Displaying the Enola Gay, hiding Hiroshima.

Luke, Timothy W.

In 1995, a national, then global furore was whipped up by ideological, cultural and aesthetic conflict over displaying parts and pieces of the then not fully restored Enola Gay. The emblematic components of this B-29 bomber put on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC (1) were meant to anchor a particular type of historical exhibition. Most importantly, its curators designed the exhibition so as to examine the motives, practices and after-effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Martin Harwit, Director of the National Air and Space Museum, said at the time:

 This is our responsibility, as a national museum in a
 democracy predicated on an informed citizenry. We have
 found no way to exhibit the Enola Gay and satisfy everyone.
 But a comprehensive and thoughtful discussion can help
 us learn from history. And this is what we aim to offer
 our visitors. (2)

The culture wars of the 1990s, however, turned this admirable academic aspiration into grist for innumerable polemics as both pro- and anti-Hiroshima activists manoeuvered back and forth through the media about the possible merits or demerits of dropping the 'Little Boy' U-238 atomic bomb over Hiroshima.

Part of the Sturm und Drang of 1995 tied directly back to the Smithsonian's failure, or inability, to show the whole aircraft. To memorialize the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, the Smithsonian had ramped up a sophisticated program during 1993 and 1994 in anticipation of staging a comprehensive exhibition centered on the Smithsonian's ongoing renovation of the Enola Gay. But the restoration could not be completed in time, and the entire plane was too large to fit inside the museum on the National Mall. As a result, the Smithsonian chose to deflect any public criticism by sharing the show's script among many possible stakeholders, inviting them to vet the exhibit. (3)

Once the authors circulated their proposal among historians, military experts and World War II servicemen, however, intense protests began. Most importantly, the Air Force Association (an organization for retired and active personnel of the US Air Force) and the American Legion (a national veteran's association) launched a lobbying campaign in the local DC media and the US Congress against the exhibition. They intended to pressure the Smithsonian into altering its allegedly 'revisionist' representations of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many, the uniqueness of this one aircraft in human history demanded that a much greater level of reverent respect be shown for it. Dragging together a few parts of the fuselage, a propeller and other assorted pieces, like its vertical stabilizer, wheels or instruments, was tantamount to reducing the Enola Gay to an infamous hulk, worthy only of being shown as the fragments of a wreck. Part of this animosity fed into intense anti-Japanese sentiments on the part of many US World War II veterans still proud about Tokyo's ignominious capitulation in 1945. Part of it was a reaction to Japan's deep-seated anger over being bombed twice in one week in 1945 with real weapons of mass destruction; but some of it was simply a rhetorical warm-up for the divisive 1996 US presidential campaign. (4) As I noted in an earlier article on this exhibition, the Smithsonian's broad educational goals were dropped in favour of a narrower patriotic celebration of the Enola Gay and her crew, and carried no discussion of the actual bombing. (5)

So, many people gladly celebrated the show's abrupt cancellation and early closure. They then forgot about the Smithsonian's continuing plans to completely restore and then install the Enola Gay at a new suburban display site, at that time to be built in Northern Virginia. One day, the entire aircraft would be able to be viewed, but it could be seven, eight, even ten years into the future. By 15 December 2003, however, things had changed. As part of the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers first powered flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, or the Dulles (International Airport) Annex of the National Air and Space Museum, was dedicated during a week-long gala celebration. The facility opened to crushing crowds hoping to gain admission, lined up in their mini-vans, pick-up trucks and Eurosport sedans for miles outside the facility's gates.

This new museum building had been planned for decades, but it became a material reality only after Steven F. Udvar-Hazy donated US$65 million to the Smithsonian to help construct it. Udvar-Hazy is a first-generation Hungarian immigrant who earned his millions in the aircraft leasing business. He says that he has funded the facility 'to pay back America for its opportunities and pass on his love of aviation to future generations'. (6) Nearly US$300 million will eventually be spent on the facility, with Udvar-Hazy contributing nearly 20 per cent of the building's construction price. (7)

Nearly a thousand feet long, the Center features a ten-storey tall exhibit hall, with 255 000 square feet of exhibition space on four display levels. (8) The building is made of twenty-one arced steel trusses, allowing many planes to hang on cables as if in flight. Most, though, are clustered together on the floor in thematic zones: pre-1920 Aviation; Commercial Aviation; World War II Aviation; General Aviation; Business Aviation; Korea and Vietnam; Sport Aviation; Cold War Aviation; and so on. (9) What on the Mall in the twentieth century had only been able to be presented in pieces, in pictures, or not at all, now has more opportunities. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, a monumentally impressive display is promised in this vast new hangar. Indeed, its first catalogue, and the Air and Space Museum itself, are calling the Udvar-Hazy Center, 'America's Hangar'. (10) But what is the Smithsonian Institution doing at this site, and what might such a site mean for museum politics in the twenty-first century? Could it be that this Center envelops a space so vast that it obscures more than it reveals?

