He guided the bomber through the night sky, just 15 seconds behind schedule, he said. The mission went perfectly, VanKirk told the AP.
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Portrait of four of the twelve members of the crew of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, 1945. VanKirk was teamed with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets' fledgling 509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission No.
![eye witness account of the enola gay bomber run eye witness account of the enola gay bomber run](http://www.hiroshima-remembered.com/photos/tinian/images/SB50.jpg)
"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. Most of the lives saved were Japanese."īut VanKirk said the experience of World War II also showed him "that wars don't settle anything." "I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run," VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. In this file photo, Theodore "Dutch'' Van Kirk visits a veteran's group at the Golden C … Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered. That blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. The bombing hastened the end of World War II. Theodore VanKirk flew as navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. VanKirk died Monday at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom VanKirk said.
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