Van Kirk left the military in 1946 with the rank of major. Dwight Eisenhower to Gibraltar to command the North African invasion forces. Mark Clark to Gibraltar for a secret meeting with the French prior to Operation Torch. In October 1942 Van Kirk’s plane flew Gen. His first assignment in Europe was as the navigator of the Red Gremlin, which also included Tibbets and Ferebee among its crew. The Pennsylvania native had joined the Army Air Force Aviation Cadet Program prior to the US’s entry into the conflict and in April 1942, he received both his commission and navigator wings, and was transferred to the 97th Bomb Group, the first operational B-17 Flying Fortress unit in England. You could see some fires burning on the edge of the city.’īy the time Van Kirk began to prepare for the atomic bomb mission in late 1944, he had already flown 58 missions. I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar. He added: ‘The entire city was covered with smoke and dust and dirt. ‘Shortly after the second wave, we turned to where we could look out and see the cloud, where the city of Hiroshima had been.’ Van Kirk told The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima raid. ‘The plane jumped and made a sound like sheet metal snapping,’ Mr. Van Kirk likened to a photographer’s flashbulb engulfed the cabin. Major (Thomas) Ferebee released the bomb, known as Little Boy, and 43 seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno, leaving tens of thousands dead or dying and turning Hiroshima into scorched devastation.Ĭolonel Tibbets executed a diving turn to avoid the blast effects, but the Enola Gay was buffeted by a pair of shock waves. The New York Times described the ensuing moments in its obituary of Van Kirk: Van Kirk navigated the Enola Gay from Tinian in the Mariana Islands to Hiroshima, on the Japanese island of Honshu, a six-and-a-half hour flight, within a few seconds of its original estimated time of arrival. 15 the Japanese surrendered, ending the Second World War. Three days later, the US would drop a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. On Aug. Paul Tibbets, in which their B-29 Superfortress bomber dropped an atomic bomb code-named “ Little Boy” on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. Kirk, called “Dutch,” was 24 years old at the time of the famous flight, piloted by Col. 6, 1945, died Monday of natural causes at the Park Springs Retirement Community in Stone Mountain, Ga. Theodore Van Kirk, who served as the navigator aboard the Enola Gay on Aug.
The last surviving crew member of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan near the end of World War II, has died.Ĭapt.