Enola Gay

The National Air and Space Museum's long-awaited plan to exhibit Enola Gay, the American B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, has run into more flak than the aircraft ever encountered in the skies over Hiroshima.On one side are museum officials who have tried to tell the story of the birth of the atomic age with compassion toward its victims as well as homage for its heroes.On the other are veterans and others angered by the exhibit's emphasis on the destruction wrought by the bomb, which they see as a form of revisionism that ignores the millions of American and Japanese lives that were saved when Enola Gay's historic flight rendered a U.S. invasion of the Japanese islands unnecessary.

ROUGHLY THREE decades ago, when Jerry Beser was a student at Pikesville High School, his history teacher delivered a lecture about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The teacher said there were no survivors from the crews of the two American bombers. "All the men died," the teacher said, "because they were so consumed by guilt." Jerry Beser raised his hand and declared, "Nobody told my father that." His father was Jacob Beser, who lived without guilt or apology for many years thereafter.

Some may say the National Air and Space Museum was caving in to political pressure when it announced its decision last week to scale back its planned exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. But that would be too easy.The decision to simply display the famous bomber's fuselage and show a video of its crew was actually a reasonable compromise given the intense and contradictory emotions stirred by America's entry into the nuclear age.This exhibit had been the subject of a heated year-long debate over how the museum would deal with the justification for the bombing and its aftermath.

E.L. Doctorow, one of America's most celebrated writers, is scheduled to deliver a lecture at the Johns Hopkins University tonight on the topic of "Literature and Religion." Doctorow is the winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other literary prizes. His novels, including Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, are often set in a richly evoked American past. His writing style is astonishingly diverse from one book to the next, so much so that it's sometimes hard to believe they were written by the same author.

If you like looking at airplane parts, you'll enjoy the National Air and Space Museum's new exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.The display, which opens to the public today, features one whole propeller and parts of another, one of the bomber's four Wright Cyclone radial engines, one radar antenna, a 20-foot tall tail section, a navigator's astro scope and even a swatch of airplane insulation. And there is the front part of the Enola Gay fuselage, an immense gleaming aluminum tube lighted inside to show the cockpit and the bomb bay.Originally, of course, airplane parts were not meant to dominate.

THEY were Captains America all, crunched in the rattling hum of the Enola Gay that August morning of 1945. The crew of that B-29 bomber, including the young radarman from Baltimore named Jacob Beser, was about to embark on the newest -- and some say darkest -- dawn of warfare as the city of Hiroshima came into view.argued, quite convincingly, that if the Allies had invaded Japan instead of dropping the bombs, as many as a million people could have perished.Others argued, however, that President Harry S Truman knew the Japanese were near military collapse and wanted to detonate the bombs in a show of U.S. military might.

WASHINGTON -- In the honor roll of aviation, the Smithsonian Institution is hallowed ground. Here are aircraft that changed the world -- flown by the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.Next year another famous airplane will be added. It's the Enola Gay, the legendary B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and brought a swift and terrible end to World War II.But unlike the proud display accorded those other famous aircraft, officials at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum have more chilling plans for the Enola Gay. And that rankles a growing number of World War II veterans who wish to evoke the pride of their wartime sacrifice -- not have it overshadowed by gruesome photos of dead children and radiation victims.

WASHINGTON - When officials at the Smithsonian Institution unveiled a new home for the World War II bomber Enola Gay in August, they had hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that had previously troubled efforts to exhibit the airplane, which carried the first atomic bomb. But a group of scholars, writers, activists and others has signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling the Enola Gay "the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time" without mentioning that the Boeing B-29 dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Dayton, Ohio -- The Smithsonian Institution may decide today to save its beleaguered World War II atomic bomb exhibit by taking this cue from the U.S. Air Force Museum: keep it simple.Since 1961, the Air Force Museum here has displayed Bockscar, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, the second nuclear blow that forced Japan's unconditional surrender and ended the war. There have been no public protests, no petition campaigns, no tumult in the museum hierarchy.

CHANTILLY, Va. -- The B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the warplane that began the nuclear age with the first use of an atomic weapon on human beings, has been installed in a place of honor at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center here. It is the first time the airplane has been fully reassembled in 40 years. Eight years ago, another Smithsonian exhibit featuring a portion of the airplane was scrapped and the museum director resigned after a furor erupted over the museum's plans to use the exhibit to address the moral debate over atomic warfare.

