They told us we were going out to do something that would either end or significantly shorten the war. "You couldn't be in the 509th and not know something was up. "We knew there was something special going on," he says. The words "atomic" and "nuclear" were never mentioned. In the six months prior to the mission they and other members of the 509th Composite Group had been holed up in Wendover Field, Utah, training for an unspecified bombing run amid total secrecy. Together, they formed the core of the Hiroshima mission. Most of those flights were in the company of his great friends, Tibbets and Thomas Ferebee, the Enola Gay's bombardier. Van Kirk was 24 when he joined the crew of the Enola Gay and by then he had already flown more than 50 bombing raids over Europe and North Africa. Now I get asked all the questions." 'We knew there was something special going on' "I read the papers as they reported Morris's death, and they all said that Van Kirk is the last survivor. He is fully aware of the burden he now shoulders. Jeppson's death on 30 March has left Van Kirk, "Dutch" to his friends, as the standard-bearer for a flight that has come to symbolise the terrible destructive power of nuclear warfare. The bomb they carried, dubbed Little Boy, was the world's first atomic bomb dropped in combat. Which leaves Van Kirk as the only living crew member of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that set out from Tinian on 6 August 1945. And then, 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. Others died through the 80s and 90s and Paul Tibbets, the commander of the plane, in 2007. The first was William Parsons, a military engineer who died in 1953, followed by Robert Shumard, another engineer, 14 years later. Over the last 65 years they have fallen one by one. 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. But this year, Van Kirk declined the invitation. 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.
The absence of any plans is unusual, because Van Kirk is usually heavily in demand on 6 August.