On August 6, 1945, a B-29 “Superfortress” bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima, a medium-sized industrial city in Japan, deposited her payload, and entered the history books as the first time an atomic weapon was used in wartime on a human population. According to the U.S Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, between 70,000 and 80,000 were killed, not including those who died later by radiation poisoning. Three days later, the B-29 Bock’s Car destroyed half of Nagasaki and eventually killed approximately 70,000 Japanese civilians. The war with Japan ended five days later.

Although these actions can be looked at as being incontrovertible facts, the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan and how it was arrived at is not as easily comprehended, and served as a magnet for criticism, support, and argument for days, weeks, months and even years after. Half a century later, controversy still looms over whether or not it was actually necessary to drop the bombs in order to end the war with Japan; other questions revolve around the possible death toll that Allied forces could expect should a planned invasion of the Japanese mainland take effect, and whether or not the atomic attacks were therefore justified by those predictions. These questions, in turn, have inspired more recent debates regarding the methods by which historians examine documents and attempt to piece together a picture of the motivations behind the decision: who supported it, who opposed it, and why (Goldberg 177).

These questions came to a head in 1995 when the Smithsonian Institution wished to present an exhibition commemorating the end of World War II starring the Enola Gay. In the end, the exhibition was, for the most part, axed, a victim of public debate between historians, veterans and even Congress over the role of museums and historical discourse as well as over the question of whose version of history should be presented as a nation’s “truth.” Shifts in political and cultural ideology often affect how history is perceived, especially in museums. Perceptions of historical events are highly subject to ideological bias; as Michel Foucault points out, historical memories are constantly refashioned to suit present purposes (Hogan 4). The matter of the Smithsonian Institution’s doomed 1995 presentation of the Enola Gay provides us with a perfect case in point, an issue that addresses the ideological crossroads where memory, history and politics meet, collide, and diverge.

            As a series of events were taking place to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Enola Gay would again become the lightning rod for controversy. The staff of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) had been planning for several months to put on an exhibit to remember the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In early 1994, Martin Harwit, the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM), met with several prominent historians, including Air Force Association (AFA) historian Richard Hallion, and presented them with an early first draft of a script for the exhibition called The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. The exhibit was to begin with a series of pictures and descriptions of events leading up to the end of the Pacific war, such as the brutal Japanese assault on her Asiatic neighbors prior to December 7, 1941. At the top of the list was the 1937 “rape of Nanking,” where thousands of Chinese were massacred by Japanese soldiers. Next would be descriptions of how Japanese soldiers took Chinese and Korean captives as prisoners and the horrible conditions in which they were kept. Later would come descriptions of the heavy losses, both Allied and Japanese, at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, followed by depictions of the wartime atrocities perpetrated on Allied soldiers in POW camps and on the grisly Bataan death march. As viewers walked on, the script explained, they would move into a section that discussed the wartime policy of strategic bombing, the focus being on the devastating firebombing of Tokyo. After a brief section depicting the Manhattan Project and the work being done by scientists and the military to invent an atomic weapon, the viewer would then be shown a mock-up of “Fat Man,” the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The centerpiece of the exhibition would be the forward fuselage portion of the Enola Gay, a specially designed B-29 “Superfortress” long-range bomber, along with personal artifacts from the crew and a 15-minute video about the crew and the restoration process of the plane itself. The next section of the exhibit, titled Cities at War, would serve a purpose comparable to the publication of John Hersey’s book Hiroshima in 1946, when many Americans’ public knowledge of the bombings was warped by government propaganda and censorship. It would place a human face on the consequences of the bombings, describing the experiences of Japanese civilians on that fateful day. Cities at War would portray the damage, both in material and in very human terms, with life-size photos of burn victims, diary entries from survivors, and artifacts from ground zero, such as a pocket watch and a child’s lunchbox. The final section of the exhibit would discuss the enduring ramifications of the atomic bombings, such as continued nuclear testing, the arms race with the Soviet Union and China, and the Cold War, and would wrap up with another short film with the B-29 crew looking back once more and giving their final thoughts on the subject (Harwit 1068). As the framers saw it, no visitor would leave the exhibit unmoved. However, between the exhibit’s earliest stages of planning and its final demise lay a very bumpy ride over an ideological minefield.

