"In a B-29 at 30,000 feet it seems like a hell of a jolt," he told the Witness to War Foundation.Īfter the shockwaves had passed, the B-29 turned around to examine the destruction below. Two shockwaves, measured at 3 Gs each, caught up with the plane, Van Kirk recalled. The bomb detonated 43 seconds after it was dropped from the Enola Gay, as the pilot turned the plane away from the blast. Van Kirk, who also saw action in a B-17 in Europe and North Africa, described the Hiroshima mission as an easy one because the plane faced no enemy opposition and was flying in perfect weather.
The first nuclear weapon used in warfare, Little Boy weighed 9,000 pounds and detonated 1,800 feet over Hiroshima with an explosive force that equaled 20,000 tons of TNT, according to the National Museum of the U.S. The plane carried Little Boy, the nickname for the first of two atomic bombs dropped over Japan - actions which forced Japan's surrender. "How they expected to tell you you were going out and dropping the first atomic bomb and it might blow up the airplane and go get some sleep, is absolutely beyond me," Van Kirk said in a video interview with the Witness to War Foundation. When their superiors advised them to get some rest after one of their last briefings, Van Kirk played poker with his crew mates instead. He had a lot on his mind the day before the mission. The city was home to 250,000 people, as well as an important army headquarters. Van Kirk served as the navigator for a crew of 12 aboard the Enola Gay, helping to guide the aircraft to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, the last living crew member of the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II, died Monday at his Georgia home at the age of 93, reports The New York Times. But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not.Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk talks about the flight of the Enola Gay at his home in Stone Mountain, Georgia in July 2005. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.