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Their B-17 Flying Fortress, named Red Gremlin, became the lead plane in the 97th Bomb Group’s missions and flew Gen. He attended Susquehanna College for a year, then became an Army Air Forces cadet in October 1941.Ĭolonel Tibbets, flying with the Eighth Air Force out of England, selected Captain Van Kirk and Major Ferebee for his crew the next year. 27, 1921, and reared in Northumberland, Pa. Theodore Van Kirk - everybody called him Dutch - was born on Feb. 15, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. Three days later, another B-29 dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Van Kirk told it, by “more generals and admirals than I had ever seen in one place in my life.”
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Shortly before 3 p.m., the crewmen returned to Tinian and were greeted, as Mr. “Even though you were still up there in the air and no one else in the world knew what had happened, you just sort of had a sense that the war was over, or would be soon,” he told Bob Greene in Mr. You could see some fires burning on the edge of the city.”
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I describe it looking like a pot of black, boiling tar. Jeppson’s death leaves Theodore Van Kirk, 89, the Enola Gay’s navigator, as the plane’s last survivor.He added: “The entire city was covered with smoke and dust and dirt. his stepsons, Mike Sullivan of Pahrump, Nev., and John Sullivan of Lakeport, Calif., and a stepdaughter, Jane Ross, of Midland, Ontario a brother, Lawrence, of Salt Lake City 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. two daughters from his first marriage, Nancy Hoskins of Colorado Springs and Carol English of Medford, Ore. Jeppson is survived by their daughter, Sally Jeppson, of Gackle, N.D. Jeppson’s first marriage ended in divorce. He sold the plugs for $167,500 to a retired physicist who collected military memorabilia. The Justice Department sought to block the auction on the grounds that the plugs were government property and perhaps contained secret data, but a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in favor of Mr. Jeppson sought to auction off Enola Gay souvenirs he had brought back with him: a green electronic plug designed to prevent an accidental detonation in flight, and a spare among the red plugs that armed the bomb and were destroyed when it exploded. He worked on nuclear projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and later founded a company that manufactured high-power microwave heating systems for industrial use and food processing. “The rest of us saw the billowing clouds and the mushroom cloud rising,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 2000. When the bomb detonated above Hiroshima, the Enola Gay’s tailgunner was the only crewman who witnessed the explosion, Mr. He divided his time between Wendover and the New Mexico desert before departing for Tinian and the final preparations to drop the bomb. Lieutenant Jeppson was assigned to help the Manhattan Project scientists who were assembling the bomb at Los Alamos, N.M., to understand its electronic devices. The bomb was dropped at 8:15 in the morning and exploded 43 seconds later, creating an inferno that left tens of thousands dead or dying. Tibbets Jr., brought the four-engine B-29 Superfortress over Hiroshima. Parsons of the Navy, the officer in overall control of the uranium bomb known as Little Boy, Lieutenant Jeppson checked its circuits, timing devices and radar components.Īfter a flawless six-and-a-half-hour flight, the bomb systems working perfectly, the Enola Gay’s pilot, Col. 6, 1945, Lieutenant Jeppson was making his first and only combat flight.Īs the assistant to Capt. When the Enola Gay lifted off from the island of Tinian in the South Pacific in the early hours of Aug. His death was announced by his wife, Molly. Jeppson, who was 87 and lived in Las Vegas, was the next-to-last survivor of the 12 men who carried out history’s first atomic strike. Jeppson, an Army Air Forces electronics specialist who helped arm the atomic bomb aboard the Enola Gay as it flew to Hiroshima, died March 30 at a hospital in Las Vegas.