Theodore VanKirk | Enola Gay crew member, 93

Theodore "Dutch" VanKirk, 93, the last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Monday at his retirement home in Stone Mountain, Ga.

Mr. VanKirk flew as navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

The bombing hastened the end of World War II. The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. Three days after Hiroshima, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. That blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered.

"I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run," Mr. VanKirk told the Associated Press in 2005. "There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese."

He stayed on with the military for a year after the war. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985.

Like many World War II veterans, he didn't talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, a son, Tom, said.

"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 Tuesday. - AP