Progressive critics of the Enola Gay exhibition as it was finally mounted in 1995 were upset by many things: its 'politicized narrative'; the downplaying of the bombing; that it ignored Japan's atomic bomb victims. But for all its faults, that show carried much more information and provided far more perspective on the issues involved than was ever going to be the case with simply parking the restored B-29 in the 'World War II Aviation' cluster in the Air and Space Annex in suburban Northern Virginia. Strangely, this rather large aeroplane is difficult to find in the Udvar-Hazy Center's 40 million cubic feet of space. Parked cheek-by-jowl in this immense hangar amidst a booming, buzzing collection of so many other striking aeronautical artifacts, all the symbolic power and historical significance of the Enola Gay is dissipated. As minor shreds of atomic dogma in the Mall in 1995, the Enola Gay could be approached as a major marker of 1945's titanic events. As a whole aircraft in 2003-4, it is just another aeroplane nestled among other 'historic firsts' lined up behind, suspended over, set before, or arrayed around it. That the Enola Gay is remarkable for being the delivery system for the world's first nuclear strategic bombing does not go unremarked, but neither is it made as significant as might have been expected.

In one sense, not much has changed--as in 1995, the meanings of the Enola Gay remain hidden. However now the Enola Gay is in plain view. It rests almost nose-to-nose with an iconic German airliner/bomber/transport from the 1930s, a tri-motor Junkers Ju52/3m, as well as the prototype of the Boeing 707 jetliner, the Boeing 367-80. And one can view the Enola Gay only by first passing a Lockheed SR-71 'Blackbird' spy plane, its black titanium skin riveting the viewer's attention until it is drawn to the even more unbelievable sight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise behind it in its own side hall. It is similarly impossible to ignore an Air France Concorde. Also posed near the Enola Gay are some incredibly striking examples of World War II aircraft types: a P-47 'Thunderbolt', a P-38 'Lightening', a Hawker Hurricane, a FockeWulf 190, a Mitsubishi AGM5 'Zero' fighter and other extremely rare craft like an Arado AR 234 'Blitz' jet bomber and the submarine-launched fighter-bomber, the Aichi MGA1 'Seiran'. These are among some of the most significant 'world firsts' as technologies, as well as now being the last of their kind.

The viewer walks about the centre in a daze, overpowered by the variety of aeronautical types and the many celebrated 'firsts'. Concerned overwhelmingly with cataloguing technical progress, the impressive cluster, 'World War II Aviation', simply does not draw out the crucial issue: how nuclear bombs, jet bombers and ballistic missiles came together in 1944-1945 as a new war machine dedicated to delivering 'weapons of mass destruction'. Relevant captions are located artlessly elsewhere, at the end of the hall in the 'Korea and Vietnam' and 'Cold War Aviation' clusters, so that the importance of these developments for Cold War nuclear-capable systems is obscured. It is ignored in dry captions that document plain facts: air speed, manufacture dates, engine specifications, and the like. Overshadowed by the Concorde next to it, overhung by the sport planes with contemporary corporate logos suspended above it, and parked next to the equally iconic P-38, P-47, FW-190, and AR 234, the extraordinary uniqueness of the Enola Gay cannot be grasped at all.

The concentrated attention given to the pieces and parts of the Enola Gay in 1995 permitted a far more political consideration of the aircraft's historical importance. In 2004, the empty immensity of the space and the bucolic isolation of the site itself foster a distracted, inattentive consciousness. The unique significance of this single aeroplane in human history is passed over. Sitting with scores of other commercial and military craft, the Enola Gay is merely a bug on a pin in a glass box with many other iron butterflies on display. The display rhetoric basically reduces it to just one more machinic specimen of a now extinct, albeit exotic, species.

