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government, which claimed the log was its property. (“I wouldn’t give them a pencil,” he says.) He was momentarily stymied by a lawsuit filed by the U.S. He thought briefly about giving it to the Smithsonian, but after the crew’s dustup with the museum during the controversial Enola Gay exhibit in 1995, he rejected the idea. “They have to be properly cared for, and I had absolutely no plan to do anything with it.” He asked his four children if they wanted the log, and all said no. “These things should be kept and maintained,” he says. In 2002, Van Kirk decided the time had come to let go of the log. When the other version came up for auction in 1990, Christie’s compared it with Van Kirk’s and, unable to verify they had the original, canceled the auction.
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Only in the mid-1980s, when a TV crew asked to go through his World War II memorabilia, did Van Kirk rediscover the book and move it into a safe-deposit box.
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The original log spent the next forty years in acid-free paper, in a dark envelope, “in a box full of junk,” says Van Kirk. He suspects that copilot Lewis, who died in 1983, later came across the copy in a trash bin and rescued it. He neglected a few details here and there- he didn’t include the scribbles in the margins he’d made during the flight trying to sharpen his pencil-but he did copy all of the notes he’d made, including “BombAway.” Payett took the copy, and Van Kirk kept the original, putting it in his briefcase. So he sat down at a desk and made an exact copy of his original log.
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But what there was, when he wasn’t flying, was time. Van Kirk jokes now that there weren’t any Xerox machines on Tinian in 1945, and there weren’t any secretaries. “I said, ‘I’ll make you an exact copy of it.’” You need a log.’” Payett asked him what he meant. “He says ‘Dutch, I can’t do that, I need it for our official records.’ I said, ‘Haze, you don’t need that log for your official records. “I said I’d like to have my log back I want to keep it,” Van Kirk says. “The more I thought about it,” he remembers, “the more I thought, hey, that could be valuable to somebody, and if to nobody else, it would be valuable to me.” He tracked down Payett to make his case. The morning after the mission, Van Kirk awoke with a pang of regret about the log. In October, “Dutch” Van Kirk’s log finally did sell at auction-at the Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, Texas, for $358,500-and the tale of its whereabouts all these years and its mysterious duplicate finally was told. “I said, ‘You’re advertising that you have the navigator’s log for sale, and I’m wondering how that is,’” he remembers, “‘Because I have it in my possession, and I was the navigator on the Enola Gay.’” But just before the auction was held, Christie’s received a call from Van Kirk. Then, in 1990, Christie’s auction house announced plans to auction off the log, which it had received from the widow of Robert Lewis, the Enola Gay’s copilot. Historians weren’t quite sure what had happened to the book some of the mission’s documents had been thrown out, and it wasn’t clear if the log had even made it off Tinian. Payett glanced at the notations- including the moment, at 9:15 that morning Tinian time, when Van Kirk recorded the birth of the atomic age with the words, “Bomb-Away”-and filed the log in the official record.įor the next four decades, Van Kirk’s record of the beginning of the end of World War II seemed to disappear from the public record. Hazen Payett, the flight’s intelligence officer. “The briefing,” chuckles Van Kirk, “was more of a bull session than a debriefing.”įollowing protocol, Van Kirk, known as “Dutch” to his friends, handed his navigation log-a minute-by-minute record of the mission-to Capt. After four years of war, there was victory in the air. A phalanx of high-ranking generals waited for the crew on the tarmac. After 1,200 miles of navigating over water, the Enola Gay had dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima only fifteen seconds behind schedule. “Everything went exactly the way it was supposed to, and we were all in a state of euphoria,” the flight’s navigator, now eighty-six, told World War II.
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Theodore Van Kirk felt he had just completed the perfect mission. ‘Bomb-Away’: The Enola Gay ’s Navigation Log Sold at AuctionĪs he stepped from the Enola Gay into the Tinian sunshine on August 6, 1945, Capt. WWII Today- February 2008 | HistoryNet Close