He will be buried in Northumberland next to his wife, who died in 1975. Interviewing VanKirk for the book, she said, “was like sitting with your father at the kitchen table listening to him tell stories”.Ī funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on 5 August in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images) With this act, World War II was essentially over, the atomic age was officially begun, and the debate over the ethics of atomic weapons has continued for the more than 70 years that have passed since the attack. VanKirk was energetic, very bright and had a terrific sense of humor, Dietz recalled on Tuesday. August 1945: The ground and flight crew of the B-29 bomber ‘Enola Gay’ at Tinian in the Mariana Islands, after the atomic bombing mission on Hiroshima. VanKirk’s military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, My True Course, by Suzanne Dietz. “I didn’t even find out that he was on that mission until I was 10 years old and read some old news clippings in my grandmother’s attic,” Tom VanKirk said. Like many second world war veterans VanKirk didn’t talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said. The Hiroshima bombardment killed less people than the. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter. Paul Tibbets confessed that he had never any problems to sleep after dropping the bomb over Hiroshima.
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Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. The last surviving member of the crew that piloted the Enola Gay on Augwhen it dropped the first atomic bomb used in war in history on Hiroshima, Japan, has died at the age of 93. VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. I am joined by that man today Theodore Van Kirk. “But if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.” Lindsay Garfield: Today only one of these twelve crew members of the Enola Gay live to tell the story. In a 2005 interview with the AP, VanKirk said his second world war experience showed that wars and atomic bombs don’t settle anything and he’d like to see the weapons abolished. Even on board, the men who flew the plane knew as much. “I know he was recognized as a war hero but we just knew him as a great father,” he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday. And as long as it is on display, the questions it raises are likely to continue after all, they have been with the Enola Gay since it first became a household name. Tom Van Kirk said he and his siblings were very fortunate to have had such a wonderful father who remained active until the end of his life.
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Van Kirk was the navigator of the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress aircraft that dropped “Little Boy” – the world’s first atomic bomb – over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.