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Interviewing VanKirk for the book, she said, “was like sitting with your father at the kitchen table listening to him tell stories”.Ī funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on 5 August in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania. VanKirk was energetic, very bright and had a terrific sense of humor, Dietz recalled on Tuesday. VanKirk’s military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, My True Course, by Suzanne Dietz. lewis - co-pilot, enola gay' s assigned aircraft commander major thomas ferebee - bombardier captain theodore 'dutch' van kirk - navigator u.s. “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 said. Like many second world war veterans VanKirk didn’t talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said. Here's what the crew of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay saw after dropping the first atomic bomb in history. Tibbets notifies his crew over the intercom and the plane sets course. The weather plane sends a coded message to Enola Gay, advising that Hiroshima is to be the primary target. Many civilians ignore it, unperturbed by the familiar sight of a single B-29 plane flying over the city. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter. On the ground, a yellow alert rings out for 22 minutes. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. “But if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.” In a 2005 interview with the AP, VanKirk said his second world war experience showed that wars and atomic bombs don’t settle anything and he’d like to see the weapons abolished. “I know he was recognized as a war hero but we just knew him as a great father,” he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. The bomb they carried, dubbed Little Boy, was the world's first.
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Tom Van Kirk said he and his siblings were very fortunate to have had such a wonderful father who remained active until the end of his life. Which leaves Van Kirk as the only living crew member of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that set out from Tinian on 6 August 1945. Bomb away members pulled dark goggles over their Suddenly almost five tons lighter, the eyes and listened to bombardier. The 13-man crew for the Enola Gay on its historic Hishoma run were as follows: Colonel Paul Tibbetts, pilot and mission commander. Van Kirk was the navigator of the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress aircraft that dropped “Little Boy” – the world’s first atomic bomb – over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.