History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805043861 ISBN 13: 9780805043860

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

Discusses society's negative memories of atomic bombings and the Vietnam War

About this title

About the Author:

Edward T. Linenthal is Edward M. Penson Professor of Religion and American Culture at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. He is the author of Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields and Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

History Wars
1 ANATOMY OF A CONTROVERSY EDWARD T. LINENTHAL  
 
 
 
 
When, in the fall of 1993, Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), asked me to serve on an advisory committee for that museum's upcoming Enola Gay exhibit, I was excited. After all, for many years I had studied battles over battlefield memorialization, clashes over "sacred ground." In the late 1980s, I had spent much time with National Park Service personnel as they struggled to transform the Little Bighorn battlefield from a shrine to George A. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into a historic site where different--often clashing--stories could be told. There, I had first heard curatorial decisions attacked and derided as "politically correct history," and as a craven caving in to "special interests"; but there, too, I had watched as a complex interpretation of a mythic American event had successfully supplanted an enduring "first take." In the early 1990s, I studied the National Park Service's preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. Watching members of the Park Service--and Pearl Harbor survivors--grapple with such a seemingly simple matter as whether a Japanese airman's uniform should be displayed (in an attempt to give a "human dimension" to the former enemy), I came to a fuller appreciation of the inevitable tension between a commemorative voice--"I was there, I know because I saw and felt what happened"--and a historical one that speaks of complicated motivesand of actions and consequences often hardly considered at the moment of the event itself. By the time Martin Harwit called me, I had published a book on the problems of memorializing American battlefields, from Lexington and Concord to Pearl Harbor, and had for more than a year been observing from within the volatile creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In addition, as a historian I was aware of how uneasily the atomic bombing of Hiroshima rested in the American consciousness. Nonetheless, nothing in my experience with memorial exhibits prepared me for what happened when the National Air and Space Museum tried to mount its Enola Gay exhibit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. I certainly imagined that such a show would raise difficulties for the museum--problems between the commemorative and historical voices, between a reverently held story and its later reappraisal. But I expected, as had happened elsewhere, that the museum would overcome them and that a historically significant Enola Gay exhibit would open in 1995. In fact, I felt remarkably sanguine about the problems or issues that might arise, and the record of the advice my colleagues on the committee and I offered the museum during its early script preparations indicates how little any of us foresaw what lay in the museum's path. So the following reconstruction of the ugly controversy that doomed the exhibition is meant not just as a record of the failures and errors of others, but also of what I proved incapable of imagining as events began to unfold. There is probably no better place to start that reconstruction than with a simple fact that was largely ignored while the controversy was under way. Although uneasiness about the Enola Gay and its mission would often be called a product of a disaffected Vietnam generation, left-wing historians, or the politically correct, its roots are half a century old. In the spring and summer of 1945, for example, the American press engaged in lively debate over alternatives to unconditional Japanese surrender. There was vigorous disagreement among Manhattan Project scientists who made the atomic bomb about the wisdom of the decision to use it, andafter the war's end, there was strong criticism of its use from many prominent Protestant and Catholic spokespeople. Influential conservative voices also criticized the decision. In 1948, Henry Luce, the founder of Time, wrote, "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 that so jarred the Christian conscience." Similar criticism was voiced by Hanson Baldwin, military affairs correspondent for the New York Times, David Lawrence, editor of United States News, and various conservative journals. For example, writing in William F. Buckley's National Review in May 1958, Harry Elmer Barnes argued that "the tens of thousands of Japanese who were roasted at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed not to end the war or save American and Japanese lives but to strengthen American diplomacy vis-a-vis Russia." Within a few years, note media critics Uday Mohan and Sanho Tree, "this iconoclastic position taken in the conservative National Review would be labeled as 'left-wing revisionism' and would remain thus to this day."1 Artifact: The Uncomfortable Presence of the Enola Gay Enduring uneasiness with the use of atomic weapons was also expressed in an enduring lack of enthusiasm for displaying the Enola Gay. After its mission, the plane returned to Tinian. On November 6, 1945, it was flown to Roswell Air Force Base, New Mexico. "After some modifications," a National Air and Space Museum report notes, it was flown back to the Pacific for Operation Crossroads, a test in the Marshall Islands "to determine the effects of atomic weapons on naval ships." However, the Enola Gay did not take part, because of engine problems. On July 2, 1946, it was stored at Davis Monthan Army Air Force Base, Arizona. 