Historians protest Enola Gay exhibit
By Susan Milius
WASHINGTON (UPI): More than 100 historians and other scholars issued a protest Monday saying that an exhibit opening Tuesday on the Enola Gay, the first atomic bomber, has been the victim of "historical cleansing."
"The fact that archival documents and artifacts were removed from a planned exhibit under political pressure is scandalous," said a statement released by the Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima.
"We therefore believe the time has come to call upon our colleagues at universities across the country to participate in a National Teach-In on Hiroshima," said the committee statement.
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum had planned to display the renovated plane amidst materials explaining the political tensions and cross-currents leading to the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The script for the exhibit proved so controversial that after preparing five drafts, the Smithsonian gave up, radically scaling back the project and dropping the sections detailing the historical context for the decision to bomb. The museum will unveil a scaled-back exhibit Tuesday.
"This may be feel-good history, celebratory history, but it is not history," said Kai Bird, committee co-chair.
The historians raised specific objections to two aspects of the scaled-down exhibit. "They censored any reference to the fact that the decision to drop the bomb was controversial, " Kai Bird, co-chair of the committee, told United Press International. "And they censored mentions of alternative ways to end the war.
Curators had considered including part of a June 1945 memo from Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard saying that "before the bomb is actually used against Japan that Japan should have some preliminary warning....The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling."
The committee also lamented that the final version of the exhibit omits documents from General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral William D. Leahy expressing opinions that the bombings were unnecessary.
Popular history simplifies the decision to bomb as a question of whether bombing would eliminate the need for a bloody Allied invasion of Japan itself, said Gar Alperovitz, committee member and author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. That, he said, is a vast oversimplification.
"There was discussion of alternatives at the highest levels of government," said Gar Alperovitz. Western policy-makers considered whether changing the surrender demands and permitting the Japanese emperor to retain his throne would by itself bring about the end of the war.
Likewise, some policy-makers in 1945 suggested that when the USSR made its planned entry into the Pacific war, the shock alone would cause the surrender without the bombing.
He joined other scholars in noting that "archival documents essential to an understanding of the historical debate over the atomic bombings likewise were removed from the exhibit."
"We're saying, listen, we want an open debate," said Bird. "That's what the veterans in World War II fought for."