Watered-Down Exhibit To Open Plane That Dropped A-Bomb On Display, But Controversial Questions Now Ignored

The Enola Gay exhibit finally will open today for public viewing at the National Air and Space Museum.

It’s mostly metal.

The focus is on hardware, not the nuances of history. It’s about a big shiny plane and its determined crew.

As for the destruction of Hiroshima: “I really decided to leave it more to the imagination,” said Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman at a news conference Tuesday attended by at least 26 TV camera crews and a U.S. Park Police SWAT team on the lookout for trouble.

Fifty years ago this summer, the B-29 dropped the atom bomb that instantly destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima and, along with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later, hastened the end of World War II.

The Enola Gay’s trip to the National Air and Space Museum has been far more tortuous than the flight it took the morning of Aug. 6, 1945.

For years, the Smithsonian Institution steadily had been restoring it to vintage condition. But the decision to display it as part of a lengthy contemplation of the birth of the atomic age, and on the anniversary of the end of the war, was disastrous.

A 500-page rough draft drew furious protest from veterans groups, who contended it ignored Japanese wartime atrocities and unfairly questioned the decision to drop the bomb. The Smithsonian received more than 30,000 pieces of angry mail, and the exhibit script was revised four times.

Finally, amid a debate over how many Americans might have died in an invasion of Japan, Heyman scrapped the show and replaced it with something far simpler.

“I don’t believe that this is a glorification of nuclear weapons,” said Heyman. “It says, ‘This is the Enola Gay. It dropped the bomb that ended the war.’ It doesn’t take a position on the morality of it.”

Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, sent a letter of congratulations after touring the exhibit, saying he is “pleased and proud” of it.

Peace activists, meanwhile, held a news conference to denounce the museum’s actions. There are plans for an all-day protest today.Air and Space Museum Director Martin Harwit resigned earlier this year in the wake of the flap.

The exhibit is short and Spartan. It would be impossible to create a museum exhibit about the plane that dropped the first A-bomb without mentioning that it instantly killed more than 78,000 people - some estimates go much higher - but the museum almost has pulled that off. The original exhibit would have explored the long-contentious question of whether the bomb was needed to end the war. The finished exhibit skips the issue.