This summer will mark 80 years since the attacks stunned the world. Today, every one of the crew members who carried out the bombings is dead. Here, one of the last writers to interview them reopens his files.
He suddenly stopped. “It was devastation,” he said finally. “I can’t go back there. I don’t dwell on this too much. It’s been almost 60 years.” There was a long silence. We ended the interview there and I thanked him. But it seemed his mind was still in that hospital. Then he said, very quietly: “Never again.”
‘It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining on the buildings. Everything down there was bright – very, very bright. You could see the city from 50 miles away, the rivers bisecting it, the aiming point. It was clear as a bell. It was perfect. The perfect mission.”
The scene of devastation at Hiroshima, 1945. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco opposite the navigator of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The year is 2004, and Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, aged 83, has agreed to be interviewed for a book I’m writing for the 60th anniversary of that fateful mission. Van Kirk informs me, with the trace of a smile, that this will probably be the last interview in his life.
We have spent the afternoon looking through wartime logbooks from his 58 overseas combat missions. Now, between servings of dim sum, he is telling me about the 59th, the one that wiped out a city, along with well over 100,000 people.
“The instant the bomb left the bomb bay, we screamed into a steep diving turn to escape the shockwave. There were two – the first, like a very, very, very close burst of flak. Then we turned back to see Hiroshima. But you couldn’t see it. It was covered in smoke, dust, debris. And coming out of it was that mushroom cloud.”…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/22/atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-author-stephen-walker
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After the truth-shower 