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Unusually for friends so accustomed to jokes and pranks, there was no extraneous talk, no frivolity, only talk that involved the task at hand. And if you talked about it, you were even more stupid."Īs flight navigator in the days before sat-nav, Mr Van Kirk's job was to guide the plane to Hiroshima by following rivers, towns and landmarks. "But if you don't know by then what was going on, you were stupid. "They kept telling us we were going to do something and destroy an entire city," he says, shaking a knowing finger. As they neared the target the mission remained secret, even for the crew. For the flight, Tibbets renamed the plane in honour of his mother. "Sleep? After that? There was no way we were going to sleep," he says. Probably best to be at least nine miles away.'" And we said, 'you think?' They said, 'We just don't know. "One said, 'We think that you'll be OK if you're nine miles away when the bomb explodes,'" he recalls. But not even the scientists had all the answers. The crew learned about their mission from the atomic scientists who had come to their base on the island of Tinian.
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In spring 1945, the war in Europe drew to a close while the battle in the Pacific raged on and an allied invasion of Japan seemed imminent. He remained friends with bombardier Tom Ferebee and pilot Paul Tibbets until their deaths in 20 respectively. But I just could not see how they could continue the war and subject their people to that." "Look, we did what we had to do," he says.
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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. If you are one of those who want to know how the whole thing went before WWII finally ended in the Pacific, this is recommended.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. Often, the horrors of war remains in those who had went through it. When it showed the images and the graphics in the brochure, I cannot really bear to see it after one look. Given I also remembered my father once went to Japan for business for some time and he did went to the memorial centre in Hiroshima and when he brought back the brochure, I almost felt sick. Yeah, often it's being discussed normally close to the WWII's anniversary that whether it is justified to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to finally force Japan to end WWII in the Pacific region, but then, this is still a topic which is very touchy even till now. Even more terrifying, hearing from the survivors themselves. It's always scary to understand about the after-effects of the atomic bomb that often it's only those who experienced, and survived to tell the tale, will give a very different perspective. Whatever I had understood in the History class was through the events in the textbook, this is more raw and humane for a change. Given it was also a good time to refresh somehow some of the events I had learnt from my History textbook, this show viewed the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima through the eyes of those who had survived to tell their story.
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Imagine my surprise when I saw this on air here last year. The fall of Japan in WWII was one of those things I learnt. Especially if it's something which I had learnt in my past History classes. Being once a former History student, history-relating subjects are often of interest to me.