I recall news of the death of President Roosevelt, vaguely, or rather the fact that people, grownups, went around crying. The whole thing of adults crying was completely new to me, and very scary. I was just old enough to have been expected to shush up whenever "the President is talking!" on the radio.
Naturally I didn't know who Roosevelt was, just that "the President" was sort of like another grownup even if he only showed up as a particular voice coming out of that box on the shelf in the kitchen or a bigger box in the living room.
I didn't understand death yet of course. I learned "Mr. Truman" would be the new President. OK so I liked him, I could pronounce his name at least, I remember saying his name over and over Truman Truman Truman Truman! and eventually being told "that'll do now, that'll do!" by my grandpa (who I learned later on loathed the man). The other guy had always just been described to me as "the President" and I never said his name as far as I can remember. So Mr. Truman (or Truman Truman Truman!) was the new voice in that box on the shelf... and whenever he talked, I was to be quiet, just like for the other guy.
But in sharper focus later on, I so clearly remember news accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. I was just pre-kindergarten and could read, but of course not yet regularly reading newspapers. However, those incidents were definitely all that was being talked about for days, even weeks at every sit-down to table, including breakfast... so those news reports stuck like a mountain in memory... because otherwise [shrug] the days and especially breakfast were just how morning started, something to eat and then some chores. Grandpa read the paper and then headed off to the bank. Grandma and mom set about their daily routines. Sometimes the mailman brought a letter from my dad or an uncle and everyone took a break while that got read aloud to all of us. My chores were stuff like kneading that orange dot into the white margarine packets that we had instead of butter during the war rationing, and then taking kitchen veggie tops and peels out to the barn to feed the rabbits.
I remember feeling anxious about whether atomic bombs could hurt the rabbits. I knew the bombs dropped on Japan were made in the USA, that had been in the newspapers. I didn't really understand if Japan had bombs like that too. I probably couldn't deal with the idea that if bombs got dropped here it wasn't just going to be rabbits at stake. I don't remember being afraid for us, just our rabbits. Weird how kids process what they can and lay the rest off. LOL I never really got it that those rabbits were being raised (and sold) for meat. We didn't eat them, so I was spared the need to know what happened to them as they grew up.