H-AISA

SMITHSONIAN ENOLA GAY EXHIBIT CONTROVERSY
(10 Feb.- 25 Sept. 1995)

H-Asia
Item number 32
Fri, 10 Feb 1995 04:49:59 -0600 (CST)
Early history of Enola Gay controversy

[Fair Use reprint for scholarly commentary only] [407 lines] [note from H-Net: After looking at scores of reports on the Enola Gay controversy, I find this very early one the most revealing of all in terms of the intellectual and administrative history of the exhibit. Richard Jensen for H-Net]

2 Views of History Collide Over Smithsonian A-Bomb Exhibit

WASHINGTON POST: A SECTION, 09/26/94

By Ken Ringle; Washington Post Staff Writer

Nearly 50 years after the United States brought World War II to an end by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, a final skirmish is underway at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum over how those bombs and their impact will be remembered: as an event that ended great suffering or as one that caused it. For the majority of Americans now alive, including curators of the divisive proposed exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, World War II is old history, a scholarly abstraction composed of archival records, argumentative books and the fading, flickering images on black-and-white film. For veterans like Grayford C. Payne, 74, of Annandale, who survived the Bataan death march in the war's earliest days plus "three years, five months and 20 days" of starvation and slave labor in five Japanese prison camps, it was something else. "In the latter part of June 1945," Payne remembers, "a note was posted in our camp" at Hanawa in northern Japan. "It was signed by [Japanese premier] Hideki Tojo. And it said, 'The moment the first American soldier sets foot on the Japanese mainland, all prisoners of war will be shot.' And they meant it. I hadn't been a prisoner for 15 minutes before they bayoneted a 15-year-old Filipino kid right next to me -- a kid so innocent he scraped together this little dirt dam with his last bit of energy so he wouldn't bleed on my uniform while he died."

The atomic bomb, which killed between 80,000 and 140,000 in Hiroshima and about half that number in Nagasaki (the exact figures remain disputed), shocked the Japanese into surrendering without an invasion, Payne says. "That's why all of us who were prisoners in Japan -- or were headed for it to probably die in the invasion -- revere the Enola Gay. It saved our lives." For Michael Neufeld, the 43-year-old curator of the exhibit, the Enola Gay, which marked the end of a nightmare for Payne's generation, began a nightmare for his. The postwar generation, he says, "grew up cowering under the bedclothes expecting World War III to drop on us any minute, and thinking 'Oh, God, it's going to happen to us and be 50,000 times worse.' "

The first script for his April 1995 exhibit laid heavy emphasis on the horrors of the atomic bombing, little on the Japanese aggression and atrocities that produced it. Neufeld's original proposal for the exhibit, written in February 1993, said it would "address the significance, necessity and morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... The question of whether it was necessary and right to drop the bombs ... continues to perplex us."

"What is he saying?" says Grayford Payne, appearing for a moment close to tears. "That the thousands of Japanese killed by those bombs were somehow worth more than the thousands of American prisoners in Japan? After all we'd been through? What about the women and children I saw bayoneted and buried alive ... by the Japanese in the Philippines? What about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese hacked to pieces in the Rape of Nanking? ...

"Does anybody really think," he says, "that the Japanese, faced with the same situation, wouldn't have used the atomic bomb on us?"

Vying to Mold the Future

The gulf separating the worldviews of Michael Neufeld and Grayford Payne is partly generational, partly ideological, partly one of experience. It also reflects what Neufeld describes as a "huge disjuncture" between the way mainstream America views American history and the way it's viewed in many academic circles today.

What's taking place is a tug of war for the perceptions of future generations between those whose political sensibilities remain anchored in the anti-government, anti-war sentiments of the Vietnam era and those whose perspective includes allowances for other times and circumstances.

Like the controversial "West as America" exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art 3 1/2 years ago, which portrayed the settling of the American frontier as largely an exercise in exploitative capitalism, Native American genocide and environmental rape, the Enola Gay exhibit has drawn considerable fire from those with a less antagonistic view of this nation and its past.

The original five-part exhibit script -- which in large part reflected debates that have been underway in academia for nearly 30 years -- has been denounced as "partisan," "left-wing," "anti- American," "politically correct" and "historical revisionism at its worst" by critics ranging from the columnist Charles Krauthammer to the American Legion. Two dozen members of Congress have signed a formal letter of protest, and outraged veterans by the hundreds have flooded the Smithsonian with letters and petitions and phone calls.

The critics have charged the usually celebratory museum -- whose 8.2 million admissions a year make it the most visited museum in the world -- with both distortion and lack of historical context in its portrayal of the atomic bomb missions. They have protested especially such script assertions as the one stating: "For most Americans, this ... was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism."

That statement has since been removed in one of a series of script revisions in recent weeks. But "what can't be altered," editorialized the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 29, "is the clear impression given by the Smithsonian that the American museum whose business it is to tell the nation's story is now in the hands of academics unable to view American history as anything other than a woeful catalogue of crimes and aggressions against the helpless peoples of the earth."

The Senate last week unanimously passed a resolution by Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.), stating that even in its latest version the exhibit is still "revisionist, unbalanced and offensive" and reminding the museum of its "obligation to portray history in the proper context of the time."

The exhibit in question will display the front 56 feet of the Enola Gay's fuselage (the whole plane is far too large for the museum), with much of the remaining display space devoted to the development of the atomic bomb, its effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and anti-nuclear sentiments in the postwar era.

Neufeld and Tom Crouch, director of the Air and Space Museum's division of aeronautics, insist the criticism of the exhibit is surprising, puzzling and unfair. They emphasize that the much-criticized first script was the first draft of a work still in progress. The finished product, they said in an interview, will be, like all such scripts, a collaborative effort reflecting not only their views but those of the museum's director, Martin Harwit, and a nine-member advisory committee including people with expertise in all aspects of World War II.

"We could have handled all this internally" had not that first draft script been obtained and made public by veterans, Harwit said. The ensuing controversy "hasn't forced on us any [script] changes we wouldn't have made ourselves."

Yet after leafing through hundreds of pages of documents dealing with the evolution and development of the Enola Gay scripts during the past six years, and interviewing exhibit historians, curators and critics, it is difficult to escape the impression that the museum and its curators were expecting trouble from the start.

For example, they elected early on to finance $300,000 of the $1.6 million exhibit from a special exhibit fund underwritten by private bequests because "we knew this exhibit would be controversial," said Crouch. "We didn't want anybody to be able to say we were misusing the taxpayer's money."

For another thing, the museum chose to conceive and shape the initial script in isolation not only from military historians, but from anyone with any real-life experience with either World War II or that era in this country.

Museum director Harwit, 63, was born in Prague and raised in Istanbul. He came to the United States in 1946 as a boy of 14. He attended college at Oberlin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and formed his view of nuclear weapons as an Army physicist drafted to evaluate hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s at Eniwetok and Bikini.

Exhibit curator Neufeld, born in 1951, is a Canadian citizen who spent his undergraduate years at the University of Calgary between 1970 and 1974, when Americans were fleeing to Canada to escape the Vietnam War. He came to the Air and Space Museum in 1988 after teaching at Colgate and Johns Hopkins, among other colleges, and has focused in most of his published works on German history and the rocketry of the Third Reich.

