Theodore ‘Dutch’ Van Kirk, navigator on Enola Gay, dies at 93

Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, a navigator who on Aug. 6, 1945, guided the Enola Gay over Hiroshima to drop the first nuclear bomb in the history of warfare, died Monday at an assisted living facility in Stone Mountain, Ga. He was 93.

The last surviving member of the Enola Gay’s 12-member crew, Van Kirk died of age-related causes, said his son Tom.

A veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk was told that he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. The payload was never specified.

Boarding the stripped-down B-29 on the island of Tinian in the northern Marianas, Van Kirk and his crewmates flew some 1,700 miles to Japan. They dropped a bomb code-named Little Boy, which took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. At 8:16 a.m. local time, Little Boy ushered in the dawn of the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a blinding flash. A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet.

Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, had just one thought at the time, he said in numerous interviews: “The war’s over.”

“Do I regret what we did that day? No sir, I do not,” he told the Sunday Mirror, a British newspaper, in 2010. “I have never apologized for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will.”