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“What are the responsibilities of a museum to deal with the destruction caused by airpower?” “Take the Air and Space Museum,” Adams told Washingtonian Magazine in 1987. Harwit’s thoughts were in harmony with those of Robert McCormick Adams, who had been secretary of the Smithsonian Institution since 1984.
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… 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.” In a 1988 interview with the Washington Post, Harwit described plans for a program on strategic bombing “as a counterpoint to the World War II gallery we have now, which portrays the heroism of the airmen but neglects to mention in any real sense the misery of war. He acknowledged that the experience “inevitably” influenced his thoughts about the Enola Gay exhibit, planning for which began shortly after Harwit’s arrival. While serving in the US Army, 1955-57, Harwit was assigned to the nuclear weapons tests at Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls in the Marshall Islands. Harwit was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, and came to the United States at age 15 in 1946. Previously, he had been a professor of astronomy at Cornell University. Harwit became director of the Air and Space Museum in August 1987. In the case of the Enola Gay, the Revisionists held that the bombing of Hiroshima was unnecessary and immoral. The museum was influenced significantly by historians of the so-called “Revisionist” persuasion, who disputed the conventional interpretation of the Cold War and cast doubt on actions, statements, and motives of the United States.
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It was part of broader cultural change at the Smithsonian, which the Washington Post described as a “move away from the traditional heroes, politicians, and objects in glass cases and toward a wide, fluid, social-history approach.” In the 1980s, the National Air and Space Museum veered away from its mission to collect, preserve, and display historic aircraft and spacecraft. By then, new political winds were blowing at the Smithsonian. Restoration of the Enola Gay finally began in December 1984 and plans to display it, or part of it, followed in 1987. Part of the reluctance to display it was that it was too big-99 feet long, with a wingspan of 141 feet-to fit, fully assembled, into the building. But when the Smithsonian opened the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1976, there was no move to exhibit the Enola Gay. In 1960, it was disassembled and stored at the Smithsonian’s restoration facility in Suitland, Md.īockscar, the B-29 that flew the Nagasaki mission, has been displayed at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, since 1961. It was moved temporarily to a base in Texas and then, from 1953 to 1960, was stored outside, unlocked, at Andrews AFB, Md. The Smithsonian accepted the Enola Gay in good condition July 3, 1949, at the Air Force Association Convention in Chicago. A host of books and articles about it have been written by people who have not bothered to check the facts. Over the years, the controversy never died. Udvar–Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., near Dulles Airport. In December 2003, the museum put the Enola Gay, fully assembled, on permanent exhibition at its new Steven F. The exhibition was canceled in response to public and Congressional outrage, and the museum director was fired.įrom 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. When the plans were revealed by an article in Air Force Magazine, a raging controversy ensued. It depicted the Japanese more as victims than as aggressors in World War II. 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. The bombing of Hiroshima was 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.įifty years after Hiroshima, the airplane flew into controversy of a different sort. Until the atomic bombs fell, Japan had not been ready to end the war.īy eliminating the need for an invasion of Japan, the bombs prevented casualties, both American and Japanese, that would have exceeded the death tolls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. However, these missions brought an end to a war in which 17 million people had died at the hands of the Japanese empire between 19. 15.Īt Hiroshima, more than half the city was destroyed in a flash, and 80,000 were killed instantly. 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.