'You always knew people would be very seriously hurt'
It would be wrong to hold Van Kirk, now 89, in any sense responsible for the extreme human suffering that the bomb caused. As Harry Truman, the president who ordered the dropping of the bomb, told Tibbets when they met in 1948: "I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."
But on a personal level, how has Van Kirk coped over the years with the knowledge of the destruction the bomb yielded? I begin by asking him whether he had any thoughts, at the moment the bomb exploded, about the thousands of people who were right then being obliterated.
"You do that thinking beforehand. You knew that when you were bombing over occupied France, over Africa; you always knew that when you were dropping bombs out of aeroplanes a lot of people on the ground would be very seriously hurt."
And civilians? Most of the Hiroshima victims were civilians.
"You've heard of 'Bomber' Harris," he replies, referring to the RAF commander who ordered the raid that obliterated the German city of
Dresden. "The idea at the time was to destroy a nation's will to fight, and you weren't dropping bombs in a pickle barrel, for chrissakes. You always recognised there were people on the ground – workers in a factory or civilians living nearby – who could be killed or damaged by the bombs."
And how difficult was that for him to deal with?
"If you could not deal with that you were worthless as an aviator. You had to separate that in your mind or else you were no good. You couldn't have done the job. Tibbets and Ferebee and I, we always agreed on this: the will of the United States at the time was that we drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima."
He pauses, and then he adds: "I've never found a way to fight a war without killing people. If you ever find that out, let me know."
Van Kirk says he never lost a night's sleep over Hiroshima. Such lack of anguish is testament, as he says himself, to the training that he received in the US air force that shielded its pilots from introspection. It is testament too, perhaps, to the ability of man – and all 12 crew members of the Enola Gay were men – to compartmentalise extreme events and emotions and thereby neutralise them.
