(See also Atomic Mission from the October 2010 issue of Air Force Magazine. Van Kirk always supported the atomic bombings for avoiding an invasion of Japan that could have killed hundreds of thousands of allied troops and Japanese. A campaign led by Air Force Magazine forced the Smithsonian to cancel that exhibit, and the bomber became a popular attraction at Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. 6, 1945, guided the Enola Gay over Hiroshima to drop the first nuclear bomb in the history of warfare, died Monday at an assisted living facility. The Enola Gay was snarled in controversy in 1994 when the Smithsonian Institution planned to use it in a display that would have depicted the Japanese as victims. Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk, a navigator who on Aug. Three days later, another B-29 from the 509th dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Flying from an airfield on the captured Japanese Island of Tinian, the crew dropped the 9,000-pound weapon, called “Little Boy,” over Hiroshima early on Aug. Paul Tibbets, who commanded the 509th Composite Bomb Group, which was formed to conduct the atomic bomb missions.
Van Kirk, known as “Dutch,” was the navigator in the Enola Gay crew, led by Col. Tom VanKirk says his 93-year-old father died at the retirement home where he.
Theodore Van Kirk died July 28 at a nursing home in Stone Mountain, Ga. The navigator for the Enola Gay spoke about his experience guiding the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb. The last surviving crew member of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, to accelerate the end of World War II, has died.
