedia:

"...On the mission to bomb Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, it was to have been the aircraft carrying the bomb, but the mission schedule had been moved forward two days because of weather considerations and the instrumentation had not yet been removed from the aircraft. To avoid delaying the mission, Sweeney traded airplanes with the crew of Bockscar to carry the Fat Man atomic bomb to Nagasaki. The crew of Captain Frederick C. Bock flew The Great Artiste to Nagasaki on its instrument support mission, and landed with it on Okinawa at the conclusion of the mission.

In addition to its use on the nuclear bomb missions, The Great Artiste was flown by five different crews on 12 training and practise missions, and by Albury and crew C-15 on two combat missions, one of which was aborted and the other in which it used a Pumpkin bomb to attack the railroad yards at Kobe. Capt. Bob Lewis and crew B-9 flew it to drop a pumpkin bomb on an industrial target in Tokushima.

In November 1945 it returned with the 509th to Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. On September 3, 1948, on a polar navigation training mission, it developed an engine problem after takeoff from Goose Bay Air Base, Labrador, and ran off the end of the runway when attempting to land. Heavily damaged, it never flew again and was eventually scrapped at Goose Bay in September 1949, despite its historical significance.

The Greate Artiste makes a very brief appearance in the take off scene from Tinian in the movie Above and Beyond as an observation plane for the Hiroshima mission. At this point in time, however, it did not have the nose art visible in the movie. It had its nose art painted after the Nagasaki mission, and the name purportedly referred to undisclosed talents of the bombardier, Capt. Beahan.
"

August 9th was the day that Nagasaki was bombed. August 9th was also, for Capt. Kermit K. Beahan, bombadier of the Nagasaki Mission, the man also known as "The Great Artiste"; his 27th birthday.

[back row (L-R)] Captain Beahan, Captain Van Pelt, Jr., First Lt. Albury, Second Lt. Olivi, Major Sweeney

Staff Sgt. Buckley, Master Sgt. Kuharek, Sgt. Gallagher, Staff Sgt. DeHart, Sgt. Spitzer

Here is a TIME Magazine article from August 20,1945.

Here is Kermit Beahans obituary. After the war, he worked as a technical writer until 1985 for Brown and Root. Thats right, the subsidiary of Halliburton!

In 1989, He still has the twinkle in his eye and the rakish moustache of "The Great Artiste". Today not just the commemoration of the Nagasaki bombing but today is also the birthday of Kermit Beahan, a man who hoped that he would be the last man in history to use an atomic weapon in warfare.

Posted @ August 09, 2007 07:14 AM | Aviation

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Posted by: Greybeard at August 9, 2007 05:30 PM