“I DIDN’T FEEL TOO GOOD ABOUT DROPPING THE BOMB”

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