The Smithsonian and the Enola Gay: A Retrospective on the Controversy 10 Years Later

Abstract

Abstract : On Aug. 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A second bomb fell on Nagasaki Aug. 9. Japan surrendered Aug. 15. At Hiroshima, more than half the city was destroyed in a flash, and 80,000 were killed instantly. The Nagasaki bomb killed 40,000. However, these missions brought an end to a war in which 17 million people had died at the hands of the Japanese empire between 1931 and 1945.2 Until the atomic bombs fell, Japan had not been ready to end the war. By eliminating the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the atomic bombs prevented casualties, both American and Japanese, that would have exceeded the death tolls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The bombing of Hiroshima was a famous event, a defining moment of the 20th century, but the aircraft that flew the mission was largely forgotten and left to deteriorate, until restoration finally began in 1984. Fifty years after Hiroshima, the airplane flew into controversy of a different sort. In the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum laid plans to use the Enola Gay as a prop in a political horror show. It depicted the Japanese more as victims than as aggressors in World War II. When the museum's plan were revealed, initially an article in Air Force Magazine in 1994, a raging controversy ensued. The exhibition was concealed in 1995 in response to public and Congressional outrage, and the museum director was fired. Under new management, the Air and Space Museum returned to its mission to collect, preserve, and display historic aircraft and spacecraft. From 1995 to 1998, the museum displayed the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay in a depoliticized exhibit that drew four million visitors, the most in the museum's history for a special exhibition. Visitor comments were overwhelmingly favorable. In December 2003, the museum put the Enola Gay on permanent exhibition at its new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The controversy never died.