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"I never saw such a beautiful sunrise in my life," Van Kirk said. It was droning at 10,000 feet over the broad expanse of the Pacific when the first rays of dawn rose upon it. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay rose into the black sky from the South Pacific island of Tinian and Van Kirk guided the B-29 toward the Japanese mainland. "If you were in the 509th and didn't figure out you were going to drop an atomic bomb, you were pretty stupid," said Van Kirk, who last visited Charlotte in December when he spoke at the Carolinas Aviation Museum.Īt 2:45 a.m. No one told them exactly what they were doing or used the word "atomic." But Van Kirk said the crew figured it out quickly based on obvious clues - their base was swarming with nuclear scientists and their planes had only one hook in the bomb bay. He was back in the United States, teaching other navigators the craft in 1944 when the pilot he'd flown with in Europe, Paul Tibbets, invited him to join a top-secret bomber group, the 509th. "After my first three missions, I said, 'I'm never going to live to be 21,' " Van Kirk once told the Observer.īut he survived 58 combat missions, losing three planes. Van Kirk's first bombing raid over Europe was in 1942 when he was 20. Bombardier Tom Ferebee, who died in 2000, was a farm boy from Mocksville in Davie County.
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Van Kirk was one of two Enola Gay fliers with Carolina connections. He died in Stone Mountain, Ga., near Atlanta, where he had retired after a 35-year career with the chemical company DuPont.
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6, 1945, hastening the end of World War II. Van Kirk, who lived in Charlotte from 19 and whose son Larry still lives here, was the navigator of the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. When he died Monday at age 93, Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk was the last of the Enola Gay crew, a team that flew one morning to a city named Hiroshima on a mission that would hurl the world into the atomic age. July 30-He flew 58 missions during World War II and never thought he'd live to see 21.