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Correll, editor of Air Force Magazine, the journal of the Air Force Assn., a veterans organization that has campaigned successfully for changes to the exhibit. “The curators are still retreating, but they are doing so grudgingly, word by word, line by line, and it’s not because they believe they are wrong, it’s because of the outside pressure,” says John T. Sensing victory, meanwhile, veterans groups continue to press for even further changes to the organization of the exhibit, arguing that the curators still hope to play “emotional tricks” on museum visitors by linking the display of the Enola Gay to depictions of Hiroshima bomb victims and survivors. “The museum has caved in to right-wing political pressure,” argues Kai Bird, a World War II historian. The Smithsonian’s about-face has been so complete, in fact, that the greatest outcry against the exhibit now comes from liberal historians sickened by what they see as the triumph of the personal memory and nostalgia of American veterans over clear-eyed history of the U.S. The language that had tarred it as being a product of political correctness run amok has been thoroughly excised from the script.
#ENOLA GAY BOMBER GIRL SERIES#
Now, after five revisions and a series of arduous, line-by-line editing sessions between the museum staff and representatives of leading veterans groups, the museum has produced a final script for the proposed Enola Gay exhibit, “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II,” that has been cleansed of most of its controversy. No matter your point of view, one thing is clear: The Smithsonian has all but surrendered to the veterans groups and other critics who loudly opposed the museum’s initial exhibit plans on the grounds that they were wildly anti-American and laden with the scent of political correctness. Or call it the triumph of uneducated censorship over legitimate historical inquiry. 6, 1945.Ĭall it a victory for American heritage over the forces of political correctness and revisionism. Under unprecedented public pressure, the museum has drastically altered its original plans for its exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of the Enola Gay’s only mission: the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. That’s a nice bit of symbolism for the implosion that’s hit the Enola Gay’s exhibit as well.įive months before the scheduled May, 1995, opening of the most controversial exhibit ever staged at America’s most popular museum, the emotion-soaked debate over the plane and its display has already become so politically charged and so weighted down by personal recriminations that the Smithsonian has been forced into retreat.
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“We could have cleared an entire area of the main hall and just had room enough to display the Enola Gay with its wings on, but it’s so heavy it still would have gone right through the floor into the parking garage below,” says museum spokesman Mike Fetters. So only the front fuselage of the Enola Gay sits behind locked and guarded doors in a closed-off museum gallery, while curators slowly-and now cautiously-build an exhibit around the B-29 to tell its story. Even one as cavernous as the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum on the Mall here. It is simply too big and too heavy to be displayed in one piece in a museum. When fully assembled, the most famous bomber aircraft of World War II is 99 feet long and has a 144-foot wingspan. Shrink-wrapped, wingless and with its tail section missing, the Enola Gay lies silently amid the debris of museum construction, like a beached whale awaiting its fate.