“Our greatest satisfaction was that the bomb worked, that the mission was a success. Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, felt little emotion. A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet. Little Boy ushered in the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a flash. They dropped a 10,000-pound bomb code-named Little Boy that took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. You had to be pretty stupid if you didn’t know,” he told the Independent Journal in 2000.īoarding the stripped-down B-29 on the island of Tinian in the northern Marianas, Van Kirk and his crewmates flew some 1,700 miles to Japan. The base was crawling with the leading atomic physicists of the time. “It didn’t take long to figure out (our mission). While the payload was never specified, he said the trainings at Wendover Air Force Base in Utah were super secret - leading him to quickly ascertain what was in the works. In 1944, he was told that he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. He continued: “Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I believe that when you’re in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.A veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk had plenty of stories to share. “It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence.” “We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat,” he said. Van Kirk joined his fellow crewmen in unwavering defense of the atomic raids. But over the years, the morality of atomic warfare and the need for the bombings has been questioned. The crews that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seen by Americans as saviors for ending the war. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Bucknell University and became a marketing executive with DuPont.īesides his son Thomas, survivors include another son, Larry two daughters, Vicki Triplett and Joanne Gotelli seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Van Kirk retired from military service in 1946 as a major, having received the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross. Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bomb. In the summer of 1945, the 509th conducted its final training on Tinian, and President Harry S. Van Kirk recalled Colonel Tibbets’s words in a 2005 Time magazine interview: “He told me, ‘We’re going to do something that I can’t tell you about right now, but if it works, it will end or significantly shorten the war.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, buddy, I’ve heard that before.’ ” Eisenhower to Gibraltar in November 1942 in preparation for the invasion of North Africa.Īs Mr. Their B-17 Flying Fortress, named Red Gremlin, became the lead plane in the 97th Bomb Group’s missions and flew Gen.
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He attended Susquehanna College for a year, then became an Army Air Forces cadet in October 1941.Ĭolonel Tibbets, flying with the Eighth Air Force out of England, selected Captain Van Kirk and Major Ferebee for his crew the next year.
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27, 1921, and reared in Northumberland, Pa. Theodore Van Kirk - everybody called him Dutch - was born on Feb. 15, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. Three days later, another B-29 dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Van Kirk told it, by “more generals and admirals than I had ever seen in one place in my life.” Shortly before 3 p.m., the crewmen returned to Tinian and were greeted, as Mr. “Even though you were still up there in the air and no one else in the world knew what had happened, you just sort of had a sense that the war was over, or would be soon,” he told Bob Greene in Mr. You could see some fires burning on the edge of the city.” I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar. He added: “The entire city was covered with smoke and dust and dirt.