Captain Van Kirk, who had also familiarized himself with Hiroshima’s landmarks, leaned over Major Ferebee’s shoulder and confirmed he was correct. Ferebee, said, “I got it,” announcing that the Enola Gay was over his aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge. Japan time, it reached Hiroshima, a city of 250,000 and the site of an important army headquarters. When the Enola Gay reached Iwo Jima as the sun rose, it began an ascent to 31,000 feet. From that spot, at the end of a long tunnel atop the bomb bays, he took the plane’s bearings, using a hand-held sextant to guide with the stars. and carrying a crew of 12, took off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands with a uranium bomb built under extraordinary secrecy in the vast Manhattan Project.Ĭaptain Van Kirk spread out his navigation charts on a small table behind Colonel Tibbets’s seat.
Theodore (Dutch) Van Kirk, the navigator and last surviving crew member of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the last days of World War II, died on Monday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. 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:
