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The big worry was whether the plane would blow up after the bomb detonated, he told Georgia Public Broadcasting. He said the Hiroshima mission was relatively easy, with no anti-aircraft fire coming from the ground. Dutch was nearing 90 when I met him as he sat in a hangar, selling a book titled, 'The 509th Remembered, A History. He studied chemical engineering after the war and became an executive with DuPont. The last surviving member of the Enola Gay crew, Van Kirk died on July 27, 2014. He was on the crew of the Enola Gay, which dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan. and by 8:15 the city was alive with activity - soldiers doing their. Van Kirk, born in Pennsylvania, flew missions in Europe during the war and visited Nagasaki after the atomic blast there. Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk dies in Georgia at age 93, his daughter confirms. Hiroshima time the Enola Gay released Little Boy, its. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, carrying 12 crew members, dropped the atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima in the closing days of WWII. “The bomb really saved lives, in spite of the tremendous number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the destruction that would have been caused in Japan otherwise would have been tremendous,” he said in an oral history for Georgia Public Broadcasting. Theodore Van Kirk’s son confirmed he died of natural causes in his Georgia home on Monday the 28th. He later told reporters that, after seeing one atomic bomb explode in war, he never wanted to see another one used again.īut he defended the use of the bomb, describing it as the lesser of two evils when compared to the continued aerial assault of the Japanese main islands and a planned U.S. Last Surviving Member Of Enola Gay Crew Dies. Van Kirk was the navigator on the flight.
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6, 1945, has died at a retirement home in Georgia at age 93, media reports said. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the last surviving member of the crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.