Project manager Crouch was born in 1944 in Dayton, Ohio. A social historian with an undergraduate degree from Ohio University, he took his graduate courses at Miami University and Ohio State during the Vietnam War, earning his PhD in 1976. He joined the Smithsonian in 1974, and has focused mostly on aerospace history and the history of technology. His primary involvement with the World War II era has been at the National Museum of American History as curator of the 1985 exhibit on the internment of Japanese Americans.

According to Crouch, the Enola Gay exhibit "was really Harwit's baby, " conceived since his 1987 appointment as a way to place his own stamp on the Air and Space Museum.

"He had seen himself what nuclear weapons can do and felt strongly about their danger," Crouch said. The 50th anniversary of Hiroshima and the long-discussed display of the Enola Gay -- undergoing a lengthy $1 million restoration at the Smithsonian's conservation facility in Suitland -- seemed to offer the perfect opportunity.

Harwit, however, offers a somewhat different version of events, picturing himself as more a coordinating supervisor than an active participant in the evolution of the exhibit.

The problematic areas of the exhibit were highly visible early on.

In a July 17, 1993, memo to Harwit, for example, Smithsonian Secretary Robert McC. Adams takes exception to the proposed title, "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Onset of the Cold War," and says the lack of "what will be perceived by some as balance" in preliminary plans for the exhibit "greatly -- and I think unacceptably -- increases the risk to [the Smithsonian.]

"This should be an exhibit commemorating the end of World War II. ... " he wrote. "I continue to be uneasy that later sections of the planning document treat fully the horrors of the bombing ... but do not present in adequate depth ... the horrors experienced by the Americans during all of the island invasions culminating with Okinawa."

Four days later Crouch wrote Harwit, listing a few possible minor changes, and adding, "If Adams is being honest with us, that should satisfy him." But taking note of additional objections from former congressman and Smithsonian regent Barber Conable -- a Marine slated for the invasion of Japan until the dropping of the atomic bombs -- he continued, "I must add ... that I think it would be a big mistake to take that approach. ...

Do you want ... an exhibition intended to make veterans feel good, or do you want an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan?

Frankly, I don't think we can do both."

Revisionist History?

While, the first exhibit script has subsequently undergone at least three revisions, what still disturbs those with memories of World War II is its view of what most Americans at the time considered fairly simple issues.

The United States was at total war with an aggressor nation whose savagery and graphically documented atrocities were considered, until full understanding of the Nazi concentration camps, unprecedented in modern war; a nation obviously doomed to defeat but culturally contemptuous of surrender.

The atomic bomb ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity for an invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands more Japanese. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targets, with both military bases and war industry. Their civilian populations had been showered with leaflets warning them to evacuate. The decision to drop the bomb, said then-President Harry Truman, who made it, was "never any decision you had to think about."

The exhibit script, however, resists what one planning document calls the "dogmatic belief in the official explanation that dropping the bomb prevented a bloody invasion" in favor of a "much more nuanced picture of the decision-making."

It raises questions of racism in the use of a bomb that was actually built to be dropped on Germany. It creates what one planning document refers to as its "emotional center" -- an elaborate re-creation of the post-bomb suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it suggests that the bomb might have been dropped as much to justify its cost, to scare the Soviet Union and to satisfy political pressures on the home front as it was to save lives.

Crouch and Neufeld say they wrote the first script, together with curatorial assistants Joanne Gernstein, 33, and Tom Dietz, 36. But "the director, all our advisory board, everybody signed off on that script," Crouch said. "Nobody had any major problem with it. The only real objection from anyone on the board came from the left. Martin Sherwin of Dartmouth said he thought any display whatever of the Enola Gay was obscene because it would amount to a celebration of the bombing."

Harwit acknowledges he approved the first script, but said he did so almost casually. "With the first script you concentrate primarily on accuracy -- to make sure you get the facts right," he said in an interview. "You worry about things like context and balance in later revisions. I was just trying to make sure with this one that we didn't say anything stupid."

Statements such as "For most Japanese it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism" didn't jump out at him at the time, he said, even though the Japanese had invaded Manchuria, China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia. "That was the way the Japanese viewed themselves," he said. "That's what we were trying to convey."

The role of the advisory committee, however, remains ambiguous. Richard Hallion, a civilian historian of the Air Force listed as an exhibit adviser, said the committee was "really a non-committee" that had one meeting, kept no minutes, took no votes and circulated no communications, which was confirmed by several other committee members.

Far from "signing off" on any script, he said, everyone at the one committee meeting thought the script could be improved. Most submitted suggestions, many of which, he said, the curators ignored. Hallion said he had expressed reservations as early as two years ago to Crouch about the direction he had heard the exhibit was taking. "But I was never consulted about any aspect of the exhibit until last January, when I was invited into Harwit's office and given a general walk-through. At that point the script was already a done deal."

Hallion, curator of science and technology at the Air and Space Museum from 1974 to 1980 and a visiting professor there in 1991, said the lack of contact surprised him because "when I was [on the staff] we circulated planning documents and proposals to everyone we could find while the first draft of a script was under preparation. We wanted input from everybody."

But he charged that Harwit, Crouch and Neufeld have resisted addressing the basic deficiencies of the exhibit even during subsequent "grudging" revisions. What he remembers most about his first meeting in Harwit's office early this year, Hallion said, was the insistent focus of Harwit, Crouch and Neufeld on the "visceral" devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their "great reluctance" to deal with either Japanese aggression and atrocities, or "the fact that the Japanese were in charge of their own fate in 1945 and could have avoided all this at any time just by calling off the war they had started." When he urged that the exhibit lay greater stress on the 268,000 American casualties projected for the invasion of the Japanese mainland, Hallion said, Neufeld replied that the actual casualties the invasion would have caused can never be known, and thus "it was not historically relevant to discuss them" in relation to the decision to drop the bomb.

The Air Force Association, a veterans group and early critic of the Enola Gay scripts, has suggested one way the exhibit might convey some idea of the anticipated invasion toll: So many Purple Heart medals were manufactured for those killed or wounded on the beaches of Japan, the association pointed out, that they're still being given out half a century later. They supplied all the Purple Hearts for the Korean War (157,530) and the Vietnam War (211,324). Those awarded in the 1991 Persian Gulf War were from the same supply and had to be sent out for polishing due to age.

The Absent Voice

One of the avowed aims of the exhibit is to expose museum visitors to "the latest scholarship" dealing with the decision to use the atomic bomb. The first version of the exhibit script from January, for example, devotes many pages to academic speculation about whether the bomb was really necessary to force a Japanese surrender. The latest version, dated Aug. 31, rewords and compresses that speculation but still devotes most of a proposed wall panel titled "Hindsight: Was an Invasion Inevitable Without the Bomb?" to a 1946 Strategic Bombing Survey claiming the Japanese would have surrendered by the end of 1945 without either the atomic bomb or an invasion.

