“It contained a dozen colors, all of them blindingly bright.” Just when it appeared that the explosion was subsiding, “a kind of mushroom spurted out of the top and traveled up, up to what some say was a distance of 60,000 or 70,000 feet.” They watched as fire swallowed the city whole: “It was like no ordinary fire,” a crew member later recalled. 6, 1945, were witnessing a man-made cataclysm unlike anything seen in the previous history of human warfare. The American airmen who flew the mission to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. Looking down, they saw the fireball unfurling. A loud clap broke around them as the first of three shock waves hit, causing the plane’s aluminum body to vibrate violently. More than one noted a strange metallic taste in his mouth. The explosion lit the plane’s interior with a brilliant flash, so bright that some of the aviators momentarily thought they had been blinded. The B-29 bomber banked hard to avoid the blast. After years of being arrested for petty crimes, he became a high-profile antinuclear activist. The latest article from “ Beyond the World War II We Know ,” a series from The Times that documents lesser-known stories from the war, looks at Claude Eatherly, an American pilot involved in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.