Last crew member of Enola Gay dies in Georgia
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| FILE - In this May 21, 2009 file photo, Theodore "Dutch'' VanKirk visits a veteran's group at the Golden Corral in Macon, Ga. The navigator for the Enola Gay spoke about his experience guiding the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb. Tom VanKirk says his 93-year-old father died at the retirement home where he lived in Georgia on Monday, July 28, 2014. He was the last surviving member of the Enola Gay crew. |
ATLANTA (AP)
-- The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II and forcing the world into
the atomic age, has died in Georgia.
Theodore
VanKirk, also known as "Dutch," died Monday of natural causes at the
retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom
VanKirk said. He was 93.
VanKirk flew nearly
60 bombing missions, but it was a single mission in the Pacific that
secured him a place in history. He was 24 years old when he served as
navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the
first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of
Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
He was teamed with
pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets' fledgling
509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission No. 13.
The
mission went perfectly, VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005
interview. He guided the bomber through the night sky, just 15 seconds
behind schedule, he said. As the 9,000-pound bomb nicknamed "Little Boy"
fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crewmates hoped to escape
with their lives.
They didn't know whether the
bomb would actually work and, if it did, whether its shockwaves would
rip their plane to shreds. They counted - one thousand one, one thousand
two - reaching the 43 seconds they'd been told it would take for
detonation and heard nothing.
"I think everybody in the plane concluded it was a dud. It seemed a lot longer than 43 seconds," VanKirk recalled.
Then came a bright flash. Then a shockwave. Then another shockwave.
The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima.
Three
days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The
blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Six days after the
Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered.
Whether
the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated
endlessly. VanKirk told the AP he thought it was necessary because it
shortened the war and eliminated the need for an Allied land invasion
that could have cost more lives on both sides.
"I
honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long
run. There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were
Japanese," VanKirk said.
But it also made him wary of war.
"The
whole World War II experience shows that wars don't settle anything.
And atomic weapons don't settle anything," he said. "I personally think
there shouldn't be any atomic bombs in the world - I'd like to see them
all abolished.
"But if anyone has one," he added, "I want to have one more than my enemy."
VanKirk
stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. Then he
went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on
with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. He later moved
from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter.
Like
many World War II veterans, VanKirk didn't talk much about his service
until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son
said.
"I didn't even find out that he was on
that mission until I was 10 years old and read some old news clippings
in my grandmother's attic," Tom VanKirk told the AP in a phone interview
Tuesday.
Instead, he and his three siblings
treasured a wonderful father, who was a great mentor and remained active
and "sharp as a tack" until the end of his life.
"I know he was recognized as a war hero, but we just knew him as a great father," Tom VanKirk said.
VanKirk's
military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, "My True Course," by
Suzanne Dietz. VanKirk was energetic, very bright and had a terrific
sense of humor, Dietz recalled Tuesday.
Interviewing
VanKirk for the book, she said, "was like sitting with your father at
the kitchen table listening to him tell stories."
A
funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on Aug. 5 in his hometown of
Northumberland, Pennsylvania.
He will be buried in Northumberland next
to his wife, who died in 1975. The burial will be private.
