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Strategic Bombing Survey (SBS): "either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. bombing assault on Japanese cities, Mark Selden explains, is found in the words of the officers responsible for the U.S.
#PICTURE OF DESCRIPTIONS IN ENOLA GAY EXHIBIT FULL#
The bombings in Japan that preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well, for in the "final six months of the war, the United States threw the full weight of its airpower into campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate, and kill their largely defenseless residents in an effort to force surrender."* Discussion of this in no way precludes ignoring the fact that Japan was earlier (1932-1945) involved in horrific bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing, and other cities, "testing chemical weapons in Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang and Hunan provinces." Displaying the Enola Gay as just another item in an airplane museum is like displaying the Declaration of Independence as just another item in a museum on the history of printing.Īs I wrote in a comment at Mirror of Justice, we should recall Of course, a single reading rail at an airplane museum is not a good place to delve into these complexities.īut that just shows that the Enola Gay should not be on display at an airplane museum as just another flying machine. And it obscures the ways in which the American military set up Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atomic testing grounds, sparing both cities the conventional bombs that were raining down on other Japanese cities so that the effects of the atomic blasts on these two cities could be better measured. That narrative misses, among other things, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' desire to gain strategic advantages of various kinds against the Soviet Union. The story of that controversy is well told, and insightfully analyzed from various perspectives, in the book History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.Īs one might expect, the narrative we Americans grow up with about the bomb - that it was a weapon of last resort deployed as the only way to force Japan to surrender without American ground troops having to fight their way from suicidal Japanese village to suicidal Japanese village - is incomplete. (Click on the photo for a readable version.)īack in the 1990s, plans to show the Enola Gay at the downtown branch of the Air and Space Museum as the focal point for an exhibit about the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War were scrapped after veterans' groups and others complained that the exhibit insultingly placed too much emphasis on the sufferings of the bomb's victims. What you see below is the entirety of the interpretation the museum offers about the Enola Gay. What struck me the most about the display of the Enola Gay was the absence of any mention of the many tens of thousands of civilian deaths the airplane's bomb inflicted, or of the reasons for the dropping of the bomb. The Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, is now displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center, a branch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in a beautiful facility very close to Dulles Airport outside of Washington, DC.
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The anniversary of the second, at Nagasaki, is on Monday. Yesterday was the anniversary of the first atomic bomb blast, the one at Hiroshima.