110. Revisiting The ‘Enola Gay Fiasco’ Today

For the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was restored to be part of a full exhibit, presented alongside context about the atomic bombing's mass civilian casualties. But that exhibit never opened. Instead, after years of script revisions and intense pressure from veterans' groups and Congress, the museum displayed the restored bomber's fuselage with minimal interpretation. The exhibit was primarily dedicated to the technical process of restoring the aircraft; as one visitor noted, "I learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but I did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb." In this episode, historian Gregg Herken, who served as Chairman of the museum's Space History Division during the controversy, recounts how the exhibit went from reckoning with the bomb's full impact to re-enforcing a patriotic narrative. He recalls the specific moments that led up to one of the museum industry's cautionary tales, like when the director agreed to remove evocative artifacts like a schoolgirl's carbonized lunchbox from Hiroshima from the exhibition plans, and how the Air Force Association demanded the exhibit say the bombing saved 1 million American lives and other assertions that have been challenged by generations of historians. Today, as a new presidential executive order (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/) dictates how the Smithsonian interprets American history, we realize the "Enola Gay Fiasco" isn't just a cautionary tale—it's the blueprint for a more aggressive campaign to justify anything. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Enola Gay in the 1980s 01:07 Gregg Herken 02:21 Initial Planning 02:40 Martin Harwit 03:48 Herken's Visit to Hiroshima 04:39 'The Lunchbox' (https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=DocumentView&document_id=362&lang=eng) 05:32 Initial Exhibit Script 06:26 Opposition and Controversy 07:15 Revisions and Criticisms 10:49 Air Force Association's Demands 11:59 Exhibit Cancellation 13:37 "Pale Shadow" 14:10 Reflecting on History and Censorship 20:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club/)

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 110. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

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Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started.

By the late 1980s, the Enola Gay – the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – had been sitti