Among other maneuvers, they practiced the sharp turns they’d have to make to escape the bomb’s shock waves. The crew trained for months in Wendover, Utah. Tibbets, who remained one of Van Kirk’s lifelong friends, became the Enola Gay’s commander. When he was teaching in New Orleans, his old friend, Paul Tibbets, who was then a lieutenant colonel, called to ask him if he’d like to be part of a secret mission. Eisenhower to North Africa.Īfter combat duty, he became a navigation instructor at various locations in the U.S. As a navigator, however, he flew many missions out of England and shuttled Gen. In October 1941, he enlisted as an Army aviator but washed out as a pilot. 27, 1921, in Northumberland, Pa., Van Kirk grew up on a farm. None of us went into monasteries and everything else that a lot of people say we did.”īorn Feb.
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“We did not suffer any effects from radiation, and none of us, I will add, had any psychological effects,” he told NPR on the bombing’s 60th anniversary in 2005. Van Kirk was frequently asked whether he and the Enola Gay’s other crew members experienced any physical or emotional damage from the bombing. Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, had just one thought at the time, he said in numerous interviews: “The war’s over.” A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet.
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local time, Little Boy ushered in the dawn of the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a blinding flash. They dropped a bomb code-named Little Boy, which took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. The payload was never specified.īoarding the stripped-down B-29 on the island of Tinian in the northern Marianas, Van Kirk and his crewmates flew some 1,700 miles to Japan.
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The last surviving member of the Enola Gay’s 12-member crew, Van Kirk died of age-related causes, said his son Tom.Ī veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk was told that he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. 6, 1945, guided the Enola Gay over Hiroshima to drop the first nuclear bomb in the history of warfare, died Monday at an assisted living facility in Stone Mountain, Ga. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, a navigator who on Aug.