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Theodore Jerome VanKirk, the son of a truck driver and a homemaker, was born Feb. The attack on Nagasaki was still to come, however, with an additional 80,000 deaths. VanKirk said, they believed the war was over. You could see some fires burning on the edge of the city.” I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar. “The entire city was covered with smoke and dust and dirt. . . “We turned to where we could look out and see the cloud, where the city of Hiroshima had been,” he told the New York Times decades later. The men braced themselves for the possibility of a dud. VanKirk recalled counting with the crew members “one thousand one, one thousand two” to 43 seconds - the length of time predicted to elapse between release and explosion. Tibbets pulled a sharp turn and swift getaway to escape the force of the blast.
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The crew members knew that after the bomb was released, the plane would lurch from the loss of weight. He said he deduced the nature of his cargo after contemplating the estimates of the weapon’s force, observing the physicists on site and putting “two and two together.” The words “atomic” and “nuclear” were not used, Mr. The assembled crew convened in Utah to train for the secret mission. “We’re going to do something that I can’t tell you about right now,” Tibbets explained, “but if it works, it will end or significantly shorten the war.” VanKirk recalled the conversation in an interview years later with Time magazine. He was 93 and had recently developed vascular disease, said his son Tom VanKirk.ĭutch VanKirk was serving stateside as a navigation instructor in 1944 when he received a call from Tibbets, his former commanding officer in Europe and the soon-to-be commander of the Enola Gay. VanKirk, who was widely reported to be the last survivor of the 12-member Enola Gay crew, died July 28 at a retirement community in Stone Mountain, Ga. Together, the attacks hastened Japan’s surrender and marked the beginning of a new era in war. Three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb, called “Fat Man,” on the city of Nagasaki. An estimated 140,000 died from its explosion and aftereffects. It was the first atomic bomb used in war. local time, the bomb, known as “Little Boy,” fell from the belly of the plane. “Dutch had us going straight for it.”Īt 8:15 a.m. “All I had to do was sit there and wait,” Ferebee, the bombardier, later told a newspaper interviewer. VanKirk recognized the landmarks of Hiroshima, including the T-shaped Aioi Bridge that was their precise target. The outlines of the Pacific islands and the positions of the stars would be his guide.įive and a half hours after take-off - just 15 seconds behind schedule - the B-29 Superfortress arrived at its destination in Japan. At 24, he was the veteran of nearly 60 combat missions in World War II. “I wasn’t able to sleep.”īefore dawn, he took his place as the navigator in the Enola Gay.
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“I don’t know how they expect to tell you that you’re going out to drop the atom bomb and not know if it’s going to work or if it’s going to blow up the airplane, and then tell you to go get some sleep,” Mr. Instead, he passed the night playing cards with two friends in the Army Air Forces, a bombardier named Tom Ferebee and pilot Paul Tibbets.
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6, 1945, and Theodore “Dutch” VanKirk was supposed to be sleeping.