On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 U.S. Air Force military plane, dropped an atomic bomb code-named “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. As the skies raged, silhouettes of men, women, and children were plastered onto building bricks. The casualties were immense: around 70,000 Japanese citizens perished. Three days later, Bockscar, another U.S. Air Force B-29 airplane, dropped the second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing 40,000 Japanese citizens.
What seemed to be the end of the bloodiest war in human history was only a prelude to the beginning of the Cold War, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the growing polarization of American politics.
In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian was set to air an exhibit displaying the Enola Gay B-29 airplane. Curators Tom Crouch and Michael Neufeld as well as National Air and Space Museum Director Martin Harwit wanted to create an exhibit that analyzed the bomber’s relevance in the war. Part of this analysis would debate the bomb’s necessity and its impact on the civilians of Hiroshima by including photographs and statements from Hiroshima residents and statements from the pilots involved in the bombings.
The Smithsonian was not prepared for the ideological fight that would soon ensue.
In January 1994, Director Harwit sent the final script to the Air Force Association (AFA) for review. It became clear that the AFA did not agree with the direction in which Harwit was taking the exhibit. John T. Correll, editor-in-chief of Air Force Magazine, publicly responded to the script, contending that “many visitors may be taken aback by what they see,” particularly “World War II veterans who had petitioned the museum to display the historic bomber in a more objective setting.” From Correll’s perspective, curators of the original script had created what was deemed to be a politically correct revisionist history of an exhibit that should instead express America’s triumphant victory in Japan.
Many veterans were outraged and felt they were facing a public trial for fighting against a dangerous foreign enemy on behalf of their country. Correll wrote in Air Force Magazine, “The Committee for the Restoration and Display of the Enola Gay, ‘a loose affiliation of World War II B-29 veterans,’ has collected 8,000 signatures on a petition asking the Smithsonian to either display the aircraft properly or turn it over to a museum that will do so.”
As soon as the AFA realized that the Smithsonian would only question the Air Force’s actions in the war, it threatened to bring in Congress to investigate if the Smithsonian did not revise their script. Crouch and Neufield’s Smithsonian team revised the exhibit plans three times, but the AFA began to petition for the entire cancellation of the exhibit. Amidst national pushback from WWII veterans and the AFA, the Enola Gay exhibit was canceled and instead replaced with an insufficient shell of what was to be: simply a display of the plane itself.
“The Air Force Association was really nervous about how the exhibit would be received by the American public,” said Tami Biddle, Professor Emerita, U.S. Army War College, in an interview with The Politic. “They didn’t want the Smithsonian to go down this road. [The U.S. Military] is a very conservative body and not very reflective of the nation’s ideologies. It’s a family business, they like to protect their story.” Suddenly, the Smithsonian had entered itself into direct conflict with conservative America.
Many at the time, including the Air Force Association, believed that President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the bomb was necessary and that criticism of its impact was unpatriotic and therefore un-American. However, other advocates of the full exhibit, primarily critics of the atomic bomb’s deployment, believed that by canceling the exhibit, the Smithsonian had failed to educate the American public on the horrors committed in the war and their continued relevance today.
The exhibit was so polarizing that General Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the Enola Gay, dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, wrote in his will that he wanted neither a funeral nor a headstone to mark his departure. Tibbets believed that in marking his resting place, he would provide physical grounds for further protests over his actions.
After the original exhibit’s cancellation, the Enola Gay bomber was opened as an unadorned exhibit in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and sat there until 2003. Today, the Enola Gay resides in Chantilly, Virginia at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Though the WWII Aviation exhibit is open to the public, the Enola Gay’s modest new home has allowed it to sink out of the public eye, quietly retiring after such an infamous career. After fifty-five years of life on the run, the Enola Gay has finally settled down. But this relic of WWII is far too important to forget, and the lessons we may learn from its history far too valuable. Conversations over its role in the war, especially its necessity, must continue.
Just like contemporary debate over controversial statues honoring Confederate leaders and slave owners, historical artifacts like the Enola Gay leave us to question whether displaying the Enola Gay is a form of education to build historical consciousness or whether it condones racist and imperialist American acts and ideologies. Instead of demythologizing Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, as the Smithsonian once intended, the exhibit, sans contextual analyses, may be mythologizing it.
It can be hard to tell a soldier following orders that the plane they assembled or the weapon they fired may have been a terrible atrocity. The moral compass that guides a man in war will differ from that of an academic inspecting a great tragedy of war decades later. In that sense, it’s possible to see how a veteran might have disagreed with the Smithsonian’s new narrative in 1995. “This is where the Smithsonian went into the exhibit a little bit naively,” Biddle explained. “The Smithsonian had only ever celebrated technology, they had never looked at it as weaponry.”
The narrative that our foreign policy promotes the greater good can be difficult to challenge in the public sphere. The exhibit sought to challenge this narrative — which museum directors believed was harmful — by proving the airplane was more than just technology, as Biddle explained.
“The framework in which we understand the necessity of the atomic bombs ultimately comes down to whether we believe Japan was going to surrender, and the unfortunate truth is that we will never know,” explained Yale History and American Studies Professor Beverly Gage, in an interview with The Politic. However, by evaluating the apportionment of blame for Japanese civilian deaths upon Japan’s unwillingness to surrender, greater philosophical and humanitarian ideals of a person’s right to live are ignored.
Whether Japan’s imperialist motives propelled the war or not does not dismiss the fact that Americans could not separate the Japanese government from Japanese civilians in the same way they could with Germans — suggesting a clear racial divide between America’s treatment of its white and non-white wartime enemies. For instance, the February 13, 1945 bombing of Dresden, which resulted in a great number of German civilian casualties, was met with heavy backlash and censure. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had doubts after the attack, as he wrote in a memo in its aftermath. The bombing of Dresden was quickly followed by numerous criminal trials and declared by many WWII scholars a de facto war crime committed by the Allied Forces. In contrast, there is little publicized remorse for the Japanese after the war. “We wanted to blame Hitler for everything and assume the German people were free of guilt,” Biddle said, “but we believed that the Japanese were different.”
This racist treatment of Japanese people is why many proponents of the exhibit believed that it was a necessary historical lesson to prevent the vicious perpetuation of ignorance. Perhaps they did not expect to encounter such challenges in changing the opinions of people already set in what they believe — especially when those opinions are forged through decades of U.S. global militarization.
The Pacific theater of WWII was just as much a race war as it was an imperial war, fought between two nations who viewed the other as less than human. This result of this dehumanization led to a war more brutal and bloody than anything anyone had ever seen.
“It was time to reckon with the bombing of Japan and the two nuclear attacks, but as a country, I don’t think we were ready,” Biddle said.
She is hopeful that future generations will be able to confront and sensitively address such a complex subject.
Mary Lui, a Professor of American Studies at Yale University echoes these sentiments. “I just don’t think we are ready yet,” said Lui in an interview with The Politic “As a country, we are more polarized than ever.” While the Enola Gay exhibit will continue to be debated, its necessity lies in its ability to provide frameworks for bipartisan conversation confronting our history as a militarized state.
When the curators of the late Enola Gay exhibit sought to create what they thought would be an eye-opening and revolutionary exhibit, they ultimately conceded to the weight of opposition. What they realized is that there will never be a perfect time to revitalize the debates over the US’s draconian treatment of the Japanese people in the Pacific theater. But for as long as the Enola Gay is still in public view, today is better than never.