Like many World War II veterans, VanKirk didn't talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. "But if anyone has one," he added, "I want to have one more than my enemy." "I personally think there shouldn't be any atomic bombs in the world - I'd like to see them all abolished. And atomic weapons don't settle anything," he said. "The whole World War II experience shows that wars don't settle anything. Most of the lives saved were Japanese," VanKirk said. "I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. VanKirk told the AP he thought it was necessary because it shortened the war and eliminated the need for an Allied land invasion that could have cost more lives on both sides. Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly.
Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered. The blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. It seemed a lot longer than 43 seconds," VanKirk recalled. "I think everybody in the plane concluded it was a dud. They counted - one thousand one, one thousand two - reaching the 43 seconds they'd been told it would take for detonation and heard nothing. They didn't know whether the bomb would actually work and, if it did, whether its shockwaves would rip their plane to shreds. As the 9,000-pound bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crewmates hoped to escape with their lives. He guided the bomber through the night sky, just 15 seconds behind schedule, he said. The mission went perfectly, VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. He was teamed with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets' fledgling 509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission No. He was 24 years old when he served as navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. VanKirk flew nearly 60 bombing missions, but it was a single mission in the Pacific that secured him a place in history. Theodore VanKirk, also known as "Dutch," died Monday of natural causes at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom VanKirk said. But when Tibbets died at age 92, he requested cremation with no headstone – and no funeral - military honors or not.ATLANTA -The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, hastening the end of World War II and forcing the world into the atomic age, has died in Georgia. His grandson is an Air Force Academy graduate who came up flying B-2 Spirit bombers. His family was also a proud military family. He even re-enacted the bombing in a B-29 during a 1976 Texas air show and denounced the Smithsonian’s exhibition of the actual plane when it debuted because of the exhibition’s focus on the suffering of the Japanese people and not the brutality of the Japanese military. He proudly named his airplane Enola Gay after his beloved mother.
At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, he was one of the youngest but most experienced pilots in the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t that Tibbets wasn’t proud of his service. But instead of being interred at home or at Arlington National Cemetery with all his brothers in arms, he was cremated and his ashes spread across the English Channel. He was the man who dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat against an enemy city. He was never forgotten, however, and never would be. When Paul Tibbets died in January 2007, he had been retired from the Air Force since 1966.