Sites like the new Udvar-Hazy Center are attempts to transcend outmoded museumologies that once featured the static display of artifacts under glass accompanied by academic captions. The intention is to put entire machines out on open display, like new cars at a car yard. Yet, like super car-dealerships, this site unfolds as an overwhelming experience, a collision of meanings and images leaving the viewer almost numb. This centre simply cannot serve effectively as a site of dynamic revelation of the machinic totalities of aeronautical action. And the logic of museum vitrines is not transcended at all. Indeed, the whole Helmuth Obata & Kassabaum-designed Udvar-Hazy edifice is a massive steel, glass and concrete vitrine itself. As a structure meant 'to meet the special needs of a large collection of aircraft and spacecraft--along with millions of visitors--but still fit the ambience of an airport', the HOK design team succeeds. One must alternately descend and ascend within the carapace to see the many aircraft. It's like going from check-in to the gate, to the plane, to the baggage claim to the bus, at an airport. Vitrine consciousness is in fact transcendent, the building itself a huge glass case through which visitors pass with glassy stares.

Short uplifting tales about the adventure of flight abound; just how often the human consequences of flight have been destructive is pushed deep into the background: made secondary or even ignored so as not to sap 'the spirit' of aviation. Indeed, the message is almost entirely one of soaring through time and space. To discuss death, destruction or disaster made possible by air combat and travel in this context would detract from the story implicitly and explicitly told about the aircraft on display as splendid specimens of machinic perfection. The Udvar-Hazy Center implicitly cubes the destructive energy of technics, terror and tourism with over-simulated information overload.

Judiciously, the Center's current catalogue does note how the 1995 show of the Enola Gay 'became the center of an exhibition controversy', but it goes on merely to outline the aeroplane's specifications, with photos of its restoration, recording 'just the facts' of its wartime mission:

 On August 6, 1945, this Martin-built B-29-45-MO dropped
 the first atomic weapon used in combat on Hiroshima,
 Japan. Three days later, Bockscar (on display at the U.S. Air
 Force Museum near Dayton, Ohio) dropped a second atomic
 bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Enola Gay flew as the advance
 weather reconnaissance aircraft that day. A third B-29,
 The Great Artiste, flew as an observation aircraft on both
 missions.

The Enola Gay is the first aeroplane represented in the catalogue. However, there is no discussion of what happened in Japan on 6 and 9 August 1945 after three B-29s flew their missions. Colonel Paul Tibbets was on hand at the Udvar-Hazy Center's dedication day to recall his exploits in the Enola Gay, as its pilot and commander on 6 August 1945, but as an Associated Press account of 11 December 2003 dedication ceremonies noted:

 Museum officials avoided the controversy that grounded a
 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay because it discussed the effects
 of the bomb dropped by the B-29 bomber. Japanese
 survivors say they want the exhibit to focus more on the
 damage from the atom bomb.

The bland catalogue text about the Enola Gay, and the fact that the bomber is positioned on the floor, has upset many peace activists, historians, public intellectuals, veterans and aviation writers, as well as ordinary citizens in Japan and the United States. An international petition to get the museum to provide more information about the bombing and less about the bomber, however, has been deflected by the Smithsonian. General John R. 'Jack' Dailey, the Air and Space Museum's director, kept to the exclusively technological script on the Enola Gay as a B-29 bomber aircraft, noting that it is in the Udvar-Hazy Center's collection because 'we could not find a better B-29 that had better technology'. Daley believes that in taking this approach the Enola Gay exhibit will leave 'the interpretation of how it was used to the visitor'. These observations echo the 1995 exhibit's meaningless captions:

 Something more than an airplane, [the Enola Gay now fifty
 years later] seems almost larger than life; as much an icon,
 now, as an airplane. After all this time, it still evokes intense
 emotions from gratitude to grief, its polished surface
 reflecting the myriad feelings and meanings and memories
 we bring before it.

As the Enola Gay went on exhibit at the Air and Space Museum Annex in November 2003, a serendipitous irony unfolded in Japan at the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims. Opened in 2002, it has dispassionately displayed photographs of 9 000 of the 140 000 people killed on 6 August 1945. As a major industrial centre, Hiroshima held thousands of ethnic Koreans as forced labour, as well as unknown hundreds of Japanese Americans trapped in Japan by Tokyo's 7 December 1941 strike against Pearl Harbor. The Enola Gay's crew killed many of them, including at least ten of their American comrades as they sat in prisoner-of-war cells. One of them was Corporal John Long Jr, a 27-year-old gunner who had served on an American B-24 shot down over Japan only a few days earlier.

