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SPIEGEL Interview with the 'Enola Gay's' Navigator

"I'm not Proud of all the Deaths it Caused'

Theodore Van Kirk, 84, is one of the surviving members of the crew of the "Enola Gay," the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb ever to be used against humanity. In a Spiegel interview, he recalls the fateful day he and his colleagues dropped the bomb.

SPIEGEL:

Sixty years ago, your crew dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. How do you remember that day?

Van Kirk: It was hard, hard work. We had been training for several months for the mission and we knew it was going to be different, and we had to do it properly. We had to take certain steps to get away from the bomb or that bomb was going to blow up the airplane and all the crew with it, obviously.

SPIEGEL: Did you know you were using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

Van Kirk: They didn't tell me a damn thing, but if you had any brains and you were in our organization you could figure it out. They did tell us that we would be dropping a bomb that would essentially destroy an entire city. There were also a lot of nuclear physicists hanging around our base on the island of Tinian -- and one fellow who was there had been on the cover of Time magazine a few years earlier. After the successful weapon test in New Mexico, they brought a film, but they couldn't get the projector to work. We could build atomic bombs, but we couldn't get a projector to work. But those who knew it was going to be an atomic bomb kept their mouths shut about it.

SPIEGEL: Then President Harry Truman gave the order for you to start your mission?

Van Kirk: President Truman had approved the use of the bomb and we were told to prepare to drop it as soon as we were ready -- which meant as soon as the weather was okay, and that was the next day. I flew 58 missions over Europe and the briefing is always the same. They told us to go get some sleep. But I don't know how they expected to tell you to go get some sleep when you were about to drop the first atom bomb. I didn't sleep; Paul Tibbets, the commander of the "Enola Gay" didn't sleep; Kirby didn't sleep. I know because we were playing in the same poker game. Basically, the time passed and then they came and got us at about 10 o'clock to have what I always termed the condemned man's breakfast. When we got down to the airplane, it was bathed in klieg lights and hundreds of people from the Manhattan Project were running around, talking, interviewing and taking pictures for historical purposes.

SPIEGEL: Were you given special instructions for the flight?

Van Kirk: We went through our procedures of planning the mission, briefing the people who were going to fly that day, the locations of the air-sea rescue units and rules about what we were supposed to do if the Japanese shot us down. Take care of yourself, they said, because you are on your own. But I didn't find that out until much later that Paul had cyanide tablets for all of us. I told him later, "Paul, you would have had a hell of a time getting me to take a cyanide tablet. I think I'd have taken my chances with the Japanese."

SPIEGEL: Was it an easy job navigating the plane to Hiroshima?

Van Kirk: It wasn't any more difficult than any other job. It was over water and you didn't have many navigational aids out there, but if you're the type of navigator who needed navigational aids to get from Tinian to Hiroshima, you didn't have any business being on that mission anyway.

SPIEGEL: What happened after the blast?

Van Kirk: The shock waves were visible to our tail gunner. He could see the heat waves passing and said it was like a parking lot on a hot summer day. When they hit the airplane, the airplane kind of flapped all over like a piece of sheet metal snapping.

SPIEGEL: There have been a lot of reports afterwards about disappointment in your group and at the Manhattan Project that the Japanese didn't surrender immediately after dropping the first bomb.

Van Kirk: Yes, absolutely. After the bomb exploded and we saw the devastation you could only draw one conclusion: the war was over. We couldn't make any visual observation of Hiroshima because it was all covered with smoke and dust, but you could see the energy that was released. Any rational people would have accepted the terms of surrender after one bomb. Well, maybe not the same day, but certainly within the next two days. Besides, Japan was a defeated nation before we ever dropped the atomic bombs. Eighty-five percent of Japan was burned down, its industrial capacity was destroyed before we ever dropped the atomic bombs. And yet they still wanted to keep on fighting. After we dropped it, the Japanese tried to cover up the fact that one of their cities was missing. They cut off all rail transportation into Hiroshima, they never announced it in the newspapers or anywhere. (Nazi SS head Heinrich) Himmler would have been proud of them for the way they handled it.

SPIEGEL: Did you ever talk about any possible targets in Germany, like Berlin?

Van Kirk: No. It's hard for me to think of a city over there that hadn't been bombed so badly that it would have been worth using the first atomic bomb.

SPIEGEL: Do you feel any regrets today about dropping the first bomb?

Van Kirk: 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.

SPIEGEL: You visited Japan shortly after the capitulation ...

Van Kirk: ... yes, in Tokyo. We had to pick up some Japanese nuclear scientists and then we flew over Hiroshima. There was no place to land there. So then we got down to Nagasaki where we landed at a little old dirt field about 20 miles outside of Nagasaki. We went in to visit Nagasaki, stayed at a resort in there for about two days. We were all amazed at how quickly the Japanese had cleaned up the city. You'd think if an atomic bomb had been dropped, you would have seen bodies lying around, but there was none of that. The Japanese had cleaned up their city, but all the buildings were flattened. We have a picture of a Japanese soldier coming back from where he had been fighting, returning to his city, which had been destroyed. You just thought, what would you think if you were coming home to this? The amount of the devastation and destruction that the bomb had caused surprised all of us.