'How they expected to tell you you were going out and dropping the first atomic bomb and it might blow up the airplane and go get some sleep, is absolutely beyond me,' Van Kirk said in a video interview with the Witness to War Foundation. When their superiors advised them to get some rest after one of their last briefings, Van Kirk played poker with his crew mates instead.
He had a lot on his mind the day before the mission. The city was home to 250,000 people, as well as an important army headquarters. Van Kirk served as the navigator for a crew of 12 aboard the Enola Gay, helping to guide the aircraft to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk, the last living crew member of the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II, died Monday at his Georgia home at the age of 93, reports The New York Times. Theodore 'Dutch' Van Kirk talks about the flight of the Enola Gay at his home in Stone Mountain, Georgia in July 2005.