WASHINGTON - When officials at the Smithsonian Institution unveiled a new home for the World War II bomber Enola Gay in August, they had hoped to avoid the kind of controversy that had previously troubled efforts to exhibit the airplane, which carried the first atomic bomb. But a group of scholars, writers, activists and others has signed a petition criticizing the exhibit for labeling the Enola Gay "the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time" without mentioning that the Boeing B-29 dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

CHANTILLY, Va. -- The B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the warplane that began the nuclear age with the first use of an atomic weapon on human beings, has been installed in a place of honor at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center here. It is the first time the airplane has been fully reassembled in 40 years. Eight years ago, another Smithsonian exhibit featuring a portion of the airplane was scrapped and the museum director resigned after a furor erupted over the museum's plans to use the exhibit to address the moral debate over atomic warfare.

Walter "Wally" Lee Jones, 73, a crew member on the last flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atom bomb on Japan during World War II, died Sunday in San Antonio. Mr. Jones, of San Antonio, was a member of the crew that flew the Enola Gay on Dec. 2, 1953, to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland from Pyote Air Force Base in Texas. After World War II, the Air Force stored or scrapped hundreds of planes at Pyote. Nearly three years earlier, the Enola Gay, named after the mother of Col. Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot on the Aug. 6, 1945, Hiroshima mission, had been accepted by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Thomas Wilson Ferebee, 81, the bombardier who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II, died Thursday in Windermere, Fla. He was 26 on Aug. 6, 1945, a major and a veteran of 64 missions when the B-29 Enola Gay took off for Japan with the first nuclear weapon ever deployed. Mr. Ferebee, who retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1970, said he never felt guilty but was sorry the bomb killed so many. "I'm sorry an awful lot of people died from that bomb, and I hate to think that something like that had to happen to end the war," he said in a 1995 interview on the 50th anniversary of the bombing.

THIS YEAR the anniversaries passed without notice. Hiroshima, missing somewhere off the edge of our consciousness. Nagasaki, beyond much American recollection. In her home in northwest Baltimore County, Sylvia Beser, widow of Jacob Beser, the only man who flew both atomic bomb missions over Japan, leafs through old photo albums and wonders about the national memory."The kids don't understand," she says softly. "Even V-J Day this year, there was nothing."In October, surviving members of her husband's old unit, the 509th Composite Group of the 20th Air Force, who gathered anxiously on the island of Tinian in the South Pacific 54 years ago, who ushered in the atomic age with the devastation of two Japanese cities and ended World War II, will reunite in Washington.

TWO RECENT newspaper stories offered contradicting opinions as to how the nation's history should be treated. In one story, African Americans accepted plans to put a statue of civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall near the statue of Roger B. Taney at the Maryland State House. Taney, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, wrote several pro-slavery opinions. In the other article, black employees of the Library of Congress successfully demanded removal of an exhibit depicting slave life on Southern plantations.

The Smithsonian jettisoned the rest of the payload without dropping the Enola Gay.

Bowing to pressure from veteran's organizations and members of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution agreed yesterday to junk its upcoming exhibit on the atomic bombings of Japan and instead mount a simple display of the B-29 Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum.Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman said in a news conference in Washington that "we made a basic error in attempting to couple an historical treatment of the use of atomic weapons with the 50th anniversary commemoration of the end of the war."

The Library of Congress' decision to close a slavery exhibit that offended some employees -- the latest in a series of such controversies -- is fueling concerns that political correctness is stifling debate about the nation's history."

It all seemed innocent enough. The Library of Congress set out to present an exhibition on Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and also an early stockholder in Broyhill's sofa division.Freud was, as we all know, a great man.He invented, for example, the Freudian slip. Also, the 50-minute hour and the month-long, gotta-get-out- of-the-city-no- matter-how- desperate-my- patients-might- be vacations. Finally, without Freud, there would be no Woody Allen movies. Think about it.Despite all this, the anti-Freudians have attacked the exhibit, on the basis that, in their view, Freud was a fraud.