In October 2007, according to Wikipedia, Van Kirk auctioned off the flight log he kept on board the Enola Gay for $358,500. Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan death march, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I believe that when you're in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.” In a war, there are so many questionable things done. It's really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence. “We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat. “We were at war for five years,” he said. VanKirk was 24 years old at the time.Īsked during a 1995 interview with the New York Times if he would do it again if he could go back in time, VanKirk said that if the circumstances were the same, then yes. VanKirk, also known as 'Dutch,' was the navigator of the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, that. local time the bomb was released, changing the world forever. VanKirk had been the lone surviving crew member since the death of Morris Jeppson on March 30, 2010. He then resumed his service to train for the Hiroshima bombing from November 1944 to June 1945.ĭuring the bombing run, VanKirk helped confirm the winds and target coordinates as the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima. The crew in Tibbets plane, which carried the bomb, were, as Tibbets put it, pretty busy for the first couple of hours, and it wasnt until they were well out. In June 1943, VanKirk took a break from the war, returning to the U.S. Dwight Eisenhower to Gibraltar to take command of the North African Allied invasion.
Mark Clark to Gibraltar for a North Africa meeting with his French counterparts. Along with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee (both of whom also later flew on the Enola Gay), he participated in 11 bombing missions out of England early in the war, and in October 1942 flew with Gen. VanKirk flew on his share of noteworthy missions though none compared with the Enola Gay for historical impact or human loss. In a 2005 interview with the Associated Press, VanKirk said his World War II experience showed wars and atomic bombs don't settle anything, and he'd like to see the weapons abolished. A second atomic bomb, Fat Man, killed 80,000 in Nagasaki three days later. VanKirk, also known as "Dutch," was the navigator of the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, that dropped Little Boy - the world's first atomic bomb - over the Japanese city of Hiroshima Aug.
VanKirk had been the lone surviving crew member since the death of Morris Jeppson on March 30, 2010. Tom VanKirk says his father, Theodore VanKirk, 93, died Monday in Stone Mountain. The last surviving member of the crew that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima has died in Georgia nearly 70 years after the bombing, which killed 140,000 people.