The exhibit fails to note that the survey in question based that claim not on the low-fatality scenario the script implies, but on the escalation of massive conventional firebombing like that which incinerated Tokyo March 9 and 10, 1945, killing thousands more than died from the atomic bomb in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The wall panel would continue without elaboration: "Many others are less confident that Japan's rulers would have accepted defeat, especially if the Allies refused to guarantee that Emperor Hirohito would remain on the throne. In any case, President Truman believed at the time that an invasion would be necessary if the atomic bomb did not work."

Code of Bushido

One historian who wasn't consulted by the Enola Gay curators was David McCullough, whose 10-year biographical study of Truman won the Pulitzer Prize and universal critical praise in 1993. Truman, McCullough noted, had led men in combat, had risked court-martial during World War I to save their lives, and worried constantly about the human cost of the war. When he learned the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan, he wrote his wife: "We'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed! That's the important thing."

"Conceivably, as many would later argue," McCullough wrote, "the Japanese might have surrendered before November and the scheduled invasion. Conceivably, they could have been strangled by naval blockade, forced to surrender by continued firebombing. ... But no one close to Truman was telling him not to use the new weapon."

Gen. George Marshall, his chief military adviser, "fully expected the Japanese to fight on even if the bomb were dropped," according to McCullough. In the Pentagon "the great concern was the likelihood of huge Japanese forces in China and Southeast Asia fighting on" even if the government in Tokyo gave up.

McCullough and numerous other scholars, historians and war veterans argue that the most confounding and frightening thing about the Japanese to the Americans was not so much their race which the original script suggests underlay most attitudes and decisions in the Pacific war -- but their alien and all-ruling culture. Their code of Bushido made no allowance for surrender, and it glorified death with suicidal banzai charges and gut- cutting hara-kiri rituals. The Japanese military not only disdained the Geneva Conventions governing warfare, but seemed to glory in periodic frenzies of pointless slaughter.

"They were the murderers of American prisoners of war, the fanatics who ordered the seemingly insane kamikaze attacks," wrote McCullough. "The details of the Bataan death march [in which only 4,000 out of 12,000 American prisoners survived] had become known only in February and enraged the country. Other atrocities included the Palawan Massacre, during which Japanese soldiers ... lured 140 American prisoners of war into air-raid trenches, then doused them with gasoline and burned them alive."

Given what appeared to American eyes as irrational and inhuman behavior, Japan's surrender without a costly invasion seemed improbable. Even after the atomic bomb had fallen on Hiroshima, McCullough wrote, Gen. Korechiki Anami, the Japanese war minister, implored the nation's Supreme Council "for one last great battle on Japanese soil -- as demanded by the national honor. ... 'Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?' he asked."

Comparatively little of such context marks even the latest script for the Enola Gay exhibit. Instead, it attempts to equate the attitudes and tactics of those fighting to end the killing with those who started it and were fighting hopelessly to prolong it. And there is considerable attention to the birth and growth of the anti-nuclear movement, about which Harwit still appears to be the most concerned in devising a script satisfactory to critics.

In the museum's early years, he said, "hardly a year would go by without someone coming in here throwing blood on our missiles. I've had letters from people promising to protest any display whatsoever of the Enola Gay."

The exhibit's July 1993 grant proposal voices hope that the exhibit will attract to Air and Space "under-served audiences who may believe the museum only offers an uncritical examination of the difficult aspects of aerospace technology."

Last week, before lengthy meetings with the American Legion, Harwit and Crouch conferred with representatives of several Catholic peace organizations to discuss additional revisions of the script to meet their objections.

"The commemoration the Museum has planned is designed largely for the benefit of those generations of Americans too young to remember how the war ended," Harwit wrote last month in the museum's Air and Space magazine. "It is they who will have the most to gain from the lessons to be learned."

H-Asia
Item number 50
Tue, 14 Feb 1995 21:25:40 -0500 Enola Gay Exhibit

Like many members of the group, I have been following with keen interest the discussion on the Enola Gay Exhibition on H-ASIA. We at Trinity College are heeding the call from many members for wider participation in the discussion and have decided to organize a campus-wide colloquium on the Enola Gay Exhibition and its implications for larger questions of history and memory. Scheduled to take place on February 28, 4:15 p.m. at the Alumni Lounge, Trinity College, the colloquium will feature a panel made up of faculty members specializing in the study of China, Germany, Japan, and the United States. I will report on the outcome of the colloquium.

In the meantime, I recall in earlier postings some queries about the background of the exhibition. The NYT article has proved useful. Yet, I wonder whether anybody has a transcript of the original exhibition. Steven Leibo also called upon colleagues at the Library of Congress to contribute.

Has there been a response? Did I miss their posting?

King-fai Tam
Trinity College
Connecticut
KingFai.Tam@mail.trincoll.EDU

H-Asia
Item number 370
Sun, 9 Apr 1995 17:07:15 -0700
Organization of American Historians Convention--Panel on Enola Gay

(x-posted from H-POST from H-ETHNIC and H-RURAL)

[Co-editor's note: In connection with this OAH session, and the continuing discussion of the cancellation of the planned Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Exhibition, H-Ethnic subscribers may find enlightening a remarkable Australian WWW site. Called The High Energy Weapons Archive , the site includes not only a basic archive of historical and scientific materials on high energy weapons, but a very useful set of links to 18 other Web sites. Moreover, the High Energy Weapons Archive offers both photographic and eyewitness testimony to the human experience of passing through such destructive warfare, the concern that ran through the OAH session. JB]

[above note from Joe Barton. Below report from H-RURAL]

Subject: Susan Rugh reports on the OAH for H-Rural

The highlight of OAH for me was the panel discussion on the Enola Gay controversy. The panel was chaired by Martin Sherwin of Dartmouth, who set the agenda of the evening by proclaiming the cancellation as a larger issue, about censorship itself, because the decision to cancel was made without public discussion. He reported that attempts to edit the draft document (which he thought was a fair assessment of the historiography) centered largely on removing items which supported the document's point of view (such as a memo from Eisenhower against dropping the bomb). Edward Linentahl, Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Religious Studies, and author of _Sacred Ground_ and the recently released volume on the making of exhibits at the Holocaust Museum, provided the moral tone by declaring that if museums are forced to satisfy financial benefactors, propaganda will be the result. John Dower, MIT, followed with a condemnation of "sanitized" history, and noted that the Japanese have also been slow to deal with the conflicts between the "tragic" and "heroic" national narratives. Because of the cancellation, Dower warned that "a chill is in the air." Richard Cohn, UNC Chapel Hill called the cancellation a "tragedy," as did Rinjiro Sodei, Prof. of Political Science at Hosei U., Japan. Sodai's statement was particularly eloquent as he talked of the legacy of the bombing. He decried the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known more for the power of the bomb than for human suffering (a suffering which continues for the many survivors disabled or stricken with cancer). He asserted that no one has the right to tell historians what to do as they "defrost the myths of the past" to "cook," so to speak, the history they write. The Q/A period returned to consider "what took place UNDER the mushroom cloud," the tragic narrative that neither nation has been able to deal with in public exhibits and commemorations. In this regard, Dower pointed out that modern war legitimates the slaughter of civilians, and that attention to slaughter challenges basic American historical myths. That Truman himself grappled with the dilemma is clear from his Potsdam diary, where he quoted Horatio's speech in the last scene of Hamlet.