       At the outset, the curators were faced with a quandary: should the exhibit venerate the event, holding the plane and its crew up as heroes in an “uncritical glorification of the American war effort” (Hogan 223), and unquestioningly accept the conventional wisdom that the dropping of the A-bombs shortened the war and saved countless American (as well as Japanese) lives? Or should it explore how the decision to drop the bombs was far from clear-cut, how it was beset by infighting among top government officials, including President Truman (Goldberg 177)? Should the exhibit serve as a condemnation of the policy of strategic bombing in all its forms, or should it even broach the topic of whether or not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were racially-motivated acts of vengeance (Zolberg 73)? And ultimately, should it delve into questions on how much of the current information regarding the decision is based on personal memory and how much is the result of retrospective scholarly study? These issues and others were alluded to in the Smithsonian’s plan:

…The exhibition’s “primary goal” was “to encourage visitors to make a thoughtful and balanced re-examination of the atomic bombing in the light of the political and military factors leading to the decision to use the bomb, the human suffering experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the long-term implications of the events of August 6 and 9, 1945.” (Kohn 1041)

This “primary goal,” unfortunately, would provide the most fuel for critics of the exhibit, and would be its downfall. Veterans of World War II, for example, were not interested in any “re-examination” of an event that possibly saved their young lives. As Susan Crane writes:

One reviewer of the exhibit wrote, “It is probably asking too much of the people who have thought for fifty years that they owed their life to President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb to reflect objectively about whether his decision was morally justified. At its core that asks people to consider the possibility that their life was not worth living.” (Crane 60)

The bombing saved lives, Japan was notified of the impending attacks, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets, and the bomb forced an early surrender by the Japanese, the only alternative to which was invasion. (Yakel 298)

        All of these assumptions are arguable, and have been for over fifty years; indeed, most of them, on further study, have been totally disproved. There is no basis for the idea that we had warned the Japanese of the atomic attacks; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were factory towns, with little if any military significance; the notion that the bomb precluded a necessary invasion discounts much of what was being said by high-ranking government officials at the time, that Japan was on her last legs militarily; and it was only after the U.S.S.R. invaded the northern Japanese islands that the Emperor demanded that the military bring a halt to all hostilities. Finally, that “the Bomb saved lives” was a notion that became the final bone of contention between the Smithsonian curators and the Veterans’ groups, the most problematic aspect of this argument being that it has the distinctive ring of “speculative history” to it (Goldberg 177).

Nevertheless, these are the “facts” on which most World War II veterans placed (and continue to place) their trust. However, much of the trust in these assumptions is undermined by the fact that the majority of the information that was the chief source of knowledge for the average military enlistee as well as for the general American public was, as discussed by Lifton and Mitchell in their book Hiroshima in America, deliberately shrouded in secrecy. This information was usually the product of a U.S. Government-orchestrated campaign of silence, censorship, misinformation and propaganda (Lifton and Mitchell, 40). 

As noted above, the idea that “the Bomb saved lives” became the final straw for the Enola Gay exhibit, as the numbers of potential casualties in such an invasion vary wildly, often depending on the ideological bent of the person stating it. Veterans’ groups such as the American Legion swear to numbers in the 500,000-1,000,000 range, whereas the Smithsonian staff, upon study of declassified letters and official documents, had found evidence that the military themselves, in 1945, planned on numbers between 30,000 and 50,000 deaths, should an invasion be necessary. It is often thought that veterans’ groups pump up the numbers in order to justify, beyond all doubt, the use of the atomic bomb (Goldberg 177). Added to this was a fierce campaign of propaganda meant to disparage the Smithsonian staffers as coddling “politically correct” views of history, culminating in a long diatribe against the people of the staff itself. Much hay was made of the fact that Martin Harwit, although a respected astrophysicist with degrees from Cornell University, was also a Czech émigré, and that several of the chief players on the curator team were also foreigners. This served to cast suspicion on whether or not the staff actually had credentials deemed “American-enough” to put on such a display (Hogan 212). It is through methods such as these in which a politically-connected group is able to loudly proclaim its version of history as “truth.” Often, through repetition and manipulation of facts, using inclusion of some facts and exclusion of others, a biased organization or entity can establish a series of “truths” that becomes a knowledge base that then, through dispersal via massive conduits such as like-minded media, permeates the popular mind. But again, it is embedded in the ideology of that group to grasp on to and emphasize whatever “facts” it can in order to defend and validate its position, in order to make “history” its own. This was the tack that the AFA and the Legionnaires took in their fight with the Smithsonian and the NASM.

In exploring other reasons why the debacle over the Enola Gay took place, it is important to understand the political zeitgeist: in the mid-term elections of 1994, Congress switched political hands and a so-called “Republican Revolution” was under way (Yakel 280); a conservative movement that promised to undo much of the work dear to then-President Bill Clinton and the Democrats, such as the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Kohn 1056). In order to whip up popular support for such actions, a firestorm of rhetoric proclaiming a “culture war” against the forces of social progressivism began. Steps forward in affirmative action, women’s rights, and social programs like Welfare were the first things on the chopping block. Along with this sweeping tide of conservative thought came those who set their sights on other issues, among them being the Smithsonian’s exhibit of the Enola Gay, proposed for the upcoming anniversary celebrations of the end of WWII.

But even though the initial script for The Last Act seemed to go over well with everyone concerned, including the Air Force historian, trouble loomed. Although the meetings to discuss the exhibit were not open to the public, the script was leaked to the Air Force Association’s magazine Air Force. The magazine’s editor, John Correll, fired out a scathing report on the exhibit and a swell of protest began. There would be no way that veterans’ groups like the Air Force Association and the American Legion, accompanied with the newfound power of like-minded members of Congress, would allow an intellectual exercise like the Enola Gay exhibit to tarnish their romanticized notions of the glories of war. Their chief grievance came when the Washington Times had been made aware of two sentences in the initial script:

For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different than one waged against Germany and Italy---it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism. (Harwit 241)

Although taken out of a context that hoped to address the fanaticism of the Japanese fighting forces, the phrase instead was made to sound as if the Americans were the aggressors in the war and the Japanese mere victims of Yankee hostilities. Even though the sentences had been excised from later versions of the script, Correll, along with retired Air Force General Monroe Hatch (the AFA’s executive director), circulated petitions and inflamed media attention, demanding that the Enola Gay be displayed “proudly and patriotically” by the NASM, or else be sent to a museum that would (Smith 28). Senate House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a chief proponent of the “Republican Revolution,” entered the fray and presented the issue to an incensed Congress, calling for the resignation of NASM Director Harwit. After many discussions with congressional committees, and with its future funding on the line, the Smithsonian eventually agreed to eliminate any sections of the display that could be perceived as anything outside the standard narrative of the atomic bombings. The Enola Gay exhibit was finally reduced to a dry, depthless display consisting of the fuselage, a plaque stating the names of the crew members, and a short video chronicling the refurbishing of the plane itself (Hogan 228).  

But why did this happen? Why shouldn’t America’s premiere history museum feel free to “encourage visitors to make a thoughtful and balanced re-examination” of history and historical events, as historian Richard Kohn asks? Many historians and scholars have grappled with the question of how to present history in a museum setting in a way that minimizes (since it cannot eliminate) obvious ideological bias. Looking at the ways that a history museum exhibit connects (or doesn’t connect) with a visitor can help in understanding how differences in opinion can have such far-reaching results. Artifacts in museums are nearly always accompanied by text. In creating these texts, the curators have to take into account the visitors and their expectations, and write them accordingly. The text can take one of two routes: either as plain description, with the very basic information including a explanation of the artifact, where it was acquired, and so on; or in a series of probing questions suggesting ideas or concepts outside the scope of the artifact itself meant to take the viewer toward a richer understanding of the artifact, its place in history, and with an eye toward engaging the viewer in a silent dialogue. Texts written in the prior method are generally written in a disembodied, omniscient “narrator” voice, with little or no context or opinion. Texts written in the latter style tend to inspire as many questions as they propose to answer. Problems sometimes occur when curators take this second route, however, as they presume an interest on the part of the viewer in the finer details of the artifact such as historical context, the controversies surrounding the artifact at the time it was created, etc. The curators had decided on an ideological tack that included a critical study of the events surrounding the bombings. The problem? The whiff of opinion seeps into what is perceived by many to be an educational institution (Crane 48), and the Smithsonian, especially as a publicly-funded entity, is an educational institution whose “objectivity” is supposed to be above reproach.