2 Several months earlier, on March 5, 1946, New Mexico senatorCarl Hatch had drafted a bill to house the Enola Gay in an "Atomic Bomb National Monument" at Alamogordo, New Mexico, under the stewardship of the National Park Service. The site, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote Robert Patterson, secretary of war, was appropriate for the Enola Gay because of its "links with Hiroshima" and because it "vividly demonstrates the ease with which atomic power could again be devoted to the destructiveness of war." Hillary A. Tolson, the acting director of the National Park Service, sought to assuage critics by stating that the use of atomic weapons would be "interpreted impartially without praise or blame ... . Doubtless," he added, "the airplane would be a grim reminder of the destructive potentialities of this new power, but we hope to emphasize in contrast to it the medical and other constructive gains which atomic energy makes possible." The hope, said Tolson--clearly interested in portraying the "sunny side" of atomic energy--was that atomic power would in the future be used only for "peaceful ends." While the War Department soon agreed to transfer the Enola Gay to the National Park Service's care, Hatch's plan was never carried out, partly because the Atomic Energy Commission objected to it.3 On July 3, 1949, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the pilot for the Hiroshima mission, flew the Enola Gay to Park Ridge, Illinois--a facility that would eventually become O'Hare International Airport--where it was put under the jurisdiction of the Smithsonian's National Air Museum (the word Space would be added to its name in 1966). At the acceptance ceremony, a Smithsonian representative, delivering a speech written by head curator Paul Garber, called attention to the plane's "majesty." When the aircraft had "laid its egg, the Atomic Age was born." It would now rest in the nation's "Valhalla of the Air."4 On December 2, 1953, the plane moved to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where it sat outside for seven years. In 1956, a journalist lamented that vandals had damaged the aircraft, and that "today, the once bright aluminum exterior is dull. The propellers are rusting, windows have been broken out, instruments smashed and the control surface fabric torn." Between August 10,1960, and July 21, 1961, the Enola Gay was disassembled and its components moved to the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility for the Smithsonian's National Air Museum in Suitland, Maryland. The Enola Gay was not entirely forgotten, however. Beginning in 1961, visitors could make appointments to see the plane's components, and in 1971, these became part of the Garber facility's daily tours. Still, a Washington Post reporter noted in 1979 that compared with the proud display of so many aircraft at the National Air and Space Museum on the Washington Mall, the Enola Gay sat "disassembled and virtually forgotten ... in a suburban Maryland warehouse," for all practical purposes, hidden from sight. "Out of sight, out of mind" suited some members of the museum's staff, who in 1960 thought the plane would be "out of place alongside objects intended to engender pride." The matter seemed moot when budgetary concerns forced the Smithsonian to drastically scale back the size of the museum's new building--which would finally open on July 1, 1976--a decision that "effectively excluded the 'Enola Gay.'"5 Uneasiness with any future relocation of the Enola Gay was evident in congressional hearings on the Smithsonian in 1970. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an air force enthusiast who had been an Army Air Forces pilot during World War II, stated that "what we are interested in here [for the museum] is the truly historic aircraft. I wouldn't consider the one that dropped the bomb on Japan as belonging to that category." Congressman Frank Thompson agreed: "I don't think we should be proud of [the use of atomic weapons] as a nation. At least it would offend me to see it exhibited in the museum." The museum's acting director, Frank Taylor, defended the possible display of the Enola Gay only by claiming it would be of interest to "students in the future."6 During the early 1980s, a few B-29 veterans urged the museum to restore and display the Enola Gay. Others believed that the only solution was to move the aircraft to a different museum. In 1981, Ohio state auditor Thomas A. Ferguson led a move to bringthe Enola Gay to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. The