After all, the mission had been a milk run and was simply a continuation of the strategic bombing policy developed by General Curtis LeMay to firebomb Japanese cities, part of the "morale" campaign that had originated in Europe. The military representatives saw little purpose. It was the post-Vietnam War executive director and board members who were the most anxious to create an Enola Gay exhibit. They argued the war could have been ended without use of the bomb, which, according to Luce, challenged the "Christian conscience." Ironically, protests against use of the bomb, was not a recent phenomenon, in fact, protests from the right, including Henry Luce, had been voiced in 1945. While the desire to represent multiple points of view may be laudable, they should have expected a backlash. Linenthal had been involved in the 1993 Little Big Horn display controversy, and frankly should have know better than to get entangled in the Enola Gay disputation. This book was an attempt by the essayists to address the issues raised by their detractors. Historians are typically ill-prepared and powerless to defend themselves against these kinds of polemical attacks. The text then was politicized, attacked by the right as un-American, promoted by the left as accurate and representing a multicultural perspective. The content, which portrayed the horror wrecked upon the Japanese pissed off many, including Senator Dole, who had been seriously injured in WWII and who was then running for president. The text accompanying the display originally was characteristic of what Hoffer describes as the "new History," which portrayed the United States in a more nuanced manner and with less rah-rah, often seeing events from different points of view. History is all about stories, what the tell us and what they reveal about us.
The best single-volume examination of World War II in the Pacific, it provides detailed analysis of the four-year conflict that culminated in the atomic bombings.Two narratives merged in the abortive display proposed by the Smithsonian of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: the successful ending to a long and devastating war and the devastation of two Japanese cities. Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan. A collection of essays that deals with the fallout from the planned 50th-anniversary exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, and its implications for America’s efforts to understand its own past. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.
Linenthal, Edward T., and Tom Engelhardt. The book remains a searing and valuable look at the bomb’s effects on the ground. A year after the atomic bombings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey collected the firsthand accounts of the attacks and their aftermath. An insightful examination of the patterns of racism that permeated both American and Japanese attitudes during the Pacific war, it helps explain many of the patterns of brutality that characterized that theater. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. An in-depth examination of America’s struggles to deal with the political implications of atomic weapons in the years immediately following the end of World War II.ĭower, John. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.