“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.