Reponses from the floor were controversial, from a Smithsonian exhibit designer saying cancellation was necessary for the institution to survive, to a museum professional from the Wisconsin Historical Society who argued that public debate was essential to public history. To which Linenthal rejoindered by citing the closed process at the Holcaust Museum, a process which meant that even the most horrific items, such as a lock of hair from a victim, could be shown in the exhibits [read his book for more]. The panel brings up issues important to historians: the role of the public in presenting history, the dynamic between financial guarantor and the views presented, popular misconceptions about what historians do (one congressman is supposed to have asked: why don't historians just tell us the facts and stop revising history?), and what constitutes censorship. Unfortunately for the profession, the Enola Gay controversy (in the view of these panelists), was a tragedy. The evening ended with distribution of information about a planned teach-in during June to observe the bombing's 50 year anniversary.

Susan S. Rugh, Dept. of History

St. Cloud State University SH283
St. Cloud, MN 56301-4498
suru@tigger.stcloud.msus.edu

H-Asia
Item number 573
Thu, 11 May 1995 22:45:46 -0400
Self-introduction & comment on Smithsonian queries

After being a subscriber for more than a month, I'd best introduce myself. I'm Edward Kaplan, an associate professor at Western Washington University (Bellingham, Washington) and editor of WWU's Center for East Asian Studies two publications series, "Studies on East Asia," and "East Asian Research Aids and Translations." (We have several dozen items in print, and I would be happy to send a titles list by "snail-mail" to anyone who asks for one. I would send it by e-mail, but haven't learned yet how to "upload" a file from my wordprocessor.) My specialty is Chinese economic and monetary history, though I am obliged to cover the waterfront of East Asian history in my teaching assignments.

While eavesdropping on the exchanges concerning the availability of the documents produced by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for its abortive Enola Gay exhibit, I wondered if it had occurred to anyone how similar are the explanations for Japanese behavior offered by the Smithsonian to the justifications offered by the Japanese fascists back in Prince Konoye's days and by the nastier kinds of Japanese politicians more recently. Of course all I know about the several versions of the exhibit is what I read in the newspapers, in my case the BELLINGHAM HERALD and the WASHINGTON TIMES. Has anyone with fuller access to the relevant documents reached the same or similar conclusions? If so, what does this tell us about the Japanese fascists, their contemporary fellow travelers, and of more interest generally, what does it tell us about the Smithsonian's historians and their advisers in academia?

From: Ed Kaplan (kaplan@janice.cc.wwu.EDU)

H-Asia
Item number 629
Sun, 21 May 1995 20:54:44
U.S. Senate & Enola Gay Exhibit

NCC Washington Update, Vol. 1, #26, May 19, 1995

by Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History

1. Senate Hearing on Enola Gay

1. Senate Hearing on Enola Gay. On May 18 the Senate Rules Committee held a second day of hearings to consider the Smithsonian Institution's Future Management Practices and its plans for avoiding another Enola Gay Exhibit. Chairman Ted Steven's (R- A laska) said in his introductory remarks that the hearings "will provide the Smithsonian with the public forum necessary to explain what went wrong with their management practices, and what steps have been taken to correct the revisionist and "politically correct" bias that was contained in the original script." Six Senators attended the hearing -- in addition to Stevens, John Warner (R- VA), Thad Cochran (R-MS), Wendell Ford (D-KY) and the Ranking Minority, Claiborne Pell (D-RI), and Dianne Feinstein (D -CA). Both Stevens and Representative Sam Johnson, the first witness and a strong critic of the Enola Gay Exhibit, indicated that they felt that the Smithsonian is adopting procedures that will "get them back on track." However, at a number of points i n the hearing, the Senators, four of whom are WW II veterans, expressed sharp criticism of the curators and the exhibit. Although there was considerable discussion of Smithsonian's procedures and of the development of this exhibits, there were no calls for further resignations or budget cuts.

The real loser in this hearing was history. None of the Senators seem to really understand that history is not static but is constantly being refined as both the questions that are asked and the primary sources that are available allow a more comprehensiv e and accurate view of the past to emerge. The second witness was Edward Linenthal, Professor of Religion and American Culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and a member of the Advisory Committee on the Enola Gay Exhibit. In an eloquent and well reasoned statement, Linenthal testified to scholars' obligation to provide a comprehensive and balanced rendering of the past and discussed the tension that often occurs between the commemorative voice and the historical voice. He not only discusse d efforts to revise the script but also talked about how the media coverage of the issue had been "distressingly irresponsible," taking quotes out of context. Linenthal concluded by stating that "Unlike totalitarian countries, we never want to give fuel to the impulse to sanitize history, to turn away from engaging our past in all its complexity. . . . Surely we can find ways to both honor the commemorative voice and respect the historical voice as we continue to create public history exhibits designed to inspire and challenge."

In an exchange with Linenthal, Senator Feinstein said that she felt that the curators should put forth only the facts and not engage in interpretation, which she said was editorial comment. Linenthal responded that all history is interpretation because even wh en you put a story in narrative you are doing interpretation, selecting facts to put in a framework of meaning. Linenthal stressed the complexities of history, but it was clear that what the Senators wanted was an exhibit that would "make them feel good about America" and that "would not show victims of U.S. weapons." When Linenthal responded to a question by drawing on his knowledge of the development of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, he talked about how that museum had dealt with complexities and he noted that visitors see Americas as liberators but also they see evidence that prewar anti- Semitism kept Jewish immigrants from coming to America. Following this reference to the Holocaust Museum, Senator Cochran then asked Linenthal if he felt that w hat the guys who dropped the bomb did was equal to what the Nazis did in the death camps. Linenthal was clearly taken back by the question and said he would never dream of making that kind of comparison. Yet the question revealed the hostile tone that u nderlay the hearing.

The Senators were not only harsh in their questioning of I. Michael Heyman, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, and Tom Crouch, the Chairman of the Air and Space Museum's Department of Aeronautics, but they were also rude to Constance Newman, the Under Sec retary for the Smithsonian, who tried at several points to provide technical information about Smithsonian procedures. Stevens was, however, quite cordial to Maxine Singer of the Carnegie Institute and Chairman of the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian, who presented the findings of the Commission's final report.

H-Asia
Item number 714
Thu, 1 Jun 1995 08:57:08 -0400
H-ASIA: Enola Gay & Fascism

John Morris's reply to my observation that there are at least surface similarities between the arguments of fellow travelers of fascism like Prince Konoye and the explanation for Japanese behavior during World War II in the original version of the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit is more amusing than enlightening.

I think he is saying that there is something to that analogy, and that some Japanese (he calls them nasty revisionist leftists; I wouldn't) agree about the convergence of these two views. If the Japanese left can stand being in the same political bed as fanatical right wingers like me, I guess I can get used to it too.

