August 5, 1945 (Sunday)[edit]

• The U.S. Twentieth Air Force flew over twelve Japanese cities and dropped 720,000 pamphlets warning their populations to surrender or face devastation.^[8]
• Paul Tibbets formally named the lead plane in the Hiroshima bombing mission the Enola Gay, after his mother. The B-29 that would take photos on the mission would be named Necessary Evil.^[9]
• Born: Loni Anderson, actress, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

August 6, 1945 (Monday)[edit]

• Atomic bombing of Hiroshima: United States B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped a uranium-235 atomic bomb codenamed "Little Boy" on the Japanese city of Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. local time, resulting in between 90,000 and 146,000 deaths.
• In a routine press release a little over 1,000 words in length, a statement from U.S. President Harry S. Truman informed the media that an atomic bomb with "more power than 20,000 tons of TNT" had been dropped on Hiroshima. The statement made no mention of radiation effects and the notion of an atomic bomb simply being a bigger version of a regular bomb persisted in the press for days afterward.^[10]
• Died: Richard Bong, 24, United States Army major and highest-scoring air ace of WWII (killed in the crash of a test flight of an experimental aircraft)