August 6

[crowback]

On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

[Waffenreich]

Headlines from August 6th and 7th.

I've never found one that talks about the Nagasaki blast on the 9th.

The unit I retired from in the Air Force was the 509th Bomb Wing. The 509th dropped both bombs in WW2. A couple of months before I retired Paul Tibbets' grandson got assigned to us as a B-2 pilot. Needless to say he was like royalty to those who knew the significance of the unit and the Enola Gay.