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. 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. And the result is not just of interest to historians but to anyone worried about the dumbing down of American public life.
A 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. 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. America’s history, these critics cried, was being hijacked by a cabal of revisionist historians of dubious patriotism. 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. Under intense political pressure, the director of the Air and Space Museum, Martin Harwit, lost his job.
Among 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.
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.”
Curiously, the views described in 1995 as distorted, hateful, narrow-minded and anti-American were common 50 years ago–and not the least among conservatives. In the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, military figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, William D. Leahy, William Halsey, Curtis LeMay and Henry “Hap” Arnold criticized the decision to annihilate Hiroshima. The New York Times’ leading military affairs correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, included the Hiroshima decision in his 1950 book, “Great Mistakes of the War.”
The paragon of the conservative Republican establishment, former President Herbert Hoover, thought dropping the bomb was unnecessary. 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. Pusey.
Evidence that has emerged from government archives in the last 15 years has given substance to much of this critique. Most diplomatic historians, if not all military historians, now agree that there were alternatives to ending the war with the bomb and Harry Truman and his closest aides knew it.
In any case, the sense that reasonable people had–and have–differing opinions about Hiroshima was expunged from the patriotically correct exhibit now on display at the Air and Space Museum. Since last August, 1.3 million visitors have filed past the dismembered carcass of the Enola Gay and read a brief series of labels packed with historical inaccuracies.
The exhibit leaves the impression that Hiroshima was, using the words of the Enola Gay’s pilot, Col. Paul W. 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. All of these assertions are debated by serious students of the subject and some are plainly wrong. (For example, there is no evidence that the war planners of the day who selected Japanese cities for bombing regarded the military installations in Hiroshima of major significance, and no evidence that atomic warning leaflets were dropped on the city.) Most people no doubt come away wondering why there should have been any controversy over the Enola Gay’s mission.
The fact is that the atomic bombings, so controversial in the late 1940s, remain controversial today. A Gallup poll taken in November 1994–in the midst of the Smithsonian controversy–asked 1,026 Americans, “If the decision about dropping the atomic bomb had been yours to make, would you have ordered the bombs to be dropped, or would you have tried some other way to force the Japanese to surrender?” In response, 44 percent said they would have dropped the bomb, and 49 percent said they would have “tried some other way.”
Obviously, many Americans are uncomfortable with Hiroshima, despite everything they have been told over the years to justify the bombing.
This division of opinion of Americans is precisely why the Enola Gay show was important for democratic life: so that Americans of good will could educate themselves and intelligently debate a key episode in the nation’s history. The powers that be in Congress and the media stifled that debate and the chilling effect was felt. The Smithsonian’s secretary, I. Michael Heyman, uncouragously canceled or postponed indefinitely two other historical exhibits: one on the Cold War, the other on the American experience in Vietnam.
Instead of having the opportunity to learn about some of the most important political issues in their lives, Americans will presumably get to see exhibits that are less controversial, more soothing.
What difference did the cancellation of the Enola Gay show make in the real world? It made us dumber.
