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Shumard served on active duty from April 1941 to November 1945, and later during the Korean conflict. ″The definition as it was laid out didn’t exactly or precisely fit a crew member of the Enola Gay,″ said Bob Conlee, a VA spokesman in Detroit.Īfter a two-month review, officials at VA headquarters in Washington authorized the Detroit office to include Shumard in the definition. 6, 1945 and July 1, 1946, or who had been a prisoner of war in the area when the bomb was dropped. The law specifically defined a radiation-exposed veteran as one who had participated in the test of an atomic bomb, who had been in Hiroshima or Nagasaki between Aug. The VA was uncertain whether an Enola Gay crew member would be covered by the legislation because the crew was in the air when the bomb was dropped. It allows veterans or their survivors to claim service-related benefits if the veteran was exposed to radiation and subsequently suffered certain cancers within 40 years or certain kinds of leukemia within 30 years. Veterans groups lobbied hard for the Radiation Exposed Veterans Compensation Act, which became law May 20. There were three strike planes that flew over Hiroshima that day: the Enola Gay, which carried the bomb, and two observation planes, the Great Artiste and the Necessary Evil.
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Arriving from its original air base in Omaha, its gleaming, polished aluminum skin nearly blinded him on. Theodore Van Kirk was 24 when he served as navigator on that mission, and already a seasoned combat veteran, having flown 58 bombing missions in Europe. ″I was fascinated, and asked the VA to reconsider a service connection for cause of death,″ Bielak said. SPRING HILL John Bombara remembers seeing the war bird for the first time in late 1944. Well, the last surviving member of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima 69 years ago, has died at 93. Theodore Van Kirk was 93 years-old and living in a retirement home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, outside Atlanta. During conversations at that time, he learned that her husband was a crew member on the Enola Gay. The last surviving crewmember of the Enola Gay the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II has died. Shumard when she was having trouble collecting her limited benefits in 1980. I can pay some of the bills that had gotten behind,″ she said.īielak first went to bat for Mrs. The American crew of the Enola Gay had just detonated the first atomic bomb ever used in combat over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Lewis of the Enola Gay Koko Kondo (nea Tanimoto) was 8 months old when she was buried in rubble, trapped in her mother’s arms. He’s been fighting for the last eight years,″ Mrs. 2019 A-Bomb Survivor Koko Kondo meets Capt.
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″When I heard the good news, I almost fell to the floor. Shumard, who will receive five times the $133 a month she now gets in benefits from the VA, credits the help of Veterans of Foreign Wars member Norman Bielak.