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Like the other members of the crew, Van Kirk always maintained that the mission wound up saving more lives than it cost because it hastened the end of the hostilities and ended the war without an invasion of Japan's mainland.īut personally, he became an advocate for an end to war, describing himself as a "confirmed peacenik" to groups he'd speak to. About 80,000 citizens were instantly vaporized and the overall death toll months later was reckoned at about 150,000. He turned back to look and Hiroshima was gone, lost in a plume of thick black smoke, "You could only see a few fires burning on the outskirts."Ī mushroom cloud roiled above their 30,000 foot altitude, so vast it was still visible in their flight path more than 250 miles away. But then the crew could see the shock waves coming at them "like a pebble dropped in a still pool," Van Kirk said. When the blast wave hit the plane, someone called out, "Flak!" thinking they were being hit by anti-aircraft fire. "Like being in a dark closet with a camera flashing." "First indication we had the bomb worked was the bright flash," Van Kirk said. Paul Tibbets swung the plane into a gut-wrenching turn to escape the blast.įorty-three seconds passed uneventfully as the Enola Gay's propellers clawed into the sky to get away. "He sat there and said, 'It's right on the track,' " Van Kirk said.
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There was tension in the aircraft - no one knew whether the bomb would work or whether the plane would survive the blast if it did.įerebee released the bomb and the Superfortress lept into the air, free of its heavy burden.įerebee stared into the bomb sight. when Hiroshima, a sprawling industrial city of 400,000 souls, crept into view. "I never saw such a beautiful sunrise in my life," Van Kirk said. It was droning at 10,000 feet over the broad expanse of the Pacific when the first rays of dawn rose upon it. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay rose into the black sky from the South Pacific island of Tinian and Van Kirk guided the B-29 toward the Japanese mainland. "If you were in the 509th and didn't figure out you were going to drop an atomic bomb, you were pretty stupid," said Van Kirk, who last visited Charlotte in December when he spoke at the Carolinas Aviation Museum.Īt 2:45 a.m. No one told them exactly what they were doing or used the word "atomic." But Van Kirk said the crew figured it out quickly based on obvious clues - their base was swarming with nuclear scientists and their planes had only one hook in the bomb bay. He was back in the United States, teaching other navigators the craft in 1944 when the pilot he'd flown with in Europe, Paul Tibbets, invited him to join a top-secret bomber group, the 509th. "After my first three missions, I said, 'I'm never going to live to be 21,' " Van Kirk once told the Observer.īut he survived 58 combat missions, losing three planes. Van Kirk's first bombing raid over Europe was in 1942 when he was 20.
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Bombardier Tom Ferebee, who died in 2000, was a farm boy from Mocksville in Davie County. Van Kirk was one of two Enola Gay fliers with Carolina connections. He died in Stone Mountain, Ga., near Atlanta, where he had retired after a 35-year career with the chemical company DuPont. 6, 1945, hastening the end of World War II.
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Van Kirk, who lived in Charlotte from 19 and whose son Larry still lives here, was the navigator of the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. When he died Monday at age 93, Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk was the last of the Enola Gay crew, a team that flew one morning to a city named Hiroshima on a mission that would hurl the world into the atomic age. July 30-He flew 58 missions during World War II and never thought he'd live to see 21.