You could see some fires burning on the edge of the city.” I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar. He added: “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.” Van Kirk told The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima raid. “The plane jumped and made a sound like sheet metal snapping,” Mr. Van Kirk likened to a photographer’s flashbulb engulfed the cabin. Major Ferebee released the bomb, known as Little Boy, and 43 seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno, leaving tens of thousands dead or dying and turning Hiroshima into scorched devastation.Ĭolonel Tibbets executed a diving turn to avoid the blast effects, but the Enola Gay was buffeted by a pair of shock waves. His navigating skills had brought the Enola Gay to its target only a few seconds behind schedule at the conclusion of a six-and-a-half-hour flight. Captain Van Kirk, who had also familiarized himself with Hiroshima’s landmarks, leaned over Major Ferebee’s shoulder and confirmed he was correct. Ferebee, said, “I got it,” announcing that the Enola Gay was over his aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge. Japan time, it reached Hiroshima, a city of 250,000 and the site of an important army headquarters. When the Enola Gay reached Iwo Jima as the sun rose, it began an ascent to 31,000 feet. From that spot, at the end of a long tunnel atop the bomb bays, he took the plane’s bearings, using a hand-held sextant to guide with the stars. and carrying a crew of 12, took off from Tinian in the Mariana Islands with a uranium bomb built under extraordinary secrecy in the vast Manhattan Project.Ĭaptain Van Kirk spread out his navigation charts on a small table behind Colonel Tibbets’s seat. Theodore (Dutch) Van Kirk, the navigator and last surviving crew member of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the last days of World War II, died on Monday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. The last surviving member of the crew that piloted the Enola Gay on Augwhen it dropped the first atomic bomb used in war in history on Hiroshima, Japan, has died at the age of 93: