Much has been written about the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare – and it is interesting to compare the newspaper reports of the time with more recent historical descriptions of the same event.

Recent accounts reports tend to dwell on the terrible death toll . But that wasn’t really what the citizens of the time were so shocked about.

After all, at that point in the war there were almost nightly raids on Japanese cities by huge fleets of B29 bombers, which inflicted similar amounts of damage with similar casualty figures. The after-effects of radiation and fallout are often mentioned these days but these weren’t really understood at the time.

No, the real shock was that here at last was an explanation for one of the greatest puzzles of WWII: What was the purpose of the V2 rocket?

This photograph of the damage to Hiroshima is also historically significant because it is signed by Col. Paul Tibbets, Pilot of the "Enola Gay" which dropped the first Atomic Bomb on Japan on August 6th, 1945.

Toward the end of WWII the Nazis launched approximately 5,000 V2 rockets, mostly aimed at Antwerp and London. At first sight, the V2 sounds like a formidable weapon: carrying a one-tonne payload, it could climb to a height of about 100km and then fall back to Earth at supersonic speed, seemingly appearing out of nowhere before destroying one or at most, two buildings.

As a military weapon, the V2 was ludicrously inefficient. They cost more to build than a conventional bomber, which could deliver much more explosive punch, far more accurately, and with a more than half-decent chance of coming back for another load! Terrifying though the V2 may have sounded, the vast majority of them simply failed to hit anything important.

But after August 6^th 1945, the whole world realised what the US and British military had known for some years: theV2 was merely one part of a radical new weapons system, the other part being the atomic bomb.