Sparknotes history wars the enola gay
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#Sparknotes history wars the enola gay serial number#
The Enola Gay (Model number B-29-45-MO, Serial number 44-86292, Victor number 82) was built by the Glenn L. The last survivor of its crew, Theodore Van Kirk, died on 28 July 2014 at the age of 93. Since 2003, the entire restored B-29 has been on display at NASM's Steven F. The cockpit and nose section of the aircraft were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the National Mall, for the bombing's 50th anniversary in 1995, amid controversy. In the 1980s, veterans groups engaged in a call for the Smithsonian to put the aircraft on display, leading to an acrimonious debate about exhibiting the aircraft without a proper historical context. Later that year it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and spent many years parked at air bases exposed to the weather and souvenir hunters, before being disassembled and transported to the Smithsonian's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, in 1961. In May 1946, it was flown to Kwajalein for the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests in the Pacific, but was not chosen to make the test drop at Bikini Atoll. Clouds and drifting smoke resulted in a secondary target, Nagasaki, being bombed instead.Īfter the war, the Enola Gay returned to the United States, where it was operated from Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. Enola Gay participated in the second nuclear attack as the weather reconnaissance aircraft for the primary target of Kokura. The bomb, code-named " Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the destruction of about three quarters of the city. Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. The Enola Gay ( / ə ˈ n oʊ l ə/) is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Paul Tibbets waving from the Enola Gay 's cockpit before taking off for the bombing of Hiroshima For other uses, see Enola Gay (disambiguation). Instead, they lost a political contest seemingly caused, at least in part, by their own tendentiousness-a lesson that, judging by this book, has yet to be learned. The Smithsonian could have fostered an appropriate national dialogue on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This interpretation is by no means generally accepted, however, even in the academic community. This reflects a revisionist position that argues that the nuking of Japan was based on questionable necessity and dubious morality. The text and artifacts originally proposed for the exhibit did in fact present strong images of American perpetrators and Japanese victims. On the other stand the usual suspects: Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, the Air Force Association and similar right-wing forces committed to ""patriotic orthodoxy."" Common to most of the contributions here is a sense of outrage that the conclusions of respected scholars should be challenged by uncredentialed outsiders. According to the authors, on one side are scholars and intellectuals courageously seeking to establish open discourse on ambiguous elements of the U.S.
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Dower, Michael Sherry, Marilyn Young and the editors comment upon and often exacerbate the current struggle over how public history depicts the American past.
In eight essays, historians including John W. The gutting in 1995, because of political protest, of a planned Smithsonian exhibit about the atomic bombing of Japan serves as the launchpad for this intemperate polemic.