Smithsonian, he thought, had buried an essential American artifact. "To me, storing the Enola Gay for thirty-four years is akin to mothballing the Statue of Liberty or the first space capsule that landed on the moon."7 Sensitive to such criticism, the Smithsonian finally did begin restoration work on the Enola Gay on December 5, 1984. "Components were returned to their original colors and appearance, decals were replaced and the instrument panels and throttle area were restored ... . Plans are to retain only those markings that were on the airplane in August 1945." Although restoration only exacerbated the museum's ambivalence about the plane's eventual display, there would be a new drive to exhibit it in some fashion when Martin Harwit, a distinguished Cornell astrophysicist, became the museum's new director in 1987. His predecessor, Walter Boyne, a retired career air force officer, had opposed plans to display the Enola Gay because, he felt, the public did not have an "adequate understanding with which to view it." Even before accepting the job, however, Harwit had indicated to Smithsonian secretary Robert McCormick Adams that he was in favor of displaying the plane.8 Born in Czechoslovakia, Harwit brought with him vivid personal memories of the horrors of World War II. "There is just no question that this had a very big impact on the family. My father was counting up recently how many people had died in concentration camps. I think on his side of the family alone there were twelve." His father--dismissed from the German university in Prague in 1938--took the family to Istanbul, where he was a professor on the medical faculty at the University of Istanbul. Harwit remembered vividly the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I think everybody was glad the war was over within a few days ... . I don't think at the time there was really much of a feeling of outrage. Don't forget that people had been worried about their kids getting killed off in the war. Lots of them had boys over there, and everybody was relieved that was over with."9 Harwit--who became an American citizen in 1953--wasdrafted into the army and eventually went to the Pacific atolls of Eniwetok and Bikini to monitor nuclear tests. "The most impressive time I remember was when there was a hydrogen bomb blast very close to where we had put out the neutron monitors on a little island in the atoll chain. There was lush vegetation, a Japanese Betty plane was there, left over from World War II ... . We went back afterwards by helicopter. There was a huge hole in the bottom of the atoll. Part of the island was missing, about half of it, no vegetation, just rubble, no Betty, no neutron counters."10 Under his leadership, he hoped that the museum could take up questions "that are under public debate." He wondered, for example, whether the museum could explore the controversy over Ronald Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative by considering "what we can expect technically from it ... . What the investment in terms of dollars would be, and how long it would take to do, and whether the cost of constructing a [space] shield [against ballistic missiles] could be undermined by an adversary trying to circumvent it." He also believed that the public needed to be reminded of the dangers of warfare in the nuclear age. NASM could become a kind of public conscience. "I think we just can't afford to make war a heroic event where people could prove their manliness and then come home to woo the fair damsel."11 During Harwit's first year as director, veterans, who had formed the Committee for the Restoration and Proud Display of the Enola Gay to help raise funds for the restoration, accused the museum of delaying exhibition plans for fear of offending the Japanese. Responding in part to such accusations, museum staff members began to consider displaying the restored fuselage at the Garber facility, along with a film about the aircraft, its role in the bombing, its postwar history, and the process of its restoration. In July 1988, Secretary Adams envisioned an exhibit that contained "some account of what happened at Hiroshima--then and afterward. Probably the somewhat doubtful overall effectiveness of earlier and subsequent non-nuclear bombing--in Germany during World War II, and in Vietnam--also should be looked at, to provide a comparative perspective." Adams thought such a showwould "cause us to reflect on how much of the extraordinary human achievement of ascending so far, and so abruptly, from the Earth has been funded and energized by the general scramble for superiority in ways of killing one another." The next month, writing in the museum's magazine Air and Space, Harwit remarked on the strong emotions engendered by the aircraft, adding that "the Enola Gay will be displayed in a setting that will recall the history of strategic bombing in World War II."12 Harwit had created the Research Advisory Committee, and the question of the Enola Gay's display arose at one of its meetings in late October 1988. A majorit...

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0805043861
• ISBN 13: 9780805043860
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295
• Editor: Linenthal Edward T., Engelhardt Tom