The USAAF was beginning its build-up in Britain for the strategic bomber offensive against Germany. Van Kirk was commissioned in April 1942, receiving his wings as a navigator at Kelly Field in Texas. Two months later, with the Japanese bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, came US entry into the second world war. Born and raised in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, Van Kirk, known as "Dutch", went to Susquehanna College for a year before joining the US army air corps's aviation cadet programme in October 1941. Van Kirk was chosen for the Hiroshima raid because he had previously worked with Tibbets – one of the USAAF's best bomber pilots – and because of his competence as a navigator. In March 1945, 100,000 people had died in a conventional B29 raid on Tokyo. The Anglo-American raid on Dresden, six months before Hiroshima, killed about 50,000 people. People are still dying from the effects of both raids, but at Hiroshima, in the year from the moment of detonation, about 140,000 people died. The war was not fully over: a second A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August, before the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945. He recalled thanking God that the war was over. He had been told to wear darkened googles, but forgot and saw a 40,000ft-high white cloud, and below him what he likened to "a pot of boiling black oil".
The B29 was 11 and a half miles away when the first of two shockwaves rolled over it with a sound, Van Kirk recalled, like that of a piece of sheet metal flapping. "All these became corpses and their bodies were carried by the current towards the sea."
"Men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking into the river," recalled a schoolboy, quoted in Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Forty-three seconds later it exploded, 1,890ft above the ground, 550ft from the Aioi bridge.Īt the site of the fireball, the temperature exceeded 3,000C (5,400F). The uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy, the culmination of the $2bn Manhattan Project, was released. After a six-and-a-half-hour flight Van Kirk had navigated the plane to within 17 seconds of the scheduled dropping time of 8.15am.
The aiming point was the T-shaped Aioi bridge. Van Kirk consulted with the bomb-aimer Thomas Ferebee. It was home to about 280,000 civilians and 43,000 military, and had hitherto escaped the incendiary raids that had laid waste to most of Japan's urban centres. It was a beautiful, sunlit day in the 350-year-old city.Īt 8.07am Van Kirk sighted Hiroshima. At 7.30am Japanese time, the B29 Straight Flush reported that conditions over Hiroshima, the US army air force's preferred target, were excellent. Three weather planes had flown ahead to assess cloud cover. The B29 had been assigned, depending on the weather, to drop the world's first atomic bomb on either Kokura, Nagasaki or Hiroshima.