I do, however, object to lumping in American right-wingers with contemporary Japanese "rightists." The latter are statists, favoring all sorts of intervention, both political and economic. The former are anti-interventionists. I suspect Professor Morris knows much more about the Japanese right than the American right. He should read a good biography of Grover Cleveland to find out what nice guys the latter are: principled anti-imperialists as well as opponents of all kinds of intervention in the market. Allen Nevins wrote a fine biography of Cleveland back in the '30s. Richard Welch did one almost as good in the '80s. In any event, I'm glad to see that the left and the right can agree on the mischief the original Smithsonian exhibit caused for those who favor honest history over political correctness.

Ed Kaplan (kaplan@henson.cc.wwu.EDU)

H-Asia
Item number 720
Thu, 1 Jun 1995 12:05:17 -0700
Re: Why bomb cities? -- remember politics

Observations on the interpretations of the atomic bombing of Japan (x-posted from H-URBAN--part of a longer thread on that list)

The technical discussion sparked by Richard Jensen's post has steered us away from the domestic socio-political dimensions of Allied bombing strategy, especially the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Japan. Even if there was convincing evidence that the A-bomb was unnecessary because of what we have learned subsequently concerning the military and political situation of Japan in August 1945, it is hard to conceptualize a scenario in which Truman could have avoided using the bomb.

Consider the counterfactual that the bomb is not used, Japan is invaded, and casualties are on the lower order that Barton Bernstein has defended. Imagine the domestic political consequences when the soldiers who were wounded and placed at risk, along with the families of the soldiers who are killed or wounded, as well as their neighbors, and aquaintences in the U.S., learned that an invasion with any level of casualties was not necessary.

Its also worth rembering that the same soldiers who would have been involved in an invasion were, in January 1946, engaged in a massive mutiny demanding immediate demobilization -- a protest that enjoyed broad public support in the U.S. Many of these GIs had been sent to the Pacific after winning the war in Europe, and had been in and out of combat situations for several years. Popular pressure to "bring the boys home," as the slogan went, probably meant that a prolonged blockade was politically unfeasible.

I think it is a no-win argument to suggest that the A-bomb was not necessary because an invasion of Japan would have succeded with far lower casualties than officially estimated by the military. It certainly didn't seem likely to the vast majority of Americans, at home and in the military, who had closely followed the brutal fighting on Okinawa. Placing such importance on lower casualty figures also implies that in an invasion of Japan, its was acceptable to have tens of thousands of Americans killed or wounded. I was not surprised to read that it was a dispute over casualty figures that finally ruptured the agreement between the Smithsonian and the American Legion over recasting the Enola Gay exhibit. Suggesting that the deaths of thousands of GIs was an acceptable alternative to dropping the bomb was the underlying issue, not a debate over which estimate was correct.

I also am dubious that an American invasion would have had resulted in fewer civilian casualties than were caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No doubt conventional air power would have been heavily deployed, with devastating consequences on the cities, and fighting on the Japanese mainland would have necessitated seizing and occupying cities, as in Europe.

It is a truism that war presents only bad options. I think Americans had a better handle on that in 1945 that we give them credit for. In _Miss You_, edited by Judy Barrett Litoff and David Smith, a soldier stationed in France wrote to his wife on August 9, 1945:

"What do you think of this new bomb? Wow, it really is a new and bad thing for the Jap, isn't it? I do hope it is kept in the right hands for even a little nation could surely harness the world with a destructive weapon as that."

I think that we are more concerned today with the prescient concern of this soldier which is contained in the third sentence. But in 1945, it was the significance of the first and second sentences that drove American policy. As we reflect on the devastation of World War II, we must keep these very different angles of vision in mind.

Dr. Roger Horowitz
Associate Director
Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society
Hagley Museum and Library
PO Box 3630
Wilmington DE 19807
rh@strauss.udel.edu

H-Asia
Item number 756
Thu, 8 Jun 1995 06:47:55 -0400
RE: Enola Gay & Fascism

There is a beautiful article on the difficulty of applying distinctions such as left and right to Japan - in the Meiji period journal Meiroku zasshi... It certainly is not a new problem.

A lot has been said about fascism in Japan; my favorite is still a record of an impromptu interview with Foreign Minister Matsuoka in 1940:

"...Four. Matsuoka said that he saw the present war coming six years ago. He began preaching a single party system for Japan but was a voice crying in the wilderness and people thought him crazy. Now the political parties in Japan are clamoring to have Konoye establish a single system. Not months but years will be needed to weld Japan into a totalitarian state, but Japanese totalitarianism will be unlike the European brand. It is contrary to the Japanese character to be coerced into adopting an idea. Concentration camps would be futile. The people would fight back. Fascism will develop in Japan through the people's will. It will come out of love for the Emperor but the people cannot be forced. It is because of the special system in Japan with the Emperor at the head that the Japanese state is better adapted than any other state to unify the nation in Fascism. The public demand for a single party system shows that the time is ripe. Five. It is clear from the circumstances of the interview that it was impromptu and not planned and that this revealing of Matsuoka's mind and philosophy is significant. ... Grew. [Cable addressed to Secretary of State, Washington. 606, July 21, 1940 5 p.m.]

Kurt W. Radtke, Leiden University, The Netherlands
RADTKE@rullet.LeidenUniv.NL

H-Asia
Item number 829
Tue, 20 Jun 1995 11:13:54 -0400
Enola Gay Exhibit

For those of you who followed the very long thread about the Enola Gay exhibit, there is a new development. A colleague just showed up with what I believe is the first academic overview of the controversy. It is in the May 1995 issue of the Radical Historians Newsletter. It is quite exhaustive and takes up the entire issue. I do not know if there is an e-mail version available but the issue lists an e-mail address of

obrienjm@umbsky.cc.umb.edu

for further information.

Steven A. Leibo
The Sage Colleges & Suny-Albany
Co-Moderator, H-ASIA
Leibo@ALBNYVMS.bitnet or leibos@sage.edu

H-Asia
Item number 906
Fri, 7 Jul 1995 14:14:34 -0700 Enola Gay Redux

Enola Gay Redux: Testimony for the Senate Rules Committee, 15 May, 1995

Ed. note:
The prolonged debate over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution has not slackened with the opening of the display. Louis Coatney's written testimony encapsulates one strongly held perspective on issues that emerged in this debate. With the author's agreement, this post has been shortened. The Historical Commission proposal was published on H-ASIA on May 10, 1995 (although with a May 9 date in the title. The opinions Mr. Coatney expressed are his own.
F.F.C.

Friends,

Here is the written testimony I submitted to Senator Ted Stevens' Rules Committee hearing on the Smithsonian. Just as Clemenceau (or Talleyrand) once said that war is too important to be left to generals, Americans seem to understand that history is too important to be left to scholars and bureaucrats (and academic bureaucrats?).

I look forward to your feedback(s).

Lou Coatney, mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
Macomb, IL.

