About 140,000 people were killed in the bombing. Peace activists arrange ribbons near the Hiroshima memorial museum. The plaque reflects the views of US navy leadership at the time. “However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August – fulfilling a promise of the Yalta conference in February – changed their minds.”
“The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military,” it says on a plaque beside a replica of Little Boy, the bomb Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima. While the air force view – which reflects US orthodoxy – is that the use of atomic weapons stopped the war and prevented much worse bloodshed, the National Museum of the US Navy has a different take. The disagreements are not limited to historians. In the Pacific, B-29s delivered a variety of aerial weapons: conventional bombs, incendiary bombs, mines, and two nuclear weapons,” it reads.Īll reference to the moral, political and historical debate over the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 – and then Nagasaki three days later – has been left off the public display, but that has not stopped the row from surfacing in the days leading up to the 75th anniversary on Thursday. “Although designed to fight in the European theater, the B-29 found its niche on the other side of the globe. In the wake of those battles, the inscription below the Enola Gay today is minimal and bland.
Red paint was hurled, denting the airframe. When the plane was fully restored and moved to the museum’s spectacular new building near Dulles in 2003, there were protests from Japanese survivors and others. The museum’s director, Martin Harwit, was forced to resign. For the critics, even that was not enough. In the face of an outcry from air force veterans, who said the exhibition would put Japanese and US responsibility on the same moral plane, the curators scaled back or eliminated the elements focused on the 140,000 people killed in Hiroshima, and the ensuing nuclear arms race. When the Enola Gay was part restored and plans were made to put in on display at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995, historians agonised over how the exhibit might look at its legacy from all sides. Behind the neglect lay a deep national ambivalence about what it represented, a quandary which endures today: was this the aircraft that finally ended the second world war, saving hundreds of thousands of lives – or the instrument of the mass killing of civilians, which heralded a new age of nuclear terror?