Last Hiroshima bomber crewman dies
The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima has died in the US.
Tom VanKirk says his father, 93-year-old Theodore VanKirk, died on Monday in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
VanKirk, also known as Dutch, was the navigator of the Enola Gay.
The B-29 Superfortress aircraft dropped Little Boy – the world’s first atomic bomb – over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The bomb killed 140,000 in Hiroshima.
Three days later another bomb killed 80,000 in Nagasaki.
Van Kirk was 24 years old at the time.
In a 2005 interview with The Associated Press, VanKirk said his Second World War experience showed that wars and atomic bombs don’t settle anything, and he’d like to see the weapons abolished.
