Excerpt from the NY TImes August 6 1945
” At 10:45 o’clock this morning, a statement by the President was issued at the White House that sixteen hours earlier – about the time that citizens on the Eastern seaboard were sitting down to their Sunday suppers – an American plane had dropped the single atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, an important army center.
What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known. The War Department said it “as yet was unable to make an accurate report” because “an impenetrable cloud of dust and smoke” masked the target area from reconnaissance planes. The Secretary of War will release the story “as soon as accurate details of the results of the bombing become available.”
But in a statement vividly describing the results of the first test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico, the War-Department told how an immense steel tower had been “vaporized” by the tremendous explosion, how a 40,000-foot cloud rushed into the sky, and two observers were knocked down at a point 10,000 yards away.”