My True Course: Dutch Van Kirk, Northumberland to Hiroshima

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Red Gremlin Press LLC, 2012 - Biography & Autobiography - 578 pages
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 Dutch's 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."

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About the author (2012)

Suzanne Simon Dietz is the historian for the Town of Porter, Niagara County, and the Aero Club of Buffalo, New York. She has lectured in Western New York on local history topics and in particular German prisoners of war held at Fort Niagara, a major POW camp during World War II. She is the author of Porter Images of America, Lewiston Images of America, Honor Thy Fathers & Mothers: Niagara Frontier's Legacy of Patriotism and Survival, POW's Interned at Fort Niagara: A Reference Manual, and co-author with Amy Lynn Freiermuth for Lewiston Then & Now. She writes and researches for the Niagara Aerospace Museum, and presently is working on a collection of veterans' stories from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. She has consulted for the history of the Tuscarora Indian Nation and also contributed to several books on Niagara County history and numerous local history publications.

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