The following is taken from an interview conducted in 2013. Mr Van Kirk sadly passed away in 2014
Seven of the twelve-man crew on board the Enola Gay stand before the aircraft; Dutch is third from the left, looking down, next to pilot, Paul Tibbets
On the night of 5-6 August, 1945, the USAAF 509th Composite Group was tasked with deploying a nuclear weapon over Hiroshima, southern Japan. Aboard the B-29 bomber responsible for delivering the bomb was navigator Theodore Van Kirk, known to everyone as ‘Dutch’. He had been hand-picked for the mission by his former commander, “I flew with Paul Tibbets all the time in England. We flew General Dwight Eisenhower [later to become US president] from Hurn [on the south coast of England] down to Gibraltar, for example, to command the north African invasion. Then we were all separated and doing various things - I was at a navigation school, for example, teaching other navigators. Tibbets was picked to take command of the 509th group and he looked up some of the people he’d worked with in the 97th [Bombardment Group].”