Enola Gay

History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, edited by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, tells the story of a doomed exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. The centerpiece of “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War” was going to be the restored Enola Gay, the plane from which the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima fifty years before the exhibition was supposed to open, on August 6, 1945. Throughout the planning process, the exhibition came under intense fire from conservative congressmen, war veterans, military associations, and journalists for its effort to present a balanced description and interpretation of the deployment of the bomb and its historical context. On January 30, 1995, the exhibit was canceled.

History Wars discusses three interrelated dimensions of the Enola Gay exhibition:

First, most contributors discuss the actual historical developments leading to and following President Truman’s decision to use the bomb. Secondly, they reconstruct the development of war remembrance in the United States after 1945 – some contrast it with the confrontation with the past in Japan. Finally, the essays try to explain what the exhibition in the Smithsonian museum was supposed to look like and why the project was not realized in the end.

The main thesis of the book is that “The Crossroads” exhibition revealed a tension between the commemorative, “individual” voice on the one hand – the idea of “I was there, I know because I saw and felt what happened” (9) – and the historical, “professional” voice on the other hand. In the case of “The Crossroads,” the commemorative voice indeed largely silenced the historical voice in the media and the political arena, and eventually prevailed.
Most authors blame the cancellation of the exhibition on the pervasiveness and prevalence of the Good War myth. Veterans in particular, as well as their relatives, their political representatives, and their media allies insisted that World War II was an honorable war against a savage foe. The exhibition challenged this smooth victory narrative and, on a very basic human level, asked what Americans fought for. Richard Kohn writes that “many WW II veterans were concerned that the exhibition would discredit everything they had done in a cause that had defined their lives and connected them to U.S. history” (167).

There was also a highly political dimension to the conflict about the exhibition. The opponents of the exhibition received help from the Republican Party, which by 1995 controlled Congress. The Republicans were eager to obstruct the efforts by so-called “revisionist” historians to challenge the official view of the past. Consequently, Congress threatened to cut funding to the federal Smithsonian institution.
Ultimately, the museum was also not able to convincingly present its views in the media. Instead, the opponents of the exhibit were able to frame the conflict as a contest between un-American, revisionist, politically correct liberals and patriotic defenders of traditional American values.
To conclude with a critical remark, it is striking that a majority of the authors clearly value the interpretations and reconstructions of historians more highly than individual memories. Paul S. Boyer for example speaks almost condescendingly of popular memory as opposed to the norms of historical research and argument (138). Boyer believes that a mythic past is inscribed in popular memory, and he writes: “For better or worse, it is the historians, at the end of the day, to whom society delegates custodianship of the past” (139).