May 15, 1995

Chair and Members
U.S. Senate Rules Committee
Russell Bldg, Rm 305
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Committee Members:

As an individual, longtime member of the World Wa II Studies Association--formerly the American Committee on the History of the Second World War--I was deeply concerned by the implications of the Smithsonian Institution's intended, distorted depiction of the Asian Pacific War and our dropping of the atom bombs. (For an excellent article on Hirohima and the historical battles about it, please see Penn State professor Robert J. Maddox's "The Bigges Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb," in the May-June 1995 issue of _American Heritage_.) The exhibit text's intimation that Japanese militarism was simply a reaction to the racism of European colonialism would have been utterly ludicrous, considering the even worse racism the Japanese aggressors exhibited toward the Chinese and other Asian peoples they were supposedly "liberating"--to say nothing of the ruthless sexism demonstrated by their enslavement of Asian and European "comfort women."

The Japanese' barbaric treatment of prisoners (and, on occasion, of their own would-be rescuers/captors) and their penchant for suicide established the savage, no-mercy tone of the entire war. Their Pearl Harbor "sneak attack," on a Sunday morning even while they were conducting peace negotiations in Washington, revealed a dimension of vicious- ness and treachery by the Japanese' governing militarists which earned the profound--if not permanent--rage an distrust of the American people and their leaders.

Travesties like the Smithsonian's intended omission of these essential facts are not only bad history: coming from a governmental agency, they have additional weight and credibility. A distortion of the motives for our use of the atom bombs by an "official" historian/agency, like this, can lead many Japanese people to consider themselves victims of the Allies rather than of their own militarists. This could relieve much of the Japanese people's postwar recrimination against militarism which has so far stifled any resurrection of that evil.

Unfortunately, this kind of "omissive history" is becoming all too typical of the historical profession in the United States. At the American Historical Associatio convention in Chicago in January, I stood up to challenge the "one-sided, hind-sighted, and all too `academic'" panel presentation on Hiroshima, chaired by Dartmouth professor Dr. Marty Sherwin. (The panel's presenters abetted variou "revisionist" claims: that the American people didn't support unconditional surrender, that a substantive Japanese peace overture had been made and was known to President Truman, that a primary reason the bombs were dropped was that their creators simply wanted to see if they worked--ergo, regardless of the human grief/consequences--etc.)

While "liberal" professors probably outnumber "conservative" in academia, they have generally respecte and encouraged a diversity of opinion in their classes, t judge by my own experience as a graduate student at Western Illinois University in Macomb. However, the new generation of historians taking over the profession exhibits far less perspective, balance, and tolerance, and "politically correct" history is proliferating throughout America education and bureaucracies. This cancer to truth will require decisive measures to monitor and remedy.

Even on a few of the Internet discussion groups for academic historians, I have seen (and experienced) editorial bias/censorship against conservative viewpoints, on occasion--despite the efforts of people (like "H-Net" organizer Richard Jensen of the University of Illinois, for example) to make sure issues like Hiroshima are being addressed in a balanced and tolerant manner. (The power of Internet is inestimable!, and it has moved the United States to the position of ultimate leadership of international academic/ intellectual life. Congress would do *well* to support it fully, as a public works institution, while making sure that the open and balanced freedom of ideas and expression is maintained.)

To AHA's credit, I was given fair opportunity to raise questions and participate from the floor. However, it is easy for some of the more extreme /outrageous "academic exercises" being held there to be given undue credence in the media, at home and abroad. Indeed, Dr. Sherwin has made trips to Japan, presumably to publicize and coordinate his Hiroshima "teach-ins" being held on campuses over here.

Not to AHA's credit, exasperation was expressed at our meeting of the World War II Studies Association--attended by such military history luminaries as Dr. Gerhard Weinberg and Marine Corps historian Ben Frank--about the contemptuous way our request for a "50th anniversary" military history panel (on amphibious warfare) was denied by the AHA. (The "unofficial" panel put on by the World War II Studies Association itself, then, was excellent--including presentations on Carlson's "Marine Raiders," Tarawa, and other topics.)

It is very easy for other countries and peoples to become confused and misled by the contradictory dialogues of our country's "open forum" approach to academic and political discourse and debate. Congress' passage of the prewar Draft by only one vote was a key factor which led Japanese militarists to believe that Americans wouldn't have the stomach to wage war in the Pacific and would capitulate to Japanese demands after a knockout blow at our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

This is why I have proposed an International Historical Commission on the Asian Pacific War. (Ed. note this item appeared on H-ASIA on May 10, 1995) It is important that Pacific nations achieve a final "official" resolution and reconciliation of the truth about that tragic war and its various issues. Japan is on the verge of strategic superpower status, and it is vital that the Japanese people understand that it is not just Americans who need them to acknowledge and forswear--in their educational programs, as well as the rest of their society--the evil of their World War II militarism. Any veto by Japan of the historical findings of this commission (or of the educational dissemination of those findings) should directly impact any consideration of Japan for U.N. Security Council status.

Thank you for your time and consideration of my concerns.

Respectfully,

Louis R. Coatney
mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu

H-Asia
Item number 931
Wed, 12 Jul 1995 13:43:50 -0700
Enola Gay Redux (cont.)

Further on Enola Gay exhibit testimony and a comment

1.)

I am pleased to report that I have just received Senate Hearing 104-40 -- THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION: MANAGEMENT GUIDELINES FOR THE FUTURE -- held 11 & 18 May 1995. This is princi- pally about the historical content of Smithsonian ("official history") displays and publications, in light of the controversy which exploded in reaction to the distorted depiction of the atom bombings initially intended by the Smithsonian for its exhibition of the "Enola Gay" B-29 bomber.

While written testimony by one Louis R. Coatney is included (pp. 120-23) -- and the various professional/intellectual sides are represented, to include Dartmouth prof Marty Sherwin's -- the most searing, substantive testimony is by Gen. Charles Sweeney, USAF (rtd.), who flew on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, commanding the latter.

One question: The "final" draft/edition of the Enola Gay exhibit transcript has been included, and it looks like everything veterans and moderate historians could ask for. Why was *that* draft then rejected?

1. Was it torpedoed by counter-objections from "revisionist" historians/intellectuals that the final draft had gone too far in the *other* direction?

2. Had such distrust of the Smithsonian -- generated by the original draft -- grown to the point that the public consensus was: "Just stick with the plane!"?

It is unfortunate that Dr. Harwit (of the Smithsonian) didn't provide the *original* draft -- that started all this -- as well.

What really has Congress and the American people concerned, of course, is that our historians -- our *official* historians, even -- could/CAN produce such a travesty ... unless they/we are "monitored."

Lou Coatney, mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu

2.)

With reference to the posting of July 7:

Lou Coatney's remarks about how we perceive history, regarding both WW II and human history as a whole, are pointed and seldom more relevant. In the realm of knowledge and understanding that he describes, the relationship between accomplished events, our understanding of them, future events, and basic morality may start to become clear. He brings us a combination of moral and intellectual passion too often absent.

