The original plan was eliminated and a more straightforward historical exhibit of the Enola Gay was put in its place. Smithsonian officials said they always welcomed comments on how they would present history. Bennett was a part of the community who helped change the NASM exhibit through letter writing campaigns and publishing articles on the subject in local papers and magazines. Michael Heyman Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Veterans groups and others became involved in campaigns to display the Enola Gay proudly and have the Smithsonian redesign their exhibit to respectfully display the airplane. Smithsonian Official Tells Why Enola Gay Exhibit Was Shot Down. The initial exhibit was controversial, with veterans groups claiming that the revisionist historical attitude was omitting the truth behind the reason to drop the atomic bomb and sympathizing too much with the Japanese. In 1995, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) created an exhibit to feature the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb in the history of warfare on Hiroshima, Japan. During this period, he was a leading member of the Committee for the Restoration and Proper Display of the Enola Gay (CRPDEG). After the war, Bennett had a long career in the concrete contractor business in the greater Chicago, Illinois area.
He enlisted in the Army Air Corps before Pearl Harbor and was discharged in October, 1945.ĭuring his years of service, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. He was a member of the 40th Bombardment Group (Very Heavy) of the XX Bomber Command in the China/Burma/India (CBI) Theater of Operations as well as Tinian in the Mariana Islands of the Central Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. He flew combat missions in B-29’s as a radar operator and combat aerial photographer. Burr Bennett had a life-long interest in the Enola Gay Controversy as a result of his military service.
"This is, in a sense, a new thing," he said.W.
Like the Enola Gay, it was built under license by the Glenn L. NASM Chronology of the Enola Gay) Bockscar The second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki Aug. Wills said he expects more such controversies involving history because the study of America's past is undergoing reassessment. The Air (Force gave the Enola Gay to the Smithsonian Institution in 1949. Historian Wills noted: "The representatives of the people can never entirely turn over public funds without accountability when they support scholarship."
The role of a professional historian, whatever his or her political beliefs or loyalties, is to help people understand the context of events." "I guess what I would look for would be really careful, responsible leadership on the part of museum staff. Jack Hurley, history professor at the University of Memphis, said, "I'm not happy with the degree of political interference that political leaders are imposing on public institutions-not just museums, but the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and public broadcasting."īut he acknowledged museum directors have to perform a "balancing act" between public concerns and scholarly pursuit.
My father saw history through the prism of World War II-that America fights good wars." I started college in 1971, when a lot of American history was being seen through the prism of Vietnam. "He felt he'd never come out of the war alive, that I would never have been born, without the bomb. "I remember conversations with my father," Pollock said. He suggested generational differences between World War II veterans and curators educated in the Vietnam War era may have played a role. Mark Pollock, professor of rhetoric at Loyola University Chicago, agreed that both sides' perceptions of the Enola Gay exhibit may have differed from reality. "They (museums) are responsible not only for what is said (in an exhibit), but for what people may reasonably think is said," Kennedy said. Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein, whose research was used for the 60,000 estimate, complained that the Smithsonian was bowing to Congress, which controls its funding.īut museum directors must take public reaction into account when they plan exhibitions, according to National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy, former director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Veterans groups believe what had been the conventional wisdom that the death toll would have been much higher, about 230,000. One major point of controversy was the exhibit's estimate that dropping the bomb prevented the deaths of some 60,000 U.S.