I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar.
'The entire city was covered with smoke and dust and dirt. 'Shortly after the second wave, we turned to where we could look out and see the cloud, where the city of Hiroshima had been. 'The plane jumped and made a sound like sheet metal snapping' after the explosion, Van Kirk told The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the raid. The second was three days later at Nagasaki, where some 70,000 people were killed. It was the first time in history that an atomic bomb was used in combat. The plane dropped 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima at 8:15 am August 6, 1945, killing 140,000 people, more than half the population of the city. Twenty-four years old at the time, Van Kirk was the navigator on the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, one of a crew of 12 airmen.
Theodore Van Kirk, also known as 'Dutch,' died on Monday (local time) of natural causes at the Park Springs Retirement Community in Stone Mountain, Georgia, NBC television reported. The last surviving crewman of the Enola Gay - the US plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan near the end of World War II - has died.
