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"But there were also concerns about what would happen when it did. "When the bomb went off, my first reaction was, 'Thank God it worked'," said Dutch. He also knew that if the bomb exploded, wiping out the entire city, there was a risk it would take Enola Gay with it. He knew that if nothing happened after 43 seconds, the detonator had failed to go off. Dutch remembers studying his watch as it plunged earthwards, about to cause the most devastating explosion man had ever created. They had a pretty name for the 8,900lb bomb too. Then just after 8.15am pilot Paul Tibbet threw the Enola Gay - named after his own mother - into a terrifying diving turn over Hiroshima. The morning was crisp and bright as they taxied along the runway on the tiny Pacific island of Tinian. He recalls how the night before they dropped the bomb the crew had calmed their nerves by playing poker until 2am, when it was time to leave. The only man alive who knows how it feels to kill so many in an instant. And it upsets him that all his comrades who flew on Enola Gay on August 6, 1945, have now gone. He won't be attending any more anniversary events. Today Dutch lives on an estate for the elderly near Atlanta, Georgia, battling health problems and grumbling he can't play golf any more. Not only to save American lives, but Japanese lives as well." "They had been taught to fight to the last man and they would have fought us with sticks and stones. We would have had to invade the country and the death toll would have been truly unimaginable. "If we had not dropped that bomb, there is no way the Japanese would have surrendered. Our mission was to end the Second World War, simple as that. "I have never apologised for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will. "Do I regret what we did that day? No, sir, I do not," he says. Yet 89-year-old Dutch, the last remaining survivor of Enola Gay's flight crew, has never had any doubts that it was the right thing to do. More than 200,00 people were killed when the world's first atomic bomb exploded. Yet 65 years ago this Friday Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk took part in a mission which changed the world forever.ĭutch was the navigator on Enola Gay, guiding the B-29 Superfortress bomber to a point 31,000ft above Hiroshima to deliver the deadliest weapon man had ever built. He is now a frail old man who spends his days tending his roses.