Enola gay crew mass murderers
Today Dutch lives on an estate for the elderly near Atlanta, Georgia, battling health problems and grumbling he can't play golf any more. Not only to save American lives, but Japanese lives as well." "They had been taught to fight to the last man and they would have fought us with sticks and stones. We would have had to invade the country and the death toll would have been truly unimaginable.
"If we had not dropped that bomb, there is no way the Japanese would have surrendered. Our mission was to end the Second World War, simple as that. "I have never apologised for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will. "Do I regret what we did that day? No, sir, I do not," he says. Yet 89-year-old Dutch, the last remaining survivor of Enola Gay's flight crew, has never had any doubts that it was the right thing to do. More than 200,00 people were killed when the world's first atomic bomb exploded. Yet 65 years ago this Friday Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk took part in a mission which changed the world forever.ĭutch was the navigator on Enola Gay, guiding the B-29 Superfortress bomber to a point 31,000ft above Hiroshima to deliver the deadliest weapon man had ever built. It is testament too, perhaps, to the ability of man – and all 12 crew members of the Enola Gay were men – to compartmentalise extreme events and emotions and thereby neutralise them.He is now a frail old man who spends his days tending his roses. Such lack of anguish is testament, as he says himself, to the training that he received in the US air force that shielded its pilots from introspection. Van Kirk says he never lost a night's sleep over Hiroshima.
He pauses, and then he adds: "I've never found a way to fight a war without killing people.
Tibbets and Ferebee and I, we always agreed on this: the will of the United States at the time was that we drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima." You had to separate that in your mind or else you were no good. "If you could not deal with that you were worthless as an aviator. You always recognised there were people on the ground – workers in a factory or civilians living nearby – who could be killed or damaged by the bombs."Īnd how difficult was that for him to deal with? "The idea at the time was to destroy a nation's will to fight, and you weren't dropping bombs in a pickle barrel, for chrissakes. "You've heard of 'Bomber' Harris," he replies, referring to the RAF commander who ordered the raid that obliterated the German city of Dresden. You knew that when you were bombing over occupied France, over Africa you always knew that when you were dropping bombs out of aeroplanes a lot of people on the ground would be very seriously hurt."Īnd civilians? Most of the Hiroshima victims were civilians. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."īut on a personal level, how has Van Kirk coped over the years with the knowledge of the destruction the bomb yielded? I begin by asking him whether he had any thoughts, at the moment the bomb exploded, about the thousands of people who were right then being obliterated. As Harry Truman, the president who ordered the dropping of the bomb, told Tibbets when they met in 1948: "I'm the guy who sent you. It would be wrong to hold Van Kirk, now 89, in any sense responsible for the extreme human suffering that the bomb caused. 'You always knew people would be very seriously hurt'