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This day in history - August 6

Posted: Thu Aug 06, 2009 9:51 pm
by seamusTX
1787 - The Constitutional Convention began to debate a draft of the new U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia.

1815 - U.S. naval forces ended piracy by the Barbary States.

1945 - The United States dropped the first of two atomic bombs ever used in warfare on Hiroshima. The bomb was dropped at 8:15 a.m. local time. It was still August 5 in the U.S., leading to everlasting mixups about the date.

1965 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

- Jim

Re: This day in history - August 6

Posted: Thu Aug 06, 2009 10:11 pm
by ELB
Somewhere, probably at my sister's house, there is a diary that my dad kept when he was an Army Air Corps mechanic serving in the Pacific theater in WWII. I read them when I was a kid, and I remember running across the entry where he found out that the US had dropped The Bomb on Japan. He enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, was on his way to boot camp by Christmas, trained at Kelly Airfield, and then off to the Pacific. At the time the bomb was dropped, he had not been home since enlistment, as far as I know. Certainly not after he was sent to the Pacific.

I remember one word from his entry. "Hooray." Then I believe something along the lines of "maybe this will finally be over soon."