“He did indeed do the job he was required to do.” “He was a very easy-going guy who told it like it was,” said Davis, who noted Van Kirk moved from Marin abour four or five years ago to be closer to family. Military and aviation historian Ed Davis, of Novato, said Van Kirk had no problem explaining why he followed orders and helped drop the bomb on Hiroshima. Veterans’ groups, on the other hand, complained that the display, with its graphic depictions, was too sympathetic toward Japan and made short shrift of the Americans who would have died had the war continued. In 1995, anti-nuclear demonstrators poured blood and ashes over a piece of the Enola Gay on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. In succeeding generations, the question of nuclear weapons was anything but simple.
“Under exactly the same circumstances, I’d do it again. It didn’t blow up the airplane, and that was satisfying, too,” he told the Independent Journal. “Our greatest satisfaction was that the bomb worked, that the mission was a success. Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, felt little emotion. A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet. Little Boy ushered in the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a flash. They dropped a 10,000-pound bomb code-named Little Boy that took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. You had to be pretty stupid if you didn’t know,” he told the Independent Journal in 2000.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. The base was crawling with the leading atomic physicists of the time. “It didn’t take long to figure out (our mission). While the payload was never specified, he said the trainings at Wendover Air Force Base in Utah were super secret - leading him to quickly ascertain what was in the works. In 1944, he was told that he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. “He always wanted to share something with people.”Ī veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk had plenty of stories to share.
“He was a very passionate man who loved to be around people and loved a good joke,” said DeLisle said, president and CEO of An Airman’s Story Foundation, which has chronicled Van Kirk’s story. He said Van Kirk was an excellent speaker who could carry a crowd and handle criticism gracefully. Military historian Leon DeLisle, of Ross, first met Van Kirk in Novato in the 1980s. Family members said he died from age-related causes. 6, 1945 that killed 80,000 people and hurried the war’s end eight days later.
Van Kirk was the last surviving member of the Enola Gay’s 12-member crew, which was responsible for dropping the atomic bomb on Aug. Longtime Novato resident Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, a navigator who guided the Enola Gay bomber over Hiroshima during World War II to drop the first nuclear bomb in the history of warfare, died Monday at an assisted living center in Stone Mountain, Ga.