The fifth programme in this 12-part series
Narrated by Anthony Quayle 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. Film editor GREG MILLER
Series producer IVAN RENDALL Executive producer JOHN GAU. Producer DENNIS ADAMS BBC Pebble Mill
Book: 'Reaching for the Skies', price £14.95 from booksellers
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