"We don't celebrate this artifact as much as we have it here to display," Jeremy Kinney, the Smithsonian's curator of vintage US warplanes, told AFP on the footbridge that passes Enola Gay at cockpit level. Stunned by the backlash, the Smithsonian reconceived its planned exhibition, titled "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War" at least five times, before it opened in 1995 for a two-year run that drew four million visitors.īy then, the exhibition had been stripped down to a straightforward recounting of the Enola Gay and its historic mission, minus any discussion of the merits or morality of the use of atomic weapons. "Many are second-guessing the decision to use the atomic weapons. "A package of lies," said Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay's commander, said at the time. Veterans and their supporters in Congress alleged that a 50th anniversary exhibition - with the polished front section of Enola Gay as its star attraction - depicted the wartime Japanese "more as victims, not aggressors," wrote John Correll of the Air Force Association.
Twenty years ago, during its restoration, Enola Gay found itself at the center of a firestorm between World War II veterans and a younger generation of historians who questioned the use of "The Bomb." "On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima, Japan," its plaque simply notes, with no mention of the death or destruction it sowed. It's hard to miss in the vastness of the Udvar-Hazy Center, sharing hanger space with dozens of others planes including an Air France Concorde, the original Boeing 707 prototype and the Space Shuttle Discovery. Were it not for the atomic bomb, many Americans contend, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of American soldiers would have died in a US-led invasion of the Japanese mainland.Īt the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's vast public collection of historic aircraft near Dulles airport outside Washington, every display gets a succinct 150-word description, including Enola Gay. Using the atomic bomb, developed amid utmost secrecy, was hugely popular with war-weary Americans at the time - and 70 years on, a majority today still think it was the right thing to do.įifty-six percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in February said using the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was justified, compared to 79 percent of Japanese respondents who said it was not.
It would be another 27 days - plus a second nuclear mushroom over Nagasaki - before Japan surrendered, ending a war that began with its 1937 invasion of China and stretched across the Asia-Pacific region. Udvar-Hazy Center in December 2003."They certainly don't care to have us drop any more bombs of atomic energy like this." While this exhibit is now closed, Museum specialists continued to restore the remaining components of the airplane, and after an additional nine years the fully assembled Enola Gay went on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. The exhibition text summarized the history and development of the Boeing B-29 fleet used in bombing raids against Japan.Īnother portion of the exhibit detailed the painstaking efforts of Smithsonian aircraft restoration specialists who had spent more than a decade restoring parts of the Enola Gay for this exhibition.
The components on display included two engines, the vertical stabilizer, an aileron, propellers, and the forward fuselage that contains the bomb bay.Ī video presentation about the Enola Gay's mission included interviews with the crew before and after the mission including mission pilot Col. It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender.