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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. 'I thought thatperhaps 25 or 50 years from now, somebody would want to redo that exhibition,' he said wistfully. For the rest of their lives (only two still survive. The youngest was only twenty at the time. The twelve men who flew on the world's first nuclear bombing mission in 1945 made history, as they deployed 'Little Boy' over the city of Hiroshima, Japan.
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He helped archive the voluminous paper trail generated by the show to document it for posterity. Nuclear Quotes: The Crew of the Enola Gay. It seemed a lot longer than 43 seconds," VanKirk recalled. He owns a video of the Enola Gay crew's reminiscences that was to have been the exhibition's coda. "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 AP. VanKirk was teamed with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets' fledgling 509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission No. "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. (23 February 1915 1 November 2007) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force.He is best known as the aircraft captain who flew the B-29 Superfortress known as the Enola Gay (named after his mother) when it dropped a Little Boy, the first of two atomic bombs used in warfare, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, 75 years ago, bringing an end to World War II and making the Enola Gay one of the most famous B-29s in history. "And atomic weapons don't settle anything," he said. The beleaguered museum director resigned and the Enola Gay exhibit opened in mid-1995, stripped down to the Enola Gay, a plaque identifying the B-29, an upbeat film about the crew, and a cardboard cutout showing the crew members. But VanKirk said the experience of World War II also showed him "that wars don't settle anything." In January 1995, 81 members of Congress likewise demanded cancellation of the exhibit and called for Harwits dismissal.