The US B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, carrying 12 crew members, dropped the atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”, on Hiroshima in the closing days of World War Two. “The bomb really saved lives, in spite of the tremendous number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the destruction that would have been caused in Japan otherwise would have been tremendous,” he said in an oral history for Georgia Public Broadcasting. He later told reporters that after seeing one atomic bomb explode in war, he never wanted to see another one used again.īut he defended the use of the bomb, describing it as the lesser of two evils when compared to the continued aerial assault of the Japanese main islands and a planned US invasion. Van Kirk was the navigator on the flight that dropped the first nuclear bomb used in warfare. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, the last surviving member of the Enola Gay plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has died at a retirement home in Georgia at age 93, media reports said.