Around the globe today, we see conflicts that were old before Columbus was born. Yet they continue to generate pain, like a sum invested centuries ago, compounding interest. Is there a process of atonement and forgiveness that can let us move on? Traditionally, true forgiveness is made possible only by sincere and explicit repentence and atonement - NOT abject humiliation or guilt-wallowing. And when true atonement has been made, the aggrieved MUST forgive. Justice and healing take place in this world. How much vengence takes place because we have lacked justice and healing?

Thanks, Lou!

Charlie Stevenson
Reston, Virginia
Mendosan@aol.com Wed

H-Asia
Item number 943
Fri, 14 Jul 1995 10:03:50 -0700
Re: Enola Gay Redux

Further comment on the Enola Gay exhibition controversy

Louis Coatney's criticism of the aborted Enola Gay exhibit is fairly typical of those who charge that it was an apology for Japanese aggression. Because the exhibit was cancelled, it will be hard for us to judge it ourselves. But there is considerable evidence that the draft was much more balanced than its critics contended, and much of the criticism distorted it or took parts out of context.

One egregious example was George Will, who claimed that the exhibit portrayed the Japanese war aim as "to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." (I don't have the column readily available - it appeared sometime last spring.) The full sentence and the sentence before it actually read: "For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy - it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Japanese imperialism." In other words, the opinion Will attributed to the Smithsonian was actually the opinion of "most Japanese" between 1941 and 1945. Will's distortion of the text is careless, misinformed, or intellectually dishonest - perhaps all three.

This misrepresentation, I'm afraid, is fairly typical of the way the media covered the Enola Gay exhibit. The exhibit does not seem in any way to have been an apology for Japanese aggression nor a condemnation of the war aims of United States. It does raise legitimate questions about the use of the atomic bombs, in a way that violates the norms of what you might call patriotic correctness.

Michael Wallace, a historian at John Jay College (CUNY), has written an excellent examination of the controversy It will be published in his book, _Mickey Mouse History_ (Temple University Press, forthcoming, 1996). An earlier draft of his analysis of this problem is, "The Battle of the Enola Gay," appeared in _Radical Historians Newsletter_ (P. O. Box 632, North Cambridge, MA 02140), no. 72 (May 1995).

Robert Entenmann
St. Olaf College
entenman@stolaf.edu

H-Asia
Item number 950
Sat, 15 Jul 1995 14:43:04 -0700
Re: Enola Gay exhibit-an another perspective

The following is a letter to Michael Heyman, Secretary to the Smithsonian Institution: (please see note at the conclusion regarding co-signing)

Mr. I. Michael Heyman
Secretary
The Smithsonian
Washington, D.C. 20560

Dear Secretary Heyman,

Testifying before a House subcommittee on March 10, 1995, you promised that when you finally unveiled the Enola Gay exhibit, "I am just going to report the facts."[1]

Unfortunately, the Enola Gay exhibit contains a text which goes far beyond the facts. The critical label at the heart of the exhibit makes the following assertions:

* The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "destroyed much of the two cities and caused many tens of thousands of deaths." This substantially understates the widely accepted figure that at least 200,000 men, women and children were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Official Japanese records calculate a figure of more than 200,000 deaths--the vast majority of victims being women, children and elderly men.)[2]

* "However," claims the Smithsonian, "the use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." Presented as fact, this sentence is actually a highly contentious interpretation. For example, an April 30, 1946 study by the War Department's Military Intelligence Division concluded, "The war would almost certainly have terminated when Russia entered the war against Japan."[3] (The Soviet entry into the war on August 8th is not even mentioned in the exhibit as a major factor in the Japanese surrender.) And it is also a fact that even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated, the Japanese still insisted that Emperor Hirohito be allowed to remain emperor as a condition of surrender. Only when that assurance was given did the Japanese agree to surrender. This was precisely the clarification of surrender terms that many of Truman's own top advisors had urged on him in the months prior to Hiroshima. This, too, is a widely known fact.[4]

* The Smithsonian's label also takes the highly partisan view that, "It was thought highly unlikely that Japan, while in a very weakened military condition, would have surrendered unconditionally without such an invasion." Nowhere in the exhibit is this interpretation balanced by other views. Visitors to the exhibit will not learn that many U.S. leaders--including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower[5], Admiral William D. Leahy[6], War Secretary Henry L. Stimson[7], Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew[8] and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy[9]-- thought it highly probably that the Japanese would surrender well before the earliest possible invasion, scheduled for November 1945. It is spurious to assert as fact that obliterating Hiroshima in August obviated the need for an invasion in November. This is interpretation--the very thing you said would be banned from the exhibit.

* In yet another label, the Smithsonian asserts as fact that "Special leaflets were then dropped on Japanese cities three days before a bombing raid to warn civilians to evacuate." The very next sentence refers to the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, inferring that the civilian inhabitants of Hiroshima were given a warning. In fact, no evidence has ever been uncovered that leaflets--warning of either conventional or atomic attack--were dropped on Hiroshima. Indeed, the decision of the Interim Committee was "that we could not give the Japanese any warning."[10]

* In a 16 minute video film in which the crew of the Enola Gay are allowed to speak at length about why they believe the atomic bombings were justified, pilot Col. Paul Tibbits asserts that Hiroshima was "definitely a military objective." No where in the exhibit is this false assertion balanced by contrary information. Hiroshima was chosen as a target precisely because it had been very low on the previous spring's campaign of conventional bombing, and therefore was a pristine target on which to measure the destructive powers of the atomic bomb.[11] Defining Hiroshima as a "military" target is analogous to calling San Francisco a "military" target because it has a port and contains the Presidio. James Conant, a member of the Interim Committee that advised President Truman, defined the target for the bomb as a "vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses."[12] There were indeed military factories in Hiroshima, but they lay on the outskirts of the city. Nevertheless, the Enola Gay bombardier's instructions were to target the bomb on the center of this civilian city.

The few words in the exhibit that attempt to provide some historical context for viewing the Enola Gay amount to a highly unbalanced and one-sided presentation of a largely discredited post-war justification of the atomic bombings.

Such errors of fact and such tendentious interpretation in the exhibit are no doubt partly the result of your decision earlier this year to take this exhibit out of the hands of professional curators and your own board of historical advisors. Accepting your stated concerns for accuracy, we trust that you will therefore adjust the exhibit, either to eliminate the highly contentious interpretations, or at the very least, balance them with other interpretations that can be easily drawn from the attached footnotes.

Sincerely,

Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin,
For the Historians' Committee for
Open Debate on Hiroshima
kai@igc.apc.org
Martin.Sherwin@Dartmouth.Edu

References

1. "Enola Gay Exhibit to 'Report the Facts,'" _Washington Times_, March 11, 1995.

2. _Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings_, (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 364.

3. "Memorandum for Chief, Strategic Policy Section, S&P Group, OPD, Subject: Use of the Atomic Bomb on Japan," April 30, 1946, ABC 471.6 Atom (17 August 1945) Sec 7, Entry 421, Record Group 165, National Archives.

4. Joseph C. Grew, _Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years 1904-1945_, Vol. II (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952), pp. 1406-1442; U.S. "Strategic Bombing Survey, Japan's Struggle to End the War" (Washington, July 1946); Gar Alperovitz, "Hiroshima: Historians Reassess," _Foreign Policy_, Summer 1995, pp. 15-34; and, Martin Sherwin, _A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race_ (New York, Random House, 1987), p. 225.

