Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. The thermic rays emitted by the explosion burned the pattern of this woman's kimono upon her back. Then another shockwave.Ī victim of the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare is seen in September 1945, at the Ujina Branch of the First Army Hospital in Hiroshima. It seemed a lot longer than 43 seconds,” VanKirk recalled. “I think everybody in the plane concluded it was a dud. They counted - one thousand one, one thousand two - reaching the 43 seconds they’d been told it would take for detonation, and heard nothing. They didn’t know whether the bomb would actually work and, if it did, whether its shockwaves would rip their plane to shreds. As the 9,000-pound bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crewmates hoped to escape with their lives. He guided the bomber through the night sky, just 15 seconds behind schedule, he said. The mission went perfectly, VanKirk told the AP. VanKirk was teamed with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets’ fledgling 509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission No. “But if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.”Įnola Gay crew members are shown 17 August, 1945, from left to right, front row: 1st Lt. “I personally think there shouldn’t be any atomic bombs in the world - I’d like to see them all abolished. “And atomic weapons don’t settle anything,” he said. Most of the lives saved were Japanese.”īut VanKirk said the experience of World War II also showed him “that wars don’t settle anything.” “I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run,” VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered. That blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. The bombing hastened the end of World War II. 6, 1945.Ī man looks over the expanse of ruins left the explosion of the atomic bomb on Augin Hiroshima. Theodore VanKirk flew as navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. VanKirk died Monday at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom VanKirk said. THE LAST SURVIVING member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima once said he thought the bombing was necessary because it shortened the war and eliminated the need for an Allied land invasion that could have cost more lives on both sides.īut Theodore “Dutch” VanKirk also said it made him wary of war – and that he would like to see all of the world’s atomic bombs abolished. 5, 1945, one month after the atomic bomb was dropped. The landscape of Hiroshima, Japan, shows widespread rubble and debris in an aerial view Sept.