A former steelworker from New Castle, Pennsylvania, Long and several crew members from another Army Air Force B-24 and a Navy Helldiver dive-bomber were under detention in Hiroshima when the bomb detonated. At least seven American POWs are listed on the official ceremonial roster of Hiroshima victims enclosed in the stone monument memorializing the bombing. Their names were added after a Japanese professor uncovered a war-time government list of twenty American POWs apparently killed at the time.

In January 2004, Corporal Long's great nephew, Nathan Long, donated a photograph of the World War II airman in his Army Air Force uniform to the Hiroshima Memorial Hall. Curator Shigeru Aratani put Corporal Long's portrait on the wall--along with captions revealing his pre-war occupation and name--with the thousands of other photos of the city's Japanese victims. Nathan Long grew up in Japan and now works as a teacher in Tokyo. He obviously is uncomfortable with how Hiroshima's agonies are hidden in the statistics of 140 000 anonymous deaths. His great-uncle's fate is a 'small story,' but Long believes it could be very telling for visitors to recognize this strange twist of nuclear terror:

 I think most Americans would look at all those Japanese
 faces and say, 'That's too bad. A lot of Japanese people died.'
 But you get one American face and they might feel a little
 more of a connection.

The Smithsonian Institution has given the American public ready access to a meticulously restored Enola Gay as the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, but has reduced the weapon, the delivery system, and the event to no more than a remarkable technological feat. There is little said about the bomb and its aftereffects, in Japan or the United States. For this information, the public must turn to Japan. At the Hiroshima Memorial Hall, the curious can now view a photo of US Army Air Force Corporal John Long Jr looking out from the past along with 9 000 Asian atomic bomb victims. As Shigeru Aratani observes, this one photograph matters: 'It shows how indiscriminate the slaughter was. Enemies and friends, soldiers and civilians, women and children--they were all killed'.

Many thought in 1995 that exhibiting the whole Enola Gay could bring these issues back into active deliberation in the twenty-first century. However, displaying the Enola Gay--a real, but also quite old, weapon of mass destruction--seems only to have hidden Hiroshima deeper in what is a past century, growing dimmer each day, as American military forces root around in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and North Korea searching for real or imagined new weapons of mass destruction. But let us remember something quite different about 6 August 1945, above and beyond the aircraft itself. The Enola Gay established a new standard of power based upon uranium, plutonium and hydrogen that all-powerful nation-states had at least to consider adopting as the sign of their sovereignty. Displaying the Enola Gay at the Udvar-Hazy Center 'hides Hiroshima' by separating the bomb from the bomber and the bombing. Until the bomb is connected with the bombing on the ground, the bomber plane, the bomber crew and the bomber nation, the meaning of Hiroshima will remain hidden from history. And, this act arguably weakens, not just morally, but practically too, the United States since its strategic deception and denial emboldens other states to acquire atomic weapons and to hide their own WMD experiments. Bearing bizarre names, all military WMD experiments like the 'Manhattan Project' or 'Star Wars' spawn delusions of national invincibility. Taking nearly fifty years to publicly display the Enola Gay, with barely any mention of the bomb and bombing missions, perhaps underscores an unease experienced by the American public that such power rests in the hands of the American state.

(1.) T. Luke, Museum Politics: Powerplays at the Exhibition, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 2002.

(2.) Washington Post, August 1994.

(3.) P. Nobile, (ed.), Judgement at the Smithsonian: Smithsonian Script by the Curators at the National Air and Space Museum, New York: Marlowe and Company, 1995.

(4.) See Luke, 2002.

(5.) T. Luke, 'Nuclear Reactions, The (Re)presentation of Hiroshima at the National Air and Space Museum', Arena Journal, no. 8. 1997, pp. 93-145.

(6.) Trescott.

(7.) W. Branigin, 'Project Prepares for Take Off: Contract Awarded to Begin Work on Air and Space Annex, Washington Post, 11 April 2001, B3.

(8.) J. Trescott, 'Smithsonian's New Aviation Museum at Dulles Gets Off to a Flying Start', A1, 20, 12 December 2003.

(9.) W. Triplett, 'A Century of Flight: Hold Everything', Smithsonian, vol. 34, no. 9, December 2003, pp. 58-63.

(10.) Smithsonian Institution, 'America's Hangar: Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center', Washington DC, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Timothy Luke teaches in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia.