All of these assertions are debated by serious students of the subject and some are plainly wrong. Tibbits Jr., "definitely a military objective," that the "tens of thousands" of civilians killed received leaflets warning them of their impending obliteration and that the atomic bombings alone ended the Pacific war.
The exhibit leaves the impression that Hiroshima was, using the words of the Enola Gay's pilot, Col.
So too did the staunchly conservative publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce, who in a 1948 speech stated, "If, instead of our doctrine of `unconditional surrender,' we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended no later than it did-without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience." The publisher of the Washington Post, Eugene Meyer, and his editor Herbert Elliston, were of substantially the same opinion, according to Meyer's biographer, Merlo J. The paragon of the conservative Republican establishment, former President Herbert Hoover, thought dropping the bomb was unnecessary. The New York Times' leading military affairs correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, included the Hiroshima decision in his 1950 book, "Great Mistakes of the War." Leahy, William Halsey, Curtis LeMay and Henry "Hap" Arnold criticized the decision to annihilate Hiroshima.
In the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, military figures like Dwight D.
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Political pundit George Will said the curators "obviously hate this country." TV journalist Cokie Roberts suggested that "to rewrite history makes no sense." Veteran broadcast journalist David Brinkley said, "What I don't understand is why a very strong element in the academic community seems to hate its own country and never passes up a chance to be critical of it." House Speaker Newt Gingrich intoned that this "revisionism" might be permissible when confined to the "faculty lounge," but there was no reason to subject the American people to "historically inaccurate, anti-American and distorted history." The Washington Post blamed the whole affair on "narrow-minded representatives of a special interest and revisionist point of view attempt(ing) to use their inside track to appropriate and hollow out a historical event that large numbers of Americans alive at that time and engaged in the war had witnessed and understood in a very different-and authentic-way."Ĭuriously, the views described in 1995 as distorted, hateful, narrow-minded and anti-American were common 50 years ago-and not the least among conservatives. Under intense political pressure, the director of the Air and Space Museum, Martin Harwit, lost his job.Īmong the very first lines of the original exhibit was the utterly factual observation that, "To this day, controversy has raged about whether dropping this weapon on Japan was necessary to end the war quickly." It was this notion that the Air Force Association and the guardians of patriotically correct history wished to expunge from the museum. The proposed exhibit, reflecting 50 years of rich archival evidence, was initially rewritten line-by-line and-when that did not satisfy the critics-was finally scrapped altogether. America's history, these critics cried, was being hijacked by a cabal of revisionist historians of dubious patriotism. The battleground was the Air and Space Museum, which was preparing to mount a massive exhibit on the Enola Gay's mission and the end of World War II. And the result is not just of interest to historians but to anyone worried about the dumbing down of American public life.Ī year ago, angry veterans-egged on by the leaders of the Air Force Association and a bevy of pundits and editorialists-succeeded in gaining control of the public presentation of the long-runnning debate over the necessity and the morality of using the atomic bomb. One year after the controversy over the Smithsonian's Hiroshima exhibit, the dismantled plane has become not just the symbol of the atomic bomb but of the sorry fact that America was more tolerant of honest, intelligent debate about Hiroshima in the 1940s than it is today.
The Enola Gay now lies in pieces-a fuselage, a tail, a piece of the wing, an empty bomb-bay-on the ground floor of the Air & Space Museum.