Instead of 12 men on the Enola Gay, people would think there were only nine. Jeppson was worried that without some addition, the importance of his role, along with that of Navy Capt. Jeppson was concerned because he learned his name, along with two others, would be absent from a list of crew members long-ago stenciled on the side of the infamous B-29 bomber by the military. The new Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was about to open with the Enola Gay on display. It was 2003 when Jeppson felt compelled to come forward. Today he lives in Las Vegas with his wife, Molly, retired after a career spent at the helm of a handful of high-tech companies and working as consultant for the Department of Energy. Jeppson turned to graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, after leaving the military. Now 90, Tibbets lives in a modest brick home in a well-kept neighborhood in Columbus and travels occasionally for air shows and veterans’ ceremonies. William Rooney, a former Army Air Corps intelligence officer with involvement in the B-29 program, wrote to House Appropriations Committee Chair Sidney Yates on September 10, 1990, asking to see the Enola Gay proudly restored and displayed because he intended once again, to see Gen. Most of the lives saved were Japanese,” the 84-year-old said from his suburban Atlanta retirement home near the base of Stone Mountain, where a large relief memorial carved out of the bare rock depicts Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Enola Gay was embroiled in controversy during the 1980s when veterans groups expressed interest in displaying the historic aircraft in Washington. “I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. The Smithsonian Institution, skirting the controversy in 1995 that enveloped its display of the Enola. The 9,000-pound bomb fell down toward the city as the Enola Gay banked away, the crew hoping to escape with their lives.ĭespite decades of controversy over whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb - which left some 140,000 dead in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki three days later - Van Kirk remains convinced it was necessary because it shortened the war and relieved the Allies of having to mount a land invasion that might have cost far more lives on both sides. Enola Gay Reassembled for Revised Museum Show. Under cover of night, he guided the bomber nearly exactly as planned - the plane was just 15 seconds behind schedule. 'But at least we have had the chance to know her father, to love and learn from this special man. It was a perfect mission, Van Kirk recalls. Written before the cancellation: 'The bombers may finally rest in peace, but they will forever be shrouded in roiling debate.' FullText 'The Enola Gay Saved Hundreds of Thousands of American Lives,' by Kathleen Krog, Buffalo News, 02/02/95, 3. Van Kirk, then 24, was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped “Little Boy” - the world’s first atomic bomb - over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug.