Road to Eternity It was quite probably the most important event of World War II. Its consequences were greater than those of any other event of the war. On the morning of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay flew over the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima and dropped the first atomic bomb through its hatches. The city went up in a fireball, causing destruction unlike anything the world had ever seen. The fact that it killed one hundred thousand people instantly made the atomic bomb known as an instrument of terrible destruction, the fact that it helped bring about the Japanese surrender and thus ended the Pacific war made the bomb an effective deterrent