Last surviving Enola Gay crewman dies in Stone Mountain

[Playinghardball]

Handout photo of Capt. Theodore Van Kirk, center, as he and the rest of the crew return from the mission over Hiroshima, Japan Aug. 6, 1945. He was the navigator. Next to the left is Col. Paul Tibbetts, flight commander.


The last surviving crewman of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, died overnight at his Stone Mountain home.
Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, 93, was the navigator on the Aug. 6, 1945 flight that dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb.

With the 2010 death of Morris Jeppson, Van Kirk became the only one of the dozen crew members left.

For a number of years, he lived at a retirement community in Stone Mountain where by chance he found himself sharing the place with James Starnes, an Atlantan who had a front-row seat at history. Starnes was the navigator on the USS Missouri and the mighty battleship’s officer of the deck on Sept. 2, 1945 who greeted Japanese officials boarding to officially surrender.
“We were two individuals who happened to be at historic dates,” said Starnes, who said his friend died Monday after being hospitalized for a few weeks. “The passing always hurts so much. I told someone today that this was the first time I shed a tear for someone in a long time.”

More here: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/last-surviving-enola-gay-crewman-dies-in-stone-mou/ngqZR/

[MoonRiver]

1. My dad, also a WWII veteran died at 93.

R.I.P. Dutch Van Kirk

[Swede Atlanta]

2. While I am torn about the use of the nuclear bomb to end WWII.....

I respect and honor those who served including those who, without really knowing what they were doing, were on the Enola Gay.

I believe I saw on a documentary that they were told they were delivering a very special payload and the pilots and crew had strict instructions to take nose up and away after they discharged their weapon and to not look down. But I don't believe they really had any idea specifically what they were doing. No one wanted to risk a security breach that could compromise the mission.

But I am torn about whether it was moral to use the bomb to end the war. We know certainly that its use hastened the end of the war and probably saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of American and other allied lives. But when you look at the pictures of the aftermath and the terrible suffering of the Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from a moral perspective it makes my stomach turn. Yes the Japanese were largely loyal to the Emperor and his Imperial military but did it justify the horrific results of those bombs?

War is not pretty and the Japanese were savages. You read about how they treated Koreans and Chinese, the Batan Death March, etc. They were no boy scouts by any means.

[caraher]

5. This prompted me to read more about the crew

It was apparently a badly-kept secret if this Tibbets interview is to be believed...

After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, "You know what we're doing today?" They said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I said, "Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special." My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, "Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I said, "Bob, you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, "OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They listened intently but I didn't see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We'd been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen.

Apparently Norm Ramsey told him the bomb would be about 20 kT in yield, though Tibbets had no notion just what that meant beyond worrying about how they'd survive the blast:

ST: Did Oppenheimer tell you about the destructive nature of the bomb?

PT: No.

ST: How did you know about that?

PT: From Dr Ramsey. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. I'd never seen 1lb of TNT blow up. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang.

Navigator Van Kirk has a similar tale...

SPIEGEL: Did you know you were using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

Van Kirk: They didn't tell me a damn thing, but if you had any brains and you were in our organization you could figure it out. They did tell us that we would be dropping a bomb that would essentially destroy an entire city. There were also a lot of nuclear physicists hanging around our base on the island of Tinian -- and one fellow who was there had been on the cover of Time magazine a few years earlier. After the successful weapon test in New Mexico, they brought a film, but they couldn't get the projector to work. We could build atomic bombs, but we couldn't get a projector to work. But those who knew it was going to be an atomic bomb kept their mouths shut about it.

Most accounts suggest that among Enola Gay crew members, only the tail gunner really had a view of the blast. (After all, they were working hard to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the blast!) Probably the accounts you recall are from crew of the two planes accompanying Enola Gay.

SPIEGEL: What happened after the blast?

Van Kirk: The shock waves were visible to our tail gunner. He could see the heat waves passing and said it was like a parking lot on a hot summer day. When they hit the airplane, the airplane kind of flapped all over like a piece of sheet metal snapping.

[davidpdx]

13. I have read the same description of the conversation on the plane before

Each of the crew members went through detailed training which would have given them some clue to what the military was up to.

[El Supremo]

6. It also saved a million additional Japanese lives.

If you thought the Kamikaze was bad, then the invasion of the home islands was going to be like hell.

[Swede Atlanta]

8. Thanks for that....

Absolutely accept that.....

I realize that the bomb was a way to bring the bloody, brutal war to an end with unconditional surrender. It saved both American and allied lives and the lives of Japanese military and civilians.

I am still internally torn about the use of this weapon when you see the faces of those people, including children, literally incinerated. It turns my stomach.

From a rational perspective it makes sense. On another human and moral level I will remain conflicted for the rest of my life.

[Coventina]

3. I'll let OMD speak for me.....

[Kaleva]

4. I remember the WWII vets being in their late 30's and early 40's

So many of them back then but I don't personally know one still living today.

RIP Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk

[MineralMan]

7. I was born eight days before Hiroshima.

My father was a B-17 pilot. I suppose I was a true Baby Boomer. Just over a week old when warfare changed forever...

[locks]

9. We had no idea if lives were saved but we wanted to believe that.

We certainly knew after Hiroshima that the Japanese were ready to surrender and we had no justification to destroy Nagasaki. Only Oppenheimer faced up to what we had created and when he wanted to put that knowledge to peaceful purposes we crucified him. We all became death, destroyer of worlds. To this day.

[Dreamer Tatum]

10. Ah yes, Hiroshimas is coming

Once a year we have the same knock-down, drag-out fight about just how evil the United States was on 8/6/45 and a few days
after.

Great times.

[greytdemocrat]

11. RIP nt

[davidpdx]

12. RIP Major Van Kirk