An Interview With The Navigator of The Enola Gay

If you have an interest in the first atomic mission as I do (the 60th anniversary was yesterday), you'll probably enjoy this interview with Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, the mission navigator. He's now 84 and still has vivid memories of the day.

In an interesting bit of editing, the pull quote at the top of the article is this: "I'm not Proud of all the Deaths it Caused'. If you just read that you'd assume that Van Kirk was having second thoughts about the mission or his participation in it. However, that quote must be read in context:

I'm not proud of all the deaths it caused, and nobody is. But how do you win a war without killing people? If you don't want to kill people, you should not start a war. And I think people that go around and start wars for any reason whatsoever are crazy, but that's another story. When you have a war, there is only one thing to do in my opinion, and that is make damn sure you win it and expend any energy that you must in order to bring that war to a rapid conclusion with a minimum loss of life.

That sort of changes the perspective a bit, doesn't it.

You can see a photo of the Enola Gay, now on display in Washington, here.