Major Theodore Van Kirk obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/30/theodore-van-kirk

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At 2.45am local time on 6 August 1945, Theodore Van Kirk, who has died aged 93, recorded in his logbook the take-off of the Boeing B29 Enola Gay from its base on Tinian in the Mariana islands of the western Pacific.

In the previous year, the US had made Tinian, 6,000 miles west of San Francisco, the largest airport in the world. That night the Enola Gay's commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, was piloting a 65-ton plane – carrying 7,000 gallons of aviation fuel and a four and a half ton bomb. The bomber struggled into the air just 100 feet (30 metres) short of the end of the two-mile runway, 1,500 miles from Japan.

Van Kirk was the Enola Gay's navigator. The B29 had been assigned, depending on the weather, to drop the world's first atomic bomb on either Kokura, Nagasaki or Hiroshima. Three weather planes had flown ahead to assess cloud cover. At 7.30am Japanese time, the B29 Straight Flush reported that conditions over Hiroshima, the US army air force's preferred target, were excellent. It was a beautiful, sunlit day in the 350-year-old city.

At 8.07am Van Kirk sighted Hiroshima. It was home to about 280,000 civilians and 43,000 military, and had hitherto escaped the incendiary raids that had laid waste to most of Japan's urban centres. Van Kirk consulted with the bomb-aimer Thomas Ferebee. The aiming point was the T-shaped Aioi bridge. After a six-and-a-half-hour flight Van Kirk had navigated the plane to within 17 seconds of the scheduled dropping time of 8.15am. The uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy, the culmination of the $2bn Manhattan Project, was released. Forty-three seconds later it exploded, 1,890ft above the ground, 550ft from the Aioi bridge.

At the site of the fireball, the temperature exceeded 3,000C (5,400F). Human beings became charred detritus. A firestorm ensued. "Men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking into the river," recalled a schoolboy, quoted in Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb. "All these became corpses and their bodies were carried by the current towards the sea."

The B29 was 11 and a half miles away when the first of two shockwaves rolled over it with a sound, Van Kirk recalled, like that of a piece of sheet metal flapping. He had been told to wear darkened googles, but forgot and saw a 40,000ft-high white cloud, and below him what he likened to "a pot of boiling black oil". He recalled thanking God that the war was over. "I don't have to get shot at any more. I can go home."

The war was not fully over: a second A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August, before the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945. People are still dying from the effects of both raids, but at Hiroshima, in the year from the moment of detonation, about 140,000 people died. The Anglo-American raid on Dresden, six months before Hiroshima, killed about 50,000 people. In March 1945, 100,000 people had died in a conventional B29 raid on Tokyo.

Van Kirk was chosen for the Hiroshima raid because he had previously worked with Tibbets – one of the USAAF's best bomber pilots – and because of his competence as a navigator. Born and raised in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Van Kirk, known as "Dutch", went to Susquehanna College for a year before joining the US army air corps's aviation cadet programme in October 1941.

Two months later, with the Japanese bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, came US entry into the second world war. Van Kirk was commissioned in April 1942, receiving his wings as a navigator at Kelly Field in Texas.

The USAAF was beginning its build-up in Britain for the strategic bomber offensive against Germany. The first operational unit flying Boeing B17 Flying Fortresses was the 97th Bomber Group, initially based at Polebrook, near Peterborough. By July that year Van Kirk had joined the 97th, navigating his B17 on the hazardous route from Bangor, Maine, via Labrador, Greenland and Iceland, to Prestwick in Scotland. It was then that the relationship with Tibbets and Ferebee was established.

The three men flew together for much of the rest of the war – initially in the B17 "Red Gremlin" – bombing targets in France and the Netherlands. That October Red Gremlin flew the US generals Mark Clark and Dwight Eisenhower to Gibraltar as the north African Anglo-American Torch landings were being prepared. A month later they were in action in Tunisia. By the time Van Kirk returned to the US in June 1943, he had flown 58 combat and eight transport missions.

After a time as an instructor he was transferred, late in 1944, to become group navigator to the 509th composite group. Its commander was Tibbets, the group bombardier was Ferebee and the unit's function – although only Tibbets then knew it – was to deliver the A-bomb.

Long after Hiroshima, Van Kirk observed that the Enola Gay's crew were a "bunch of civilians they put uniforms on" whose collective ambition was to get the war over and get out of the USAAF. Although Tibbets was to remain with the US military until 1966, Van Kirk was out of the forces by 1946, with the rank of major and the US DFC and a Silver Star.

Back in Pennsylvania he took a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Bucknell University, Lewisburg, in 1949 and a master's a year later. For the next 35 years he held technical and managerial posts with the DuPont chemical corporation. He left his home state and settled in Novato, California.

In later years Van Kirk lectured and gave interviews about that day in August. He did it, he said, to educate, not to glorify. In his opinion the raid had saved lives, because it forced Japan's surrender and prevented a series of bloody battles into 1946.

His wife, Mary Jane (nee Young), died in 1975. He is survived by his sons, Thomas and Larry, his daughters, Vicki and Joanne, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

• Theodore Van Kirk, navigator, born 27 February 1921; died 28 July 2014