It's the anniversary of Hiroshima. More precisely, it's the anniversary of the day on which the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb ("Little Boy") on the "munitions plant surrounded by workers' houses" in Hiroshima. The Little Boy design had never been tested.

I don't have anything new to say, except that this is one of those dates that I just know. So I'm planning to follow ges's example, and offer a reflection of mine, written for a different context, that still seems frightfully pertinent. Besides, despite its flaws, it talks about the public sphere! ;)

“The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.” ~C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.” ~ Ernest Renan

The Enola Gay controversy, a compelling series of events in its own right, calls attention to several intersections between history and theories of history. It illustrates the tension between history and memory, the difficulties of determining what qualifications are necessary to participate in the discussion, and the influence of discursive boundaries on a discussion. It also indicates the enduring contentiousness of the debate surrounding some American foreign policy decisions as well as the persistent and potent dogmatism of the American national mythology.

During the early 1990s, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. planned an exhibit centered around the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that delivered the atomic bomb “Little Boy” to Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. In theory, the exhibit was designed to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In actuality, however, the exhibit triggered a controversy about the meaning of the recent past.

Veterans wanted the exhibit to celebrate the Enola Gay’s role in the Japanese surrender, thereby preventing a ground invasion of Japan and saving millions of American lives. The initial plans failed to live up to this patriotic vision, triggering protests from the American Legion, the Air Force Association, and the U.S. Senate, among others. Faced with this pressure, the museum postponed the exhibit indefinitely.

When it finally opened to the public after substantial modifications had been made, many historians opposed the changes and objected to the distortion of the past perpetrated by the exhibit’s heroic depiction of the Enola Gay. They argued that the modified exhibit underestimated the number of Japanese casualties, overstated the likelihood of an American invasion, suggested falsely that the citizens of Hiroshima had been encouraged to evacuate, described Hiroshima as an exclusively military target (when multiple documents showed that Hiroshima had been selected as a target because of its low military priority, since the destruction of an undamaged city would most fully demonstrate the powers of the atomic bomb), and oversimplified the causal link between the atomic bomb and the Japanese surrender, neglecting the influence of the Soviet invasion of Japan and the modification of surrender terms to retain Emperor Hirohito.

These criticisms were largely disregarded as an attempt by “narrow-minded representatives of a special-interest and revisionist point of view . . . to appropriate and hollow out a historical event that large numbers of Americans alive at that time . . . had witnessed and understood in a very different—and authentic—way.”[1] Patriotic memory took precedence over historical accounts.

In the United States of the early 1990s, it was widely deemed inappropriate and un-American to cast any doubt on the belief that the atomic bombings were necessary and justified. Yet in late August 1945, several essays highly critical of the atomic bombings were published, not only in left-wing magazines like Dwight Macdonald’s Politics but in the mainstream media.

In 1947, John Hersey’s book Hiroshima generated both substantial backlash against the bombings and widespread public debate. Even stalwart Henry Stimson, former Secretary of War, did not glorify the atomic bombings, instead explaining that the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had been the “least abhorrent choice.” While Stimson publicly defended his actions and the decisions of the Truman administration in an essay in Harper’s Magazine, he did not impugn the integrity or patriotism of those who disagreed. In the United States of the late 1940s, it was politically acceptable to question the necessity of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to suggest that the United States might have sacrificed too much on the altar of expediency, to doubt the patriotic myth.

The Enola Gay controversy throws into relief the “gap” that Pierre Nora described between his lived, political experience as a French citizen and his intellectual, professional experience as a historian. Although Nora emphasized the uniquely French aspects of this “gap,” the tension transcends national borders, as does the reality that political pragmatism and historical findings do not always coincide.

The story also shows that the boundaries of the public discursive space shifted between the late 1940s and the early 1990s. By indicating the influence of the public sphere, it suggests the importance of recognizing the assumptions and restrictions of the available space for discussion in modern America.

Finally, the Enola Gay controversy suggests that the American national mythology has been formed, at least partially, by forgetting.[2] The Japanese casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have fallen into the same discursive pit of silence that obscures Thomas Jefferson’s slaveholding and the decimation of Native Americans.[3] Yet the national myth endures, beginning with an idealistic founding that promised an ideal and idealistic future. From this pure source, the story goes, the United States draws the strength to shoulder a national burden: the perceived duty to proclaim liberty and equality, to defend human rights and dignity, to preserve the power of democracy.

Notes
1 Editorial published in the Washington Post, 1 February 1995. Although veterans and historians represented the core membership of their respective camps, the debate was much more inclusive and widespread.

2 Friedrich Nietzsche argued that “the ability to forget” was a key ingredient of happiness. It seems that it is also a vital component in the creation of national myths, especially as lugubrious or upsetting stories are unlikely to inspire patriotism. (Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 62.

3 In recent years, historians have brought slavery’s “harsh brutality and its influence front and center,” revealing the clay feet of many of the Founders (Gordon Wood, “Never Forget: They Kept Lots of Slaves,” New York Times, 14 December 2003). Native American history is also on the rise. These aspects of the American past do not, however, feature at all prominently in the hagiographic national narrative.