He pulls out from one of the many boxes in his study a facsimile of the navigator's log he kept that day. "Fifteen seconds was damn good, that's all I can say." We had a dome up top of the plane to sit up in and shoot the stars with a bubble sextant."ĭespite the basic techniques, Van Kirk navigated the Enola Gay to its target 1,800 miles away, 15 seconds later than scheduled. Van Kirk's role was navigator: "We did things the old-fashioned way: celestial navigation, telling your position by the stars. The Enola Gay – named by Tibbets after his mother – took off on 6 August at 2.45am. "I mean, they tell you you were about to go out and drop the first atom bomb that night, and then tell you to get some sleep! That was absolutely beyond me!" 'Bomb away' Instead Van Kirk, Tibbets and Ferebee sat up all night playing poker. The word atomic remained unspoken.Īfter the briefing, they were ordered to get some sleep. They were informed they were about to do the job for which they had trained for so long: to drop a bomb unlike anything that had gone before. On 5 August, having been relocated to Tinian, they were called together for a final briefing. They stripped down the B-29 bomber to its shell to reduce weight and began practising hair-raisingly tight mid-air turns that would be needed to reach a safe distance once the bomb was away. The crew was told that the bomb they would drop would be so powerful that their plane would need to be at least 11 miles away when it detonated or else it would break up. If you talked about it you were even more damn stupid, as you would be transferred instantly to the Aleutian islands, where you could talk all you wanted and nobody would listen."Ī few months before the mission, the pace of preparations picked up. "After all that, if you couldn't figure out it was an atomic bomb you were pretty damn stupid. On top of that, they saw hundreds of physicists milling around the base, one of whom Van Kirk recognised from the cover of Time magazine. They told us that the weapon we were going to drop would destroy an entire city." They told us we were going out to do something that would either end or significantly shorten the war. "You couldn't be in the 509th and not know something was up. "We knew there was something special going on," he says. The words "atomic" and "nuclear" were never mentioned. In the six months prior to the mission they and other members of the 509th Composite Group had been holed up in Wendover Field, Utah, training for an unspecified bombing run amid total secrecy. Together, they formed the core of the Hiroshima mission. Most of those flights were in the company of his great friends, Tibbets and Thomas Ferebee, the Enola Gay's bombardier. Van Kirk was 24 when he joined the crew of the Enola Gay and by then he had already flown more than 50 bombing raids over Europe and North Africa. Now I get asked all the questions." 'We knew there was something special going on'
"I read the papers as they reported Morris's death, and they all said that Van Kirk is the last survivor. He is fully aware of the burden he now shoulders. Jeppson's death on 30 March has left Van Kirk, "Dutch" to his friends, as the standard-bearer for a flight that has come to symbolise the terrible destructive power of nuclear warfare. The bomb they carried, dubbed Little Boy, was the world's first atomic bomb dropped in combat.
Which leaves Van Kirk as the only living crew member of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that set out from Tinian on 6 August 1945. And then, less than two months ago, Morris Jeppson, a bomb expert, became the penultimate member of the crew to pass away, dying in a hospital in Las Vegas. Others died through the 80s and 90s and Paul Tibbets, the commander of the plane, in 2007. The first was William Parsons, a military engineer who died in 1953, followed by Robert Shumard, another engineer, 14 years later. Over the last 65 years they have fallen one by one. His uncharacteristic inactivity is explained by the fact that none of the 11 crew members who joined him on that fateful flight will be in Tinian this year, and without them he didn't have the stomach to go. But this year, Van Kirk declined the invitation. This year, he tells me, he has been invited to travel, all expenses paid, to Tinian, the tiny Pacific island where, 65 years ago on that same day, he set out with 11 other men on an aeroplane journey that would change the world. The absence of any plans is unusual, because Van Kirk is usually heavily in demand on 6 August.