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Tom Wages Funeral Home in Snellville will be handling arrangements. Thomas Wilson Ferebee was the Bombardier aboard the Enola Gay. Officials at the Park Springs Retirement Community in Stone Mountain Tuesday afternoon confirmed Van Kirk’s death. “He was very responsible for the success of the bomb drop.”Ī native of Pennsylvania, Van Kirk joined the Army Air Corps before Pearl Harbor, and became a navigator after washing out as a pilot.Īfter World War II, Van Kirk returned home and had a long career as an executive with DuPont. One of 15 Silverplate B-29s used by the 509th, Bockscar was built at the Glenn L. “I like to say Dutch ended the war, and I made it official - got them to sign on the dotted line,” Starnes told The AJC in 2010. Bockscar, sometimes called Bocks Car, is the name of the United States Army Air Forces B-29 bomber that dropped a Fat Man nuclear weapon over the Japanese city of Nagasaki during World War II in the second and last nuclear attack in history.
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The two became close friends, Starnes told The Atlanta Journal Constitution Tuesday. A mutual friend who also lived in the retirement community introduced them.įor more than a decade, the two men put on "dog-and-pony" talks around metro Atlanta about the two events that ended World War II. After World War II, Tibbets and his fellow crew members received various military honors for their roles in the Hiroshima mission. The last surviving crew member, Theodore Dutch Van Kirk, died in 2014 at 93. Tibbets died at the age of 92 on November 1, 2007, in Columbus, Ohio. Starnes learned that Van Kirk was living in Stone Mountain from a Time Magazine article. None of the 12 crew members of the Enola Gay are alive today.