Two shockwaves, measured at 3 Gs each, caught up with the plane, Van Kirk recalled. The bomb detonated 43 seconds after it was dropped from the Enola Gay, as the pilot turned the plane away from the blast. Van Kirk, who also saw action in a B-17 in Europe and North Africa, described the Hiroshima mission as an easy one because the plane faced no enemy opposition and was flying in perfect weather. The first nuclear weapon used in warfare, Little Boy weighed 9,000 pounds and detonated 1,800 feet over Hiroshima with an explosive force that equaled 20,000 tons of TNT, according to the National Museum of the U.S. The plane carried Little Boy, the nickname for the first of two atomic bombs dropped over Japan - actions which forced Japan's surrender. "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. "I didn't even find out that he was on that mission until I was 10 years old and read some old news clippings in my grandmother's attic," Tom VanKirk told the AP in a phone interview Tuesday.Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk talks about the flight of the Enola Gay at his home in Stone Mountain, Georgia in July 2005. Like many World War II veterans, VanKirk didn't talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said.
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. 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." "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. But VanKirk said the experience of World War II also showed him "that wars don't settle anything."