My True Course: Dutch Van Kirk Northumberland to Hiroshima

My True Course: Dutch Van Kirk Northumberland to Hiroshima by Dietz, Suzanne Simon. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780692016763.

Look out your window and you can see him; he looks like the boy next door, a Depression-era kid. The now ninety-year-old gentleman with a glint in his eye, a remarkable memory, and a sharp wit became in 2011 the only living crewman from the Boeing Silverplate B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. A debate continued for more than half a century with his former commanding officer, Paul Tibbets, until his death about how Dutch Van Kirk came to navigate the Enola Gay from Tinian in the southwest Pacific Ocean to Honshu, one of the main islands of Japan. The answer is part of Dutchs biographical chronicle My True Course from his hometown Northumberland, Pennsylvania, to the Pacific Theatre. Letters from home, his own correspondence, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, military orders, presidential speeches, and interviews of family members and others from the "greatest generation" build the chapters of his story.