Best of Beth Ashley: Enola Gay navigator was a memorable interview

Editor’s note: The IJ is reprinting some of the late Beth Ashley’s columns. This is from 2014.

Of the hundreds of interviews I did as a reporter for the IJ, the one I remember most is the one with Theodore (“Dutch”) Van Kirk.

Van Kirk, who died last month at age 93, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

He was a player in one of the most significant — and much debated — moments in U.S. history.

He had been living a low-profile life in Novato, working as a chemical engineer for DuPont when I met him.

I was visiting my sister at Marin General Hospital and a nurse who knew I wrote for the IJ, said, “You should interview the man in the bed across the hall.”

I probably sniffed a bit because people are always pushing reporters to write about someone they know — someone who grows enormous zucchini or square-dances nonstop for six hours at a time.

“No, no,” she persisted, “This man dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

I don’t remember what had brought Van Kirk to the hospital, but he was well enough at that moment to welcome me into his room and agree that — after he had returned home — I could interview him.

For more than two hours I was transfixed by his story.

I lived every moment with him — from the pre-dawn of Aug. 6, 1945, when he and fellow crewmembers lifted off from Tinian and headed to Japan, carrying their deadly cargo beneath them.

The plane was flown by Col. Paul Tibbets; the bombardier was Tom Ferebee; Van Kirk had flown with them in Europe and North Africa. When Tibbets was selected to fly the raid on Hiroshima, he in turn selected his two friends.

None knew exactly what their mission was to be, although they trained in a B-29 for seven months at Wendover Field before being consigned to Tinian, launching pad for the flight.

Van Kirk took me, minute by minute, through that momentous day.

As they neared Hiroshima, he joined Ferebee in the nose of the plane to look down at their target, the Aioi Bridge in the heart of the city.

“Is that the bridge?” Ferebee asked.

Van Kirk nodded, and Ferebee hit the button that released the bomb.

By now, the crew (nine others besides Tibbets, Ferebee and Van Kirk) knew the nature of the bomb, and braced themselves for the shock to come. Van Kirk remembered a huge yellow flash, like a photographic flash but immensely more penetrating, and two shock waves that shook the plane even at 31,000 feet.

All they could see from the plane was a rolling cloud of dust where the city had been.

Tibbets yanked the plane around and began the six-hour flight back to Tinian.

Coincidentally, on the day Van Kirk died, I had been re-reading John Hersey’s encyclopedic report on the Hiroshima bombing, told through the eyes of six survivors. It was a harrowing account — of collapsed buildings, hideously burned bodies, injured people pinned under rubble. Fires broke out everywhere; people died for hours afterward from their injuries — people who seemed to have escaped.

The whole city, which had been an important army headquarters, was all but wiped off the map.

An estimated 166,000 people died.

Tibbets and his crew, meanwhile, were greeted at Tinian by an array of top brass and joyful congratulations for a job well done.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and on Aug. 15, 1945, a terrorized Japan finally surrendered.

Van Kirk left the Air Force a year later, at age 25, and enrolled at Bucknell University to study chemical engineering. Eventually he left his longtime home in Novato to live in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where he died, the last survivor of the Enola Gay crew.

I interviewed him several times — usually on the five-year anniversaries of the bombing.

As the years passed, debate had arisen in this country and around the world as to the wisdom — and morality — of using such a devastating weapon. Van Kirk never revised his opinion that using the bomb was the right thing to do.

First, he said, it was absurd to talk of war and morality in the same breath, and cited instances of wartime brutality everywhere.

But he remembered that in August 1945, American land forces expected to invade Japan and face months of savage hand-to-hand fighting. Instead, using the bomb brought the war to a quick end.

Throughout July and August of 1945, Van Kirk said, American bombers were dropping tons of fire bombs on Tokyo every night, killing thousands and thousands of defenseless people.

He believed the bomb saved many lives — not just American lives, but Japanese lives as well.

The debate goes on, nonetheless.

The choices on all sides are hard. In all its forms, war is hell.