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Various personnel and guards are standing around the loading area. The weapon is in the pit covered with canvas. Taken at Tinian Island on the afternoon of August 5, 1945, this shows the tail of the Enola Gay being edged over the pit and into position to load "Little Boy" into the bomb bay. 60 inches in diameter and 128 inches long, the weapon weighed about 10,000 pounds and had a yield approximating 21,000 tons of high explosives (Copy from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-AEC)Ī nuclear weapon of the "Fat Man" type, the plutonium implosion-type detonated over Nagasaki. "Little Boy" weighed about 9,000 pounds and had a yield approximating 15,000 tons of high explosives. It is 28 inches in diameter and 120 inches long. Photo restoration by TX Unlimited, San FranciscoĪ nuclear weapon of the "Little Boy" type, the uranium gun-type detonated over Hiroshima. Nagasaki, Augphotograph by Yosuke Yamahata used with permission of copyright holder, Shogo Yamahata/Courtesy: IDG films. FOIA Advisory Committee Oversight Reports.
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His survivors include four children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. "Given the circumstances the country found itself in, with an enemy showing no desire to not continue to engage in war, with invasion imminent, he felt it was exactly the kind of thing this country should have done." "He thought he did his duty," his son said. Van Kirk didn't talk much about Hiroshima until anniversaries started becoming major media events, his son said. "We did not suffer any effects from radiation, and none of us, I will add, had any psychological effects," he told NPR on the bombing's 60th anniversary in 2005. Van Kirk was frequently asked whether the Enola Gay's crew members experienced any physical or emotional damage from the bombing. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. "Do I regret what we did that day? No sir, I do not," he told the Sunday Mirror, a British newspaper, in 2010.Īt least 80,000 of Hiroshima's residents were killed instantly and more were contaminated by nuclear fallout. Van Kirk, who looked down at the city for a jarring moment and saw what he later likened to a pot of boiling tar, had just one thought at the time, he said in numerous interviews: "The war's over." A poisonous mushroom cloud rose more than 50,000 feet. local time, Little Boy ushered in the dawn of the atomic age, destroying most of Hiroshima in a blinding flash. They dropped a bomb code-named Little Boy, which took 43 seconds to detonate, generating a burst of heat estimated at 50 million degrees. The payload was never specified.īoarding the stripped-down B-29 on the island of Tinian in the northern Marianas, Van Kirk and his crewmates flew some 1,700 miles to Japan. The last surviving member of the Enola Gay's 12-member crew, Van Kirk died of age-related causes, said his son Tom.Ī veteran of 58 World War II combat missions over Europe and Africa, Van Kirk was told he had been chosen for a top-secret bombing mission that could help end World War II. 6, 1945, guided the Enola Gay over Hiroshima to drop the first nuclear bomb in the history of warfare, died Monday at an assisted living facility in Stone Mountain, Ga. Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, a navigator who on Aug.