Note: Enola Gay was the name of the pilot’s mother.
intercst
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Enola Gay Controversy:
When curators at the Smithsonian planned a critical commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII, the clash between professional historians, public interest groups, veterans, and politicians launched an era of high stakes contention in the United States over the meanings of America’s pasts for its present.
When the Smithsonian decided to exhibit the “Enola Gay,” the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the director and curators of the National Air & Space Museum (NASM) hardly anticipated the firestorm of controversy that would result. While the “Enola Gay fiasco,” as some at the museum came to call it, was not the first skirmish in America’s ongoing culture wars, it was an ominous warning of the battles to come.
the Air Force Association (AFA) launched a full-scale assault on the exhibit as “politically biased,” and an example of “politically correct curating.”[3] Enlisting its own well-connected media relations and communications departments in the campaign, the AFA also contracted with one of Washington, D.C.’s largest public relations firms, in what was soon a campaign to fundamentally change the exhibit to the AFA’s liking, or force its cancellation altogether.
AFA required us to say… (1) The atomic bomb ended the war; (2) It saved one million American lives; and (3) There was no real alternative to its use. In truth, all three of these claims have been challenged by generations of historians, citing documentary evidence from the time that contradicts or significantly modifies each one.
opposition to the exhibit, from the media and in Congress, bordered on the hysterical. In letters to the editors of major newspapers, Martin was compared to the notorious Japanese militarist Hideki Tojo. Veteran groups called for the curators who wrote the labels to be fired. The lead curator, Mike Neufeld, even received anonymous death threats.
The exhibit that opened at the Mall museum on June 28, 1995, was a pale shadow of the “Enola Gay” exhibit as originally conceived.
On December 16, 2003, the day after the “Enola Gay” was unveiled in its new—and likely permanent—home, NASM’s new annex near Dulles airport, a half-dozen atomic bomb survivors joined fifty self-identified “peace activists” to unfurl a banner reading: “Hiroshima—Never Again” in front of the plane. Two men, part of the group, threw red paint—symbolizing blood—hitting and slightly denting the fuselage just below the pilot’s window. The men who threw the paint were arrested, the other protesters left peacefully, and the damage to the aircraft was quickly repaired.
almost two decades have passed without further incident.
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I would suggest there is a difference between the question of the morality of using an atomic bomb on a largely civilian population, and the issue now, of the use of the word “Gay”.
I wonder if this man has also suffered at the hands of the nutter “cancel culture” at DoD? This is George Gay, sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron 8, at the Battle of Midway.
Gay St, in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Will the nutter thought police demand the city change the name of the street?
Fifty years ago, Nixon embarked on a campaign to have all the places in the US with “immoral” names renamed. One on his list was “Sheboygan”, Wisconsin, deemed immoral, because the name supposedly had to do with childbirth, ie sex, which could not be spoken of in Nixon’s Amerika. That time, the howls of derision aimed at the program quickly buried it.
Steve
They indeed removed pictures of soldiers with the last name of Gay.
I had one in my unit when I was on active duty. I am not sure if he had it worse or if if the guy named “John Boy” did.