Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk died Monday at the age of 93. He was the last survivor of the crew of the Enola Gay, which on August 6, 1945, dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. It is one those tricks of history that he died amid a campaign by the left to convict Israel of “war crimes” for its action in Gaza.

Van Kirk himself was not involved in that debate. He died at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga., having long since retired from the Army. With Col. Paul Tibbets Jr., the pilot, and Maj. Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, Van Kirk had guided the B-29 Superfortress to Hiroshima from Tinian in the Marianas. He navigated with a hand-sextant.

One account of the flight is in Stephen Coonts “War in the Air.” It was Van Kirk who called out the coordinates as the Enola Gay approached its target. He’d helped design the headrest from which Ferebee peered down to spot their aiming point, the Aioi Bridge. When the bomb was released, the plane banked away, only to be nearly shaken out of the sky by the atomic blast.

Some estimates of the number who perished at Hiroshima range above 150,000, the vast majority of them civilians. As many as 80,000 died at Nagasaki.

A debate has long sputtered as to whether America was within its rights to strike — though, as Van Kirk wrote years later in Time magazine, Hiroshima had “over 100 numbered military targets.” In that piece, Van Kirk also wrote that, at the time of the blast, “there was one thought that was uppermost on everyone’s mind. Somebody said, and I thought too, ‘This war is over.’ You didn’t see how anybody — even the most radical, militaristic, uncaring for their people — how anybody like that could stand up to something like this.”

Yet it took more. We struck Nagasaki three days later, on Aug. 9, and only a week after that, on Aug. 15, did the enemy emperor, Hirohito, give his “Jewel Voice Broadcast,” announcing unconditional surrender. A vast land and sea campaign to invade Japan, sure to have cost countless lives on both sides, was no longer needed. The deadliest war in history was over in two fell swoops.

There were no triumphalist displays for the Enola Gay crew. Gen. Carl Spaatz, our strategic commander in the Pacific, did, in a modest formation, award Tibbets the Distinguished Service Cross the moment he landed back at Tinian. In a more restrained sense, Van Kirk and his comrades were treated as heroes for the rest of their lives.

This is what comes to mind with the news about Van Kirk’s death. How could we have possibly defeated Japan if we were subjected to the kind of propaganda campaign to which Israel is subjected over Gaza? It has killed in the entire Gaza campaign less than half a percent of the civilians we killed with the atomic bombs we unleashed on Japan. And all for a clearly moral purpose: to end Hamas’ campaign of terror, via rocket and tunnel, menacing small communities like Sderot on the edge of Gaza as well as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Yet throughout the fighting, organizations without loyalties, like Human Rights Watch, have had agents on the battlefield, watching out for war crimes. Its cadre then go on TV and retail their allegations of Israeli wrongdoing. How could we have waged World War II under such circumstances? The scale of the current fighting may be small. But the strategic situation, with a vast Arab region in turmoil and Russia and China expanding, is as precarious as in any world war.

Yet today, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are publicly campaigning for a halt to Israel’s action. Could either one have led us in World War II? Could they ever rank with the Greatest Generation? Could they ever have simply stood fast the way Van Kirk and the crew of the Enola Gay did for the rest of their years?

“We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat,” Van Kirk said, according to his New York Times obituary. He said: “I believe that when you’re in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.”

“Where,” he asked, citing some of the horrors earlier in that war, “was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan Death March, or the Rape of Nanking or the bombing of Pearl Harbor?”

He could have added Sderot.

This column originally appeared in the New York Post.