The 393rd Bombardment Squadron crew of the B-29 Enola Gay. 

During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the United States conducted two
atomic bombings against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the first
on August 6, 1945 and the second on August 9, 1945. For six months prior to the bombings, the United States fire-bombed 67 Japanese cities and  calling  for the surrender of Japan in a declaration issued on July 26, 1945. The Japanese
government ignored the ultimatum and by executive order of President Harry S.
Truman, the U.S. dropped the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” (shown below) on the
city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed by the detonation of the
second atomic bomb, “Fat Man” over Nagasaki on August 9. Within the first two
to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people
in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki,with roughly
half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Enola Gay (above)
dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima.

The atomic bomb “Little Boy”

 
The explosion of “Little Boy”

Hiroshima after the bombing

April 1943, 25-year-old Lt. John F. Kennedy arrived in the Pacific and took command
of the Patrol Torpedo boat, PT 109. Just months later,the most famous collision in
U.S. Navy history occurred at about 2:30 a.m. on August 2, 1943 when the boat
collided with a Japanese destroyer, killing two of his men.

Jimmy Dean’s PT-109 was one of the five top forty songs he had in
1962 and was the biggest hit, reaching the top ten on the charts.The
above video contains scenes from the 1963 biographical film PT-109
staring Cliff Robertson as Lt. John F. Kennedy.

A devastating fire and series of chain-reaction explosions on 29 July 1967 that
killed 134 sailors and injured 161 took place on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal
(CV-59), after an unusual electrical anomaly discharged a Zune rocket on the
flight deck. Forrestal was engaged in combat operations in the Gulf of Tonkin
during the Vietnam War at the time. The damage exceeded $72 million, not
including the damaged aircraft. 

USS Forrestal before the fire. It was decommissioned September 11, 1993.

On a Saturday morning, July 28, 1945 a U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bomber was
being flown by Lt. Colonel William Smith through a steadily increasing fog. The  
plane was on its way to Newark airport at the time when it crashed in the 79th  
floor of New York City’s Empire State Building, killing 14 people (three crewmen
and eleven in the building) and injuring 26 others. The resulting fire was put out
in 40 minutes. The crash caused one million dollar’s in damage. The structural
integrity of the building was not compromised and was opened for business on
many floors the following Monday. In the aftermath of the crash, flight rules
over New York City were strengthened.    

B-25 Mitchell bomber, similar to one that hit the Empire State Building 

JUNE 1, 1948

The public housing project Vanport, originally called Kaiserville, received its official
name in November 1942, taken from the two cities on either side of the Columbia
River—Vancouver and Portland. The first tenants arrived on December 12, 1942. It
was constructed to house wartime workers at the Kaiser Shipyards in Portland and Vancouver. Vanport was Oregon’s second largest city at the time with 40,000 people
and the largest housing project in the nation. The city was destroyed at 4:05 P.M. on Sunday May 30,1948, when a 200-foot section of a dike holding back the Columbia
River collapsed during a flood, killing 15 people.

Vanport before the flood, 1947