They and their supporters are intent on making sure the Enola Gay controversy is recorded as a case of strangled dissent, of the Smithsonian knuckling under to pressure from reactionary jingoists. It took a wave of nationwide outrage and angry rumblings from Congress before the museum finally scrapped its plans for a politically correct harangue and assembled instead the Spartan exhibit now on display.īut as the obnoxious behavior of the protesters suggests, that isn't the end of it. Such crude and unbalanced revisionism, in fact, was exactly what the Smithsonian's curators originally envisioned for the show. They wanted the exhibit to castigate the United States for dropping the bomb, to dwell on the horrors of radiation sickness, to portray the Japanese as the prime victims of the Pacific War. But not good enough, or emotional enough, for the protesters. Such an invasion, especially if undertaken for both main islands, would have led to very heavy casualties among American, Allied, and Japanese armed forces and Japanese civilians."
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However, the use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, relates a wall panel, "destroyed much of the two cities and caused many tens of thousands of deaths. The exhibit neither hides nor harps on the Enola Gay's role in helping to end World War II and begin the Atomic Age. The airplane, painstakingly restored, is presented chiefly as an important artifact in the history of aviation and air power.
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The protesters are angry because the Enola Gay is being displayed the way everything else in the National Air and Space Museum is displayed: simply. This past Sunday three more protesters hurled ashes and what they claimed was human blood on the fuselage of the aircraft. Three weeks earlier, vandals had splattered the gallery with red paint. As hundreds of visitors waited in line to see the B-29 that delivered the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, a handful of demonstrators waving anti-nuclear placards kneeled at the entrance to the exhibit, shouting slogans and singing songs, refusing to move until the police finally hauled them off. WASHINGTON - The Smithsonian Institution's exhibit on the Enola Gay opened to the public last week, and within hours protesters were doing their best to shut it down.