Additionally, the 320th Troop Carrier Squadron was charged with rapidly transporting men and supplies to and from various locations, including the group’s move from Utah to Tinian. The 390th Air Service Group, “a group within a group,” with its 603rd Air Engineering and 1027th Air Materiel Squadrons covered housing and other logistical matters while overseas and the 1395th Military Police Company provided security for the project. Organized to be self-sufficient, the group was composed of the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, with the tactical role of flying the unit’s B-29 Superfortresses, and the 1st Ordnance Squadron, which held the key to operations as the unit overseeing the special weapons. Meanwhile, on the remote Pacific island of Tinian members of the 509th Composite Group, the precursor to today’s 509th Bomb Wing, continued preparing for the mission they had been training for since the group’s activation at Wendover Field, Utah, in December of the previous year. 5 in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, the paper said.“The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” A funeral for Van Kirk is planned for Aug. Local broadcasters also quoted his son as confirming the death. Officials at the Park Springs Retirement Community in Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta, confirmed his death, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
A shockwave then came and shook the aircraft. He said that 43 seconds after the bomb was dropped, he saw a flash from the blast. The big worry was whether the plane would blow up after the bomb detonated, he told Georgia Public Broadcasting. He said the Hiroshima mission was relatively easy, with no anti-aircraft fire coming from the ground. He studied chemical engineering after the war and became an executive with DuPont. The Pennsylvania-born Van Kirk flew missions in Europe during the war and visited Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic blast there. 15, 1945, bringing World War Two to an end. Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, the United States dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" on Nagasaki. The death toll from the blast by the end of the year was estimated at about 140,000, out of the total of 350,000 who lived there at the time. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, carrying 12 crew members, dropped the atomic bomb, nicknamed "Little Boy", on Hiroshima in the closing days of World War Two. "The bomb really saved lives, in spite of the tremendous number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the destruction that would have been caused in Japan otherwise would have been tremendous," he said in an oral history for Georgia Public Broadcasting. But he defended the use of the bomb, describing it as the lesser of two evils when compared to the continued aerial assault of the Japanese main islands and a planned U.S. He later told reporters that after seeing one atomic bomb explode in war, he never wanted to see another one used again. Van Kirk was the navigator on the flight that dropped the first nuclear bomb used in warfare. 6, 1945, has died at a retirement home in Georgia at age 93, media reports said. By Jon Herskovitz and Jonathan Kaminsky (Reuters) - Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, the last surviving member of the Enola Gay plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.