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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. 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 4 082,37-kg bomb nicknamed 'Little Boy' fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crew mates 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 13. “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. 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.
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The blast and its after-effects killed 140 000 in Hiroshima. The bombing hastened the end of World War II. Theodore VanKirk, then 24, 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 6 August 1945. VanKirk died on Monday at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia. The last surviving member of the crew that dropped a catastrophic atomic bomb on Hiroshima once said he thought the bombing was necessary because it shortened the war and eliminated the need for an Allied land invasion that could have cost more lives on both sides.īut Theodore 'Dutch' VanKirk also said it made him wary of war – and that he would like to see all of the world's atomic bombs abolished.