27, 1921, in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Van Kirk was the son of a coal digger. Our mission was to end the Second World War, simple as that.”īorn on Feb. “I have never apologized for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will.
“Do I regret what we did that day? No, sir, I do not,” Van Kirk, nicknamed “Dutch,” said in a 2010 interview with Britain’s Mirror newspaper. After observing the destruction and taking photographs for several minutes, they escaped to safety. On the advice of Oppenheimer, Tibbets was required to steer the plane at an angle of 159 degrees in either direction as fast as possible after the bomb’s release to have the best chance of survival and avoid the shockwaves from the explosion 10 miles away, according to a 2002 interview with Tibbets in the Guardian newspaper. “Enola Gay” took off from the Pacific island of Tinian, near Guam, and unloaded its deadly cargo at 8:15 a.m. Under the codename “Silverplate,” the B-29 Superfortress aircraft was modified to carry the 10,000-pound (4,536-kilogram) weapon. Army Air Corps, said Tibbets had cyanide tablets for all crew members in case the mission didn’t go according to plan. Thomas Ferebee and flight engineer Wyatt Duzenbury, became involved in the top-secret Manhattan Project, the team led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop the atomic bomb. The “Enola Gay” crew, which included bombardier Col.