Any sense of subjectivity in a museum context renders it vulnerable to scrutiny. This was keenly felt by the staff of the Smithsonian. According to Martin Harwit, who served as NASM Director from 1987 until his release from that position in the aftermath of the Enola Gay exhibit in 1995, museum curators are burdened with having to achieve an equilibrium between three different aspects of displaying an exhibition: accuracy, balance, and perceptions. Accuracy relates to the basic facts, the “who, what, when, where,” and so on. Balance, harder to discern, is essentially trying to decide which facts to display (Harwit and the NASM team, contending with military historians, found it difficult to achieve any middle ground in this area: they were persistently harangued by critics who claimed that the numbers of photographs, for example, portraying Japanese suffering far outweighed those showing American suffering at Japanese hands). Perceptions focus chiefly on the visitor, his or her previous knowledge on a topic, and what impressions they come away with. The main way to address perceptions when building an exhibition, says Harwit, is through a series of focus groups meant to determine the similarities and the differences between what is learned in an exhibition and what the staff intends for it to teach (Harwit 1072). Of course, these perceptions are also shaped by the predetermined ideology brought in with the viewer; certainly there would be vast gulf between the ideological mindset of a twenty-year-old college student, the daughter of Vietnam-era antiwar protesters, and that of a 75-year-old World War II veteran. How to address the expectations---and the perceptions--- of such a disparate cross-section of American culture (let alone world culture) was the primary burden that faced the Smithsonian curators.

How did the battle over the Enola Gay get so out of hand? The core of the debate, as many authors and historians have noted on retrospect, centered around one particular argument wherein those involved found themselves divided into two distinct camps: those who favored a commemorative retelling of the story versus those who leaned more toward a revisionist version (Hubbard and Hasian). The commemorative, or celebratory, seeks to describe the event in heroic terms, lauding the accomplishments of the men who fought to eradicate fascism and to protect American values. The revisionist version (although the word has, of late, been tarred with highly negative connotations) is essentially a reevaluation of an historical event after the fact, taking into account information not available at the time of the event. The commemorative version, chiefly based on collective memory, was favored by the veterans’ groups and by conservative commentators and politicians. The National Commander of the American Legion, William M. Detweiler, made a comment that was indicative of veterans’ groups’ unwillingness to have their collective memory altered in any way by the Enola Gay exhibit when he stated, “We are demanding an accurate portrayal of the facts as they existed when the decision was made at that period of time” (Smith 66). Again, to the exhibit’s critics, the “facts as they existed” appear to be inflexible and, because they are based on collective memory and personal experience, instead of on critical reflection and interpretation, they are perceived to have a greater ring of truth to them. And perceptions, as Martin Harwit describes above, are at the heart of how ideologies are formed. In any case, historians and those who do historical research on specific events are sure to find conflict with those whose memories of those events are still relatively fresh. As historian Martin Sherwin, one of many who worked on the Enola Gay exhibit, put it:

It…is a disturbing example of a clash between memory and history…personal memories of the war remain part of the current debate over the history of the war…memory and history inevitably conflict, for memory, the living voice of the past, is personal and particular, while history, the scholarly reconstruction of the past, in universal and critical. (Sherwin 34)

As one might gather from Sherwin’s comment, because the Enola Gay issue straddles the line between the historical and the personal, it follows that it is also about how politicized the telling of history can become. The Smithsonian curators were driven to capitulate by political forces well beyond their reckoning. Where they failed was in trying to combine the commemorative and the revisionist versions of the Enola Gay story, not aware that the two are ideologically opposed to each other. Truly, the staff of the Smithsonian had the very best of intentions; in essence, they were ideologically outgunned, out-shouted, and were simply buried in an avalanche of anti-intellectualist propaganda.

            The long-term effects of the fight over the Enola Gay will be felt for years to come. Professor Alfred F. Young of Northern Illinois University put the matter in a nutshell:

The central issue…is whether or not the nation’s history can be openly and critically discussed or whether organized political pressure will encourage censorship and promote a false consciousness about the past. (Hogan 231)

“Organized political pressure” continues to be a driving force behind many current issues that have roots that pass thorough the Enola Gay debacle. Concerns over Patriot Act-inspired censorship and continuing battles over school textbook versions of American history, for example, suggest that arguments over ideologically-weighted versions of history are nowhere near over. We are in a very historically significant time in our country’s existence; it is incumbent upon us and our children, as well as on future generations, that we stay well aware of all attempts to veer historical knowledge away from constant reevaluation and toward an ideologically narrow point of view, unwilling to take into account a country’s weaknesses as well as its strengths. For it is only through constant reevaluation that the real nation’s truths, for good or ill, can be acknowledged and encompassed in an honest version of history.