Services will be held for Lewis in Smithfield Monday and a military funeral will be held Wednesday at the Holmdel Cemetary in Holmdel, N.J., where Lewis will be buried.
and Steven Lewis, 25, of Williamsburg, Va. The four other children are Robert Lewis Jr., 34, of Pittsburgh John Lewis, 30, of St. Marcotte, four other children and six grandchildren. She said Lewis also was an inventor with six worldwide patents to his credit and a sculptor of both abstract and classical works in marble who won awards in the amateur class of numerous art shows.
Lewis also taught famed pilot Charles Lindbergh how to fly the B29, Ms. armed services, for his part in the Hiroshima bombing. Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. One crewman, a Major Ferebee ihad a nervous breakdown after the war, he was the bombardier who actually released the bomb and all. The Enola Gay (/ n o l /) is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. He received the Silver Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross, the second highest decoration in the U.S. Taking the question simply as it is asked - the answer is, no. He was in the reserves for 20 years after leaving active military service and retired as a major. He retired to Smithfield with his wife, Eileen, 59, in 1981. in New Brunswick, N.J., after the war and 33 years later reached the position of plant manager. Lewis went to work for the Heidi Candy Co. The log first was auctioned off in 1975 at Southeby Park-Bernet in New York for $45,000 and later resold for $87,500 to set the record. Five and a half hours earlier, the B-29 departed from Tinian, a small Pacific. on August 6, 1945, a modified American B-29 Superfortress bomber named the Enola Gay left the island of Tinian for Hiroshima. She said he kept a log which, to date, is the highest priced personally signed document sold in the history of the United States. The crew of the Enola Gay B-29 Superfortress poses for a photo in front of the bomber in the Mariana Islands in 1945. The Enola Gay dropped the 8,900-pound bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy,' over Hiroshima at 8:15 A.M. Lewis trained the crew for the Enola Gay for about a year before the actual bombing, Ms.
He had been promoted to captain at the time of the mission. Lewis enlisted in the Air Force as a private in January 1942 and quickly was selected to be a B29 pilot and subsequently picked by Tibbets to be his co-pilot on the top secret mission. The bomb dropped by the Enola Gay had an explosive power equal to 20,000 tons of TNT, considered inconceivably enormous at that time. 6, 1982, also said that he had no regrets about the bombing because the United States was at war and that he would do it again under the same circumstances. Van Kirk was the navigator on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Marcotte said her father died unexpectedly Saturday and had no previous history of heart illness.Įnola Gay pilot Tibbets, looking back on his actions on Aug. The funeral for Theodore Van Kirk was held Tuesday morning.