'Heat and flash of the blast were so intense it gave the impression of being dangled in hell and hauled out'

Eighty years ago today, a new deadly weapon was unleashed, closing the final bloody chapter of the Second World War.

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS

Just before 11am on August 6, 1945, American B-29 bomber the Enola Gay flew high above the Japanese city of Hiroshima and opened its bay doors.

The 10ft bomb held inside, with uranium at its core and nicknamed Little Boy, was the result of years of research by Allied scientists working under the Manhattan Project, masterminded by J Robert Oppenheimer.

Little Boy rolled out of the plane and its parachute unfurled, stalling its fall until the moment it exploded 1,900ft above the city, on Japan's largest island of Honshu.

Within seconds, 40,000 people were dead, many vaporised, leaving only shadows burnt on concrete surfaces.

More than six square miles of the city were reduced to rubble before blazes raged for three days, killing many more who survived the blast.

Then three days later, a plutonium-loaded bomb, named Fat Boy due to its round shape, fell over Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu, killing 40,000.

Estimates suggest both bombs, in the end, claimed the lives of more than 240,000 people.

A British prisoner of war working four miles away from the blast epicentre of Nagasaki had a "ringside view".

In a report produced by the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division in November 1945, the witness - an unnamed Petty Officer who had survived the HMS Exeter's sinking and was held captive in Fukuoka Camp Noll - said the flash "would have lit up the whole of England had it been dark instead of daylight".