Bombers

On 6 August 1945, a B29 bomber, called Enola Gay after the captain's mother, dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Seventy-eight thousand people died immediately. It was the ultimate in terror bombing. An aeroplane first dropped a bomb just eight years after the Wright brothers first flew. A new and horrific dimension to warfare had arrived. Conventional bombing reached its climax in the Vietnam War, when the United States, in a ten-year-long campaign dropped six-and-a-half million tons of bombs. More than was used in the whole of the Second World War.