"We'd talk about playing golf or kids or just go visit each other."Įvery year around this time the calls start coming in, he says - requests to speak at high schools, events, public appearances. "Let's just say it was - more descriptive."Įven as he sits surrounded by mementos, Mr Van Kirk says neither he nor his friends let that day define their lives. "But I'm not going to tell you what Bob's first thing was." He pauses. Radio operator Dick Nelson, the youngest of the crew at 19, sent word back to command: "Results excellent."īob Lewis, the co-pilot, kept a log of the flight, and is remembered for saying the infamous words, "My God, what have we done?" "General Rose wanted to know, the scientists wanted to know," he says. They just took a look before heading back, because everyone wanted a report, he says. Contrary to reports, Mr Van Kirk flatly denies they circled the target. "That's the best way I can describe it."Īfter the shock waves subsided, Tibbets turned the plane around to survey. "It's like when a rock hits a still pool of water," he says. The concussion rocked the plane like anti-aircraft fire. "And then there was an orange light so bright from the back of the plane that I think you didn't have on goggles, you'd probably be blind."Ībout 140,000 people were killed or died within months of the bomb "For 43 seconds, nothing happened," he pauses. But Little Boy detonated 1,800ft above Hiroshima at 8.15am. The plane turned hard to the right to escape the blast they weren't sure would even come. I've got it down the line.'" he recalls.Īnd the 9,400-lb bomb, named Little Boy, dropped from the plane.
![enola gay crew on the bomb enola gay crew on the bomb](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/D1IAAOSwfp9bIAIb/s-l300.jpg)
Unusually for friends so accustomed to jokes and pranks, there was no extraneous talk, no frivolity, only talk that involved the task at hand. And if you talked about it, you were even more stupid."Īs flight navigator in the days before sat-nav, Mr Van Kirk's job was to guide the plane to Hiroshima by following rivers, towns and landmarks. "But if you don't know by then what was going on, you were stupid. "They kept telling us we were going to do something and destroy an entire city," he says, shaking a knowing finger. As they neared the target the mission remained secret, even for the crew. For the flight, Tibbets renamed the plane in honour of his mother. "Sleep? After that? There was no way we were going to sleep," he says. Mr Van Kirk, third from left, says he never let the flight define him Probably best to be at least nine miles away.'" And we said, 'you think?' They said, 'We just don't know. "One said, 'We think that you'll be OK if you're nine miles away when the bomb explodes,'" he recalls.
![enola gay crew on the bomb enola gay crew on the bomb](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/vfAAAOSwL05cWZ12/s-l400.jpg)
But not even the scientists had all the answers. The crew learned about their mission from the atomic scientists who had come to their base on the island of Tinian. In spring 1945, the war in Europe drew to a close while the battle in the Pacific raged on and an allied invasion of Japan seemed imminent. He remained friends with bombardier Tom Ferebee and pilot Paul Tibbets until their deaths in 20 respectively. But I just could not see how they could continue the war and subject their people to that." "Look, we did what we had to do," he says. The bomb killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese, but it ended the war and precluded an invasion of Japan, and Mr Van Kirk says he has no regrets. Just that maybe it would shorten the war." "We didn't know at first what we were going to do. "I looked out the window and saw the just-rising sun and thought about what a beautiful morning it was over the Pacific," he recalls, sitting in his home office surrounded by pictures, books, model planes, awards and mementos marking the mission. On the morning of 6 August, 1945 he, two of the closest friends and nine other Americans took off for the flight that launched the world into the nuclear age. To his family and friends, the elderly man in a little retirement community in Georgia is just "Dutch".īut 65 years ago on Friday, Lt Theodore Van Kirk was flight navigator for the Enola Gay on its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On board the flight that bombed HiroshimaĪs the Japanese city of Hiroshima marks the 65th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack, a member of the US crew that dropped the weapon talks to the BBC's Kristin Wilson about his memories of that day.