He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter. 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. “But if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.” 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. “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. 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. Van Kirk's sacrifice will never be forgotten, especially by me.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. Some students even called it World War eleven.įor that hour, at the Greenwood Lake airshow, this quite unassuming patriot shared his stories of self-less service and sacrifice so that thousands of warfighters would be spared the casualties certain to result from a grinding and costly invasion of Japan.
He said that he spent his retirement years speaking at schools and was frustrated with our education system because our children have no idea of what World War II was about. What I will never forget his last words before we parted. He became a chemical engineer for DuPont, raised his children, and went on with his life, stating that his military service was simply his duty. Like so many of his generation, he got married and went to college on the G.I. It has been estimated that the government placed an order for a staggering 500,000 Purple Heart medals, all in anticipation of the invasion of Japan.ĭutch, who was only 24 years old at the time, had no hesitation about his part in dropping the first atomic bomb because "they (Japanese) would not give up."ĭutch left the service as a major in 1946 with a Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross for his part in the mission.
Yet, these members of the greatest generation gambled their lives, hoping their mission would be successful so that thousands of Soldiers, Sailors, Airman and Marines would not have to die attempting to invade Japan. Their chances of surviving this mission was slim. But what left me in awe was what Dutch was told by Tibbets. He recounted the real-life story of the crew, as well as the senior leaders, who planned and organized the mission. Any infraction would mean harsh discipline and a transfer to the Aleutians islands. He told me about the solemn secrecy of the mission. "I had flown missions with him in Europe and when we returned home he told me, 'You are volunteering to fly with me again,'" he remembered. "I volunteered to fly with Paul," recalled Dutch. I greeted him and, for about an hour, we spoke about that mission as though it has occurred yesterday. No one recognized the source of his fame, though there was a sign with his name.
The last surviving member of the Enola Gay crew, Van Kirk died on July 27, 2014.ĭutch was nearing 90 when I met him as he sat in a hangar, selling a book titled, "The 509th Remembered, A History of the 509th Composite Group as told by the Veterans Themselves At A Recent Reunion." We met at the Greenwood Lake airshow a few years ago. My connection with the Enola Gay was meeting the navigator on that mission, Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk. The anniversary garnered some media interest, mostly about the survivors and how the city rebuilt itself from the ashes after the first use of the atomic bomb.īut there was little mention of the crew of the B-29, hastily named the Enola Gay after the mother of the pilot, Col. This past August 6 was the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, which hastened the Japanese surrender during World War II.