Display it like Lindbergh's plane, with silent reverence and a few lines explaining what it did and when. Paul Tibbets, the man who commanded the Enola Gay, has the right idea: Hang the plane in the museum without commentary or slanted context.
The Air and Space commemoration of Hiroshima promises to be an embarrassing amalgam of revisionist hand-wringing and politically correct guilt.
The bomb meant "we were going to live, we were going to grow up to adulthood after all" _ and so would hundreds of thousands of others. It was genuinely in train, as I know because I was to be in it." Fussell was a second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in Europe, preparing to be shipped to the Pacific for the invasion of Honshu. "On Okinawa, only weeks before Hiroshima, 123,000 Japanese and Americans killed each other." Moreover, "invasion was not just a hypothetical threat. Writing on the 36th anniversary of Hiroshima, in a piece subtitled "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb," he pointed out the horror and cost of the alternative to the bomb, the planned invasion of Japan. These kinds of cozy, easy judgments made at the safe distance of 50 years and 7,000 miles have earned the deserved contempt of those like Paul Fussell, author of classic critical studies of World War I and World War II, who were there. Not just because of the amply displayed horror but because other measures _ "some combination of blockade, firebombing, an Emperor guarantee, and a Soviet declaration of war" _ "would probably have forced a Japanese surrender." ("Would probably" is now changed to "might.") The essential if undeclared judgment of the authors of this commemoration is that we should never have dropped the bomb. We don't give wall space in our national museums to such "controversies." Some have argued that the Holocaust never happened. "Some have argued"? Some have argued that the Earth is flat. The fact is that the A-bomb was built to be used against Germany. Under the heading "Historical controversies" the exhibit asks "Would the bomb have been dropped on the Germans?" It begins its answer thus: "Some have argued that the United States would never have dropped the bomb on the Germans, because Americans were more reluctant to bomb "white people' than Asians."Īllied reluctance to bomb "white people" will certainly come as news to the survivors of Dresden (Kurt Vonnegut among them). It is an exhibit, in short, that subtly and not so subtly casts the Japanese as victims, the kamikaze pilots as heroes, and the Americans as the vengeful heavy.
"Missing from this exhibit," noted the review team, "are other representative artifacts belonging to soldiers, factory workers, government officials, etc." It is an exhibit with dozens of wrenching photos and touching artifacts from Hiroshima, heavily weighted toward those from women and children. I have given the Luftwaffe instructions to attack only military objectives," then two script pages later quotes George Marshall saying, "There won't be any hesitation about bombing civilians _ it will be all out." It quotes Hitler declaring, "I want no war against women and children. It is an exhibit that underplays Japanese savagery in the conduct of World War II (and against the rest of Asia in the 10 years of depredation that preceded Pearl Harbor) and devotes much attention to American racism. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." The quote was later cleaned up, but you can imagine the prejudices of those who would write such a thing and the kind of exhibit they would put on. It said of the Pacific War endgame, for example, that "for most Americans. Some of the review team's recommended changes have been made, but the original script reveals the ideology and intentions of the curators.