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Truman's decision to approve use of the bomb. The groups also took issue with the number of Americans - 30,000 to 50,000 - military officials anticipated would have been killed in an invasion of Japan and which has been cited as the crucial factor in President Harry S. In 1994, war veterans criticized material in a planned Smithsonian exhibit, claiming viewers could conclude that the Japanese were victims of American aggression. This is the second time the Smithsonian has been taken to task for its display of the Enola Gay, named after the mother of its pilot, Paul Tibbets. Its explanatory placard includes the restored airplane's dimensions and the information that while it was originally built to be used in the European fighting theater, it found ''its niche on the other side of the globe.'' On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay was used to drop a. The Enola Gay is exhibited at the Steven Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport in Virginia, with other vintage war planes. The Enola Gay was a modified B-29 (Superfortress) bomber plane, specially equipped to carry the atomic bomb. He said he and other signers hoped ''to sit down with Smithsonian officials to see the seriousness of this, and revise the exhibit.''Ĭlaire Brown, a spokeswoman at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, said the Smithsonian would have no comment until the petition was presented. Kuznick said, ''but it must include discussions about the decision to drop the bomb.'' ''It is essential that the plane be displayed,'' Mr. Kuznick, the director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, who initiated the petition along with members of the antiwar group Peace Action, emphasized that they were not opposed to the display. ''It would be offensive not to put it in context.''
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''You wouldn't display a slave ship solely as a model of technological advancement,'' said David Nasaw, a cultural historian at CUNY Graduate Center, and one of more than 100 signers of the petition. Now a group of scholars, writers, activists and others have signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling the Enola Gay as ''the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time'' without mentioning that the Boeing B-29 dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Udvar-Hazy Center in December 2003.When officials at the Smithsonian Institution unveiled a new home for the World War II bomber the Enola Gay in August, they had hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that had previously plagued efforts to exhibit the airplane that carried the first atomic bomb. 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. There were a few crashes of B29's on Tinian due to how short the starting/landing strip was and they were afraid of the bomb going off in case it happened to Enola Gay.