TV PREVIEW
“The Day the Bomb Dropped,” featuring the late Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, of Stone Mountain, the navigator aboard the Enola Gay, premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 2, on the Smithsonian Channel.
Seventy years ago, a Stone Mountain man guided the world into the nuclear age.
Capt. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk was the navigator aboard the Enola Gay, faultlessly steering the B-29 Superfortress to 30,000 feet above Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. At 8:15 that morning, bombardier Maj. Thomas Ferebee triggered the release of Little Boy, a 16-kiloton argument for the end of World War II.
Afterward, when Van Kirk, commander Col. Paul Tibbets, and the rest of the crew returned from their bombing run to the airbase on Tinian island, 1,500 miles away, they were debriefed by an intelligence officer.
“They came to me,” Van Kirk told an interviewer, “and they says, ‘What time did you drop the bomb?’ The intelligence officer looked at me like, ‘Why were you late?’ Christ, I was six seconds late!”
Two years ago, Van Kirk told his story to a documentary film crew. By then, he was 93 years old and the last survivor of the Enola Gay crew. He’d recently been in the hospital, but his voice was strong and his memory was clear. And so was his conscience.
“He was enormously sparkly and bright and very witty,” said British documentarian Leslie Woodhead. “And, of course, he was at ease with having been part of that monumental day.” Woodhead’s film, “The Day the Bomb Dropped,” premieres Sunday on the Smithsonian Channel.
Though he had told his story many times, it would be the last time Van Kirk spoke on camera, according to Woodhead. The navigator died last year.
A native of Pennsylvania, Van Kirk had already completed 58 combat missions over Europe and Africa when he was chosen for the Hiroshima mission by a pre-dawn phone call from Tibbets.
Van Kirk joked with Woodhead about the selection process: “I wouldn’t say we were cherry-picked for anything, except for drinking.” He confessed he was happy to volunteer because he figured his number had long since come up. “I never expected to live through this war,” he said. “Here I am 93 years old. Hell, I should have died years ago.”
After returning from the war, Van Kirk enjoyed a long career with DuPont. Later in life, he moved to Stone Mountain to be near family.
Woodhead also interviewed Japanese survivors of the atomic blast, some of whom were only a few hundred yards from ground zero, who offer chilling accounts of the nightmarish scene.
The documentarian has made films on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the assassination of President John Kennedy, and the attacks on 9/11, but said his work on “The Day the Bomb Dropped” was particularly haunting.
Woodhead draws no conclusions about the ethics of the bombing, cautioning that 21st-century hindsight can’t properly evaluate a decision made during the turmoil of a world war.
He leaves it to Van Kirk to provide the film’s final words:
“Well, I think we’re all more aware of life,” said the old soldier, summing up the experience. “We are all aware that if an atomic bomb is aimed at you, you’re dead. Whether we learn to live with it, and learn to live well with it, is still I think to be decided.”
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