THEODORE Van Kirk is sitting at his desk in a detached bungalow in the gated community outside Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives. The room is cluttered with boxes, trinkets, shelves full of books on wartime history and photographs of planes on the walls. he picks up a large calendar from the floor and begins flicking through it. “Let’s have a look at what’s coming up on August 6,” he says. Finding that date he holds up the calendar. The page is empty. “Nope, nothing there.”

The absence of any plans is unusual because Van Kirk is normally heavily in demand on August 6. This year, he tells me, he has been invited to travel all expenses paid to Tinian, the tiny Pacific island where 65 years ago on that same day he set out with 11 other men on an aeroplane journey that would change the world. But this year Van Kirk declined the invitation. he just didn’t feel like it.

His uncharacteristic inactivity is explained by the fact that none of the 11 crew members who joined him on that fateful flight will be in Tinian this year and without them he didn’t have the stomach to go. over the last 65
years they have fallen one by one. First was William Parsons, a military engineer who died in 1953, followed by Robert Shumard, another engineer, 14 years later. others died through the eighties and Nineties. Paul Tibbets, the commander of the plane, died in 2007.

Less than two months ago Morris Jeppson, a bomb expert, became the penultimate member of the crew to pass away, dying in a hospital in Las Vegas aged 87. Which leaves Van Kirk, now 89, as the only living crew member of the enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that set out from Tinian on August 6, 1945.

The bomb they carried, dubbed Little Boy, was the world’s first atomic bomb dropped in combat. Its target:
Hiroshima.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/...the-bomb-again