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“He could’ve stayed in the Air Force and retired a general,” DeLisle said. He said Van Kirk was a talented military man, but not one to boast of his achievements or try to promote his legacy. In California, he made his home in Novato.ĭeLisle said Van Kirk lived near the Marin Country Club, often attending local events for veterans. He lived in various spots around the U.S., including the Love Canal area near Niagara Falls, according to his biographer Suzanne Simon Dietz. Tibbets, who remained one of Van Kirk’s lifelong friends, became the Enola Gay’s commander.Īfter their mission, Van Kirk was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and other honors.Īs a civilian, he received a degree in chemical engineering from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and spent 35 years working for the DuPont chemical company. When he was teaching in New Orleans, his old friend, Paul Tibbets, who was then a lieutenant colonel, called to ask him if he’d like to be part of a secret mission. Eisenhower to North Africa.Īfter combat duty, he became a navigation instructor at various locations in the U.S. As a navigator, however, he flew many missions out of England and shuttled Gen. In October 1941 he enlisted as an Army aviator but washed out as a pilot. 27, 1921, in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Van Kirk grew up on a farm. None of us went into monasteries and everything else that a lot of people say we did.”īorn Feb. “We did not suffer any effects from radiation, and none of us, I will add, had any psychological effects,” he told National Public Radio on the bombing’s 60th anniversary in 2005. Van Kirk was frequently asked whether he and the Enola Gay’s other crew members experienced any physical or emotional damage from the bombing. “I have never apologized for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will.” “Do I regret what we did that day? No sir, I do not,” he told the Sunday Mirror, a British newspaper, in 2010. Van Kirk said that without the Little Boy bomb, the war would have gone on for at least two months more and killed additional people. “He did indeed do the job he was required to do.” “He was a very easy-going guy who told it like it was,” said Davis, who noted Van Kirk moved from Marin abour four or five years ago to be closer to family.
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Veteran Ed Davis, of Novato, said Van Kirk had no problem explaining why he followed orders and helped drop the bomb on Hiroshima.
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Veterans’ groups, on the other hand, complained that the display, with its graphic depictions, was too sympathetic toward Japan and made short shrift of the Americans who would have died had the war continued. In 1995, anti-nuclear demonstrators poured blood and ashes over a piece of the Enola Gay on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. In succeeding generations, the question of nuclear weapons was anything but simple. “Under exactly the same circumstances, I’d do it again. It didn’t blow up the airplane, and that was satisfying, too,” he told the Independent Journal. “Our greatest satisfaction was that the bomb worked, that the mission was a success. Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, felt little emotion. A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet. Little Boy ushered in the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a flash. They dropped a 10,000-pound bomb code-named Little Boy that took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. You had to be pretty stupid if you didn’t know,” he told the Independent Journal in 2000.īoarding the stripped-down B-29 on the island of Tinian in the northern Marianas, Van Kirk and his crewmates flew some 1,700 miles to Japan. The base was crawling with the leading atomic physicists of the time. “It didn’t take long to figure out (our mission). While the payload was never specified, he said the trainings at Wendover Air Force Base in Utah were super secret - leading him to quickly ascertain what was in the works. In 1944, he was told that he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. A veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk had plenty of stories to share.