Aircraft en route to Nagasaki; shots of “Bock's Car” filmed by Harold Melvin Agnew. Footage shot above the city of Kokura, Japan, August 9, 1945, 16mm film transferred to video, silent, 1 min. 28 sec. Source: Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
Harold Melvin Agnew was an American physicist at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory who participated in the second atomic strike mission. Flying as a scientific member of the crew of the B-29 bomber “The Great Artiste,” used for scientific measurements of the effects caused by the nuclear weapon, Agnew filmed the flight of the B-29 “Bock’s Car” which carried the bomb nicknamed Fat Man. In this footage, “Bock’s Car” is flying above the city of Kokura, the intended target of the August 9, 1945 nuclear bombing mission. The planes were behind schedule, and the sky above the target had become overcast with clouds. The film shows “Bock’s Car” circling Kokura in search for a hole in the cloud cover which it does not find, preventing it from dropping the bomb. The plane eventually deviates to the mission’s secondary target: Nagasaki, which was annihilated instead.