'Do I regret what we did that day? No sir, I do not,' he told the Sunday Mirror, a British newspaper, in 2010.Īt least 80,000 of Hiroshima's residents were killed instantly and more were contaminated by nuclear fallout. Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, had just one thought at the time, he said in numerous interviews: 'The war's over.' A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet. local time, Little Boy ushered in the dawn of the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a blinding flash. They dropped a bomb code-named Little Boy, which took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. The payload was never specified.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 last surviving member of the Enola Gay's 12-member crew, Van Kirk died of age-related causes, said his son Tom.Ī veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk was told he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. 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 in Stone Mountain, Ga. Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk, a navigator who on Aug.
