“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. The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. The bombing hastened the end of World War II.
6, 1945.Ī man looks over the expanse of ruins left the explosion of the atomic bomb on Augin Hiroshima. 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. THE LAST SURVIVING member of the crew that dropped an 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. 5, 1945, one month after the atomic bomb was dropped. Enola Gay navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the last surviving crew member, died in Georgia in 2014.The landscape of Hiroshima, Japan, shows widespread rubble and debris in an aerial view Sept. Robert Lewis died in Virginia in 1983, Tibbets in 2007 in Ohio. Japan surrendered six days later, ending the war. Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, another U.S. “People don’t realize how many times he flew aboard the Enola Gay,” Steven Lewis said. But Tibbets only flew the Enola Gay a couple of times, while Lewis had piloted the aircraft 16 times during test flights leading up to the Hiroshima mission. The move made Tibbets a household name after his crew completed the world’s first atomic bombing mission, which destroyed much of the Japanese city and killed tens of thousands of its citizens.
Paul Tibbets was also the pilot of the Enola Gay, relegating the lower-ranked Lewis to co-pilot. “Any records of that mission would be significant.”Īs commander of the Hiroshima mission, Col. “The Enola Gay was the most significant aircraft of World War Two,” said Larry Starr, collections manager at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, New York. “He wrote down everything and he kept everything,” said Steven Lewis, 57, of Hampton Township, New Jersey. The younger Lewis said his father recorded details of every flight he took, including the three dozen he made aboard the Enola Gay.
#The flight of the enola gay date archive#
The flight logs covering Lewis’ service in the Army Air Forces from 1942-46 are among an extensive archive of his documents handed down to his son, Steven Lewis. A meticulous record-keeper, Lewis’ handwritten entry in his personal flight log for that historic day reads: “No#1 Atomic bomb a huge success.” 6, 1945, bombing mission that changed the world. Lewis, a 27-year-old pilot from Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, logged a total of 36 flights aboard the Enola Gay, including the Aug.