Van Kirk, born in Pennsylvania, flew missions in Europe during the war and visited Nagasaki after the atomic blast there. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, carrying 12 crew members, dropped the atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima in the closing days of WWII. “The bomb really saved lives, in spite of the tremendous number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the destruction that would have been caused in Japan otherwise would have been tremendous,” he said in an oral history for Georgia Public Broadcasting. He later told reporters that, after seeing one atomic bomb explode in war, he never wanted to see another one used again.īut he defended the use of the bomb, describing it as the lesser of two evils when compared to the continued aerial assault of the Japanese main islands and a planned U.S. Van Kirk was the navigator on the flight. 6, 1945, has died at a retirement home in Georgia at age 93, media reports said.
Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the last surviving member of the crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.
