16 Facts About Jacob Beser

Jacob Beser was a lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces who served during World War II.

Three days later, Jacob Beser was a crewmember aboard Bockscar when the Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Jacob Beser was the only person to have served as a strike crew member of both of the 1945 atomic bomb missions.

Jacob Beser attended the Baltimore City College and graduated in June 1938.

Jacob Beser then studied mechanical engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, but dropped out the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor to enlist in the Army Air Forces.

Jacob Beser was Jewish and extremely restless to get into the fight against Hitler.

The 509th Composite Group, which Jacob Beser served in, was the army unit tasked with deploying the atomic bombs.

Jacob Beser's job was to monitor those sensors and ensure that there was no interference that could have detonated it prematurely.

Jacob Beser did not watch the bomb detonate but he heard the bomb's radar signals switch on and then cut off at the moment the intense light generated by its detonation filled the plane.

Three days later in a second B-29 Superfortress bomber, Bockscar, Jacob Beser repeated this task over Nagasaki with Fat Man, the plutonium implosion bomb that became the second and last atomic bomb used in combat.

In 1946, Jacob Beser was one of the founding members of Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico.

Jacob Beser came home to Baltimore and in the mid-1950s began a long career working on defense projects for Westinghouse.

Jacob Beser was an amateur radio operator, holding the callsign W3NOD.

Jacob Beser was inducted into the "Hall of Fame" of his alma mater high school, Baltimore City College, the third oldest public high school in America.

Captain Jacob Beser, United States Army Air Forces, for gallantry in action while engaged in aerial flight against the Japanese Empire on 6 August 1945.

Lieutenant Jacob Beser was the Radar Countermeasures Officer for a combat crew of the B-29 aircraft of the 393d Bombardment Squadron, 509th Composite Group, 20th Air Force, which flew from a base in the Marianas Islands to drop on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare.