Second World War
Kokura was the primary target of the nuclear weapon "Fat Man" on August 9, 1945, but on the morning of the raid, the city was obscured by clouds and smoke from an earlier fire-bombing of the neighboring city of Yahata. Since the mission commander Major Charles Sweeney had orders to drop the bomb visually and not by radar, he diverted to the secondary target, Nagasaki. People use the phrase "Kokura luck" meaning the lucky avoidance of some great misfortune, coined after Kokura was twice spared an A Bomb attack.
Read more about this topic: Kokura
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“We, too, had good attendance once,
Hearers and hearteners of the work;
Aye, horsemen for companions,
Before the merchant and the clerk
Breathed on the world with timid breath.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But no, he only said,
“Well, there’s the storm. That says I must go on.
That wants me as a war might if it came.
Ask any man.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)