VanKirk’s military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, My True Course, by Suzanne Dietz. “I didn’t even find out that he was on that mission until I was 10 years old and read some old news clippings in my grandmother’s attic,” Tom VanKirk said. Like many second world war veterans VanKirk didn’t talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. “But if anyone has one,” he added, “I want to have one more than my enemy.”
In a 2005 interview with the AP, VanKirk said his second world war experience showed that wars and atomic bombs don’t settle anything and he’d like to see the weapons abolished. “I know he was recognized as a war hero but we just knew him as a great father,” he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Tom Van Kirk said he and his siblings were very fortunate to have had such a wonderful father who remained active until the end of his life. Van Kirk was the navigator of the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress aircraft that dropped “Little Boy” – the world’s first atomic bomb – over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