5. See "Notes on talk with President Eisenhower," April 6, 1960, War Department Notes envelope, Box 66, Herbert Feis Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; and, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, "Memorandum of Conference with the President, April 6, 1960," April 11, 1960, "Staff Notes--April 1960," Folder 2, DDE Diary Series, Box 49, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library; and also, Dwight D. Eisenhower, _Mandate for Change, 1953-1956_ (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.), pp. 312-313.

6. William D. Leahy, _I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time_ (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1950), p. 441. See also his private diary (in particular the June 18, 1945 entry) available at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

7. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, _On Active Service in Peace and War_ (New York: Harper & Brothers,1948), pp. 628-629.

8. Grew, _Turbulent Era_, pp. 1406-1442; Sherwin, _World Destroyed_, p. 225.

9. See John J. McCloy interview with Fred Freed for NBC White Paper, "The Decision to Drop the Bomb," (interview conducted sometime between May 1964 and February 1965), Roll 1, p. 11, File 50A, Box SP2, McCloy Papers, Amherst College Archives.

10. Sherwin, _World Destroyed_, Appendix L, "Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, May 31, 1945," p. 302.

11. The papers of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, are filled with his statements to the effect that he wanted a virgin target large enough so that the effects of the bomb would not dissipate by the time they reached the edge of the city. See for example the letter from Groves to John A. Shane, 12/27/60 on target selection, in the Groves Papers, Record Group 200, National Archives. See also, Sherwin, _World Destroyed_, pp. 229-230.

12. Sherwin, _World Destroyed_, Appendix L, "Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, May 31, 1945," p. 302.

----
Numerous Japan scholars have asked to be included in our activities. Members of the H-ASIA list who wish to join as co-signators to the above letter (with attached notes) to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Michael Heyman, are invited to e-mail or FAX Martin Sherwin or Kai Bird immediately. Indicate if you wish to sign the letter AND indicate if you also wish to add your name as a supporter of The Historians' Committee for Open Debate on Hiroshima. E-mail and FAX addresses appear at the end of the letter under Bird's and Sherwin's signatures.

H-Asia
Item number 952
Sat, 15 Jul 1995 14:56:06 -0700
H-ASIA: Re: Enola Gay Redux

Another suggested reading on the Enola Gay/Hiroshima debate

One of the most provocative perspectives on this mess can be found in Richard Minear's "Atomic Holocaust, Nazi Holocaust: Some Reflections" in _Diplomatic History_ 19,2 (Spring 1995), 347-365.

I would strongly suggest that once begun it be read in its entirety in order to give Minear (who has paid his dues in this field) a fair hearing whether or not one ends by agreeing with him.

Byron Marshall
Dept of History, Univ of Minnesota
267-19th Ave South,
Minneapolis, MN, 55455
marsh004@maroon.tc.umn.edu

H-Asia
Item number 964
Tue, 18 Jul 1995 10:38:01 -0700
Enola Gay/ Obtaining Senate Reports query

How to obtain the reports from the U. S. Senate hearings: Enola Gay

Can anyone (Louis Coatney or otherwise) tell me how I might acquire a copy of _Senate Hearing_ 104-40 _The Smithsonian Institution: Management Guidelines for the Future_ ?

I appreciate your help in this matter.

Yours sincerely,

John Morris
Dept of Intercultural Studies,
Miyagi Gakuin, Sendai, Japan
F26461@sinet.ad.jp

P.S. If it is not obvious from the e-mail address, I am located in Japan and am not a U.S. taxpayer. Will this affect my accessibility to info.?

H-Asia
Item number 981
Wed, 19 Jul 1995 11:00:57 -0700
Enola Gay Redux

Enola Gay--the "Script 1" and its content

In his post of July 14 Robert Entenmann commented:

Louis Coatney's criticism of the aborted Enola Gay exhibit is fairly typical of those who charge that it was an apology for Japanese available - it appeared sometime last spring.) The full sentence and the sentence before it actually read: "For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy - it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Japanese imperialism."

According to the hearing, Robert, that read " ... defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." However, "Western" imperialism is/was an East/West Cold War -- postwar -- term: completely anachronistic. No wonder suspicions and accusations were raised about a leftwing undertone in the script!

I've checked (statewide Illinois library) book titles prior to 1946, and "European imperialism" would have been much more appropriate. There was also mention of *Japanese* imperialism and something called the "Tanaka Document"??

In other words, the opinion [George] Will attributed to the Smithsonian was actually the opinion of "most Japanese" between 1941 and 1945. Will's distortion of the text is careless, misinformed, or intellectually dishonest - perhaps all three.

No. The Smithsonian's statement is historically false in *any* context and fully deserving of criticism/censure by George Will or anyone else. For the following reasons, I find it hard to believe professional historians could think otherwise:

Vengeance in Europe certainly *was* a motivating factor for European Allies -- who had no qualms about mass-bombing the Germans -- and even for Americans, once we started discovering the concentration camps. The postwar reprisals against German civilians in many non-German countries were as hideous as those against Japanese colonialists in Manchuria, etc., by the local populations.

However, the overriding motive for Americans was the same old desire to "make the world safe for democracy" we had fought for in WWI, "the war to end all wars." *This* time, we were resolved to *destroy* militarism, once and for all time, and that is why we held out for "unconditional surrender." FDR talked about our crusade for the "four freedoms" (of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear). The Atlantic Charter further specified *positive* goals. The creation of the United Nations was another positive step. "Never again!" was the basic theme, but that declarative/imperative came after the war.

To be sure, revenge was *one* American motive, particularly for servicemen. Halsey's "Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill More Japs!" exhortation was the Patton-like inspiration needed for troops fighting an inhumanly ruthless enemy in abominable climates and conditions. However, the Smithsonian statement only shows the Allied *peoples* as being vindictive and vengeful. That is unfair and untruthful by omission. On Saipan, for example, GIs did everything they could -- in the midst of battle -- to try to dissuade Japanese families from committing suicide. Similarly, our occupation of Japan astonished the Japanese with our *lack* of vengeance and atrocities which accompanied Soviet occupation of Germany, for example.

****

But the statement that for most Japanese the war was to defend "the unique Japanese culture from Western imperialism," is downright ludicrous. It should also be remembered that America under Roosevelt was pushing DE-colonialization. That is one reason the Filipinos fought the Japanese so hard and were so loyal to us (non-Asians): The Phillipines was fighting for its *independence* which we had promised the the Filipinos, and they were not *about* to let the Japanese RE-conquer them! Americans were *not* practicing "imperialism," an impression which the unqualified Smithsonian statement leaves uncontested.

That propaganda line of the Imperial Japanese militarists *may* have been believed by many Japanese people and a very few "true believers" in the hierarchy, but it was obviously false, even then. Before the war, the Allies had been no aggressive threat to the *Japanese*, even in the minds of many Japanese people. It was the *Japanese* who were the aggressors, and Asians are concerned