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A prominent historian serving on an advisory group for the exhibition, for example, complains about the “celebratory” treatment of the Enola Gay and that the crew showed “no remorse” for the mission. The Air and Space Museum is also taking flak from the other side. The museum says this is “happenstance,” not a deliberate ideological twist. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.” Women, children, and mutilated religious objects are strongly emphasized in the “ground zero” scenes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “For most Americans,” the script says, “it was a war of vengeance. Despite some hedging, it says the atomic bomb “played a crucial role in ending the Pacific war quickly.” Further revisions to the script are expected.ĭespite the balancing material added in January, the curators still make some curious calls. It gives greater recognition to US casualties. It acknowledges Japan’s “naked aggression and extreme brutality” that began in the 1930s. The latest script, written in January, shows major concessions to balance. US conduct of the war was depicted as brutal, vindictive, and racially motivated. It depicted the Japanese in a desperate defense of their home islands, saying little about what had made such a defense necessary. The exhibition plan the museum was following as recently as November picked up the story of the war in 1945 as the end approached. For the past two years, however, museum officials have been under fire from veterans groups who charge that the exhibition plan is politically biased. The Air and Space Museum says it takes no position on the “difficult moral and political questions” involved. To ensure that nobody misses the point, “where possible, photos of the persons who owned or wore these artifacts would be used to show that real people stood behind the artifacts.” Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will recall the horror in their own words. One display is a schoolgirl’s lunch box with remains of peas and rice reduced to carbon.
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The exhibition plan notes that parents might find some parts unsuitable for viewing by their children.įor the “emotional center” of the exhibit, the curators are collecting burnt watches and broken wall clocks, photos of victims - which will be enlarged to life size - as well as melted and broken religious objects. The presentation is designed for shock effect.
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The rest of the gallery space is allotted to a program about the atomic bomb. The restored aircraft will be there all right, the front fifty-six feet of it, anyway. That is particularly true for World War II veterans who had petitioned the museum to display the historic bomber in an objective setting. Nevertheless, many visitors may be taken aback by what they see. The Enola Gay‘s task was a grim one, hardly suitable for glamorization. The aircraft will be an element in a larger exhibition called “The Cross-roads: The End of World War II, the Atomic, Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War.” The context is the development of the atomic bomb and its use against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The exhibition will run from May 1995 to January 1996 at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Now, following a lengthy period of restoration, it will finally be displayed to the public on the fiftieth anniversary of its famous mission. After a decade of deterioration in open weather, the aircraft was put into storage in 1960. The Smithsonian Institution acquired the Enola Gay - the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb - forty-four years ago.