'Look, we did what we had to do,' he says. The bomb killed an estimated 100,000 Japanese, but it ended the war and precluded an invasion of Japan, and Mr Van Kirk says he has no regrets. Just that maybe it would shorten the war.' 'We didn't know at first what we were going to do. 'I looked out the window and saw the just-rising sun and thought about what a beautiful morning it was over the Pacific,' he recalls, sitting in his home office surrounded by pictures, books, model planes, awards and mementos marking the mission. On the morning of 6 August, 1945 he, two of the closest friends and nine other Americans took off for the flight that launched the world into the nuclear age.
To his family and friends, the elderly man in a little retirement community in Georgia is just 'Dutch'.īut 65 years ago on Friday, Lt Theodore Van Kirk was flight navigator for the Enola Gay on its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. As the Japanese city of Hiroshima marks the 65th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack, a member of the US crew that dropped the weapon talks to the BBC's Kristin Wilson about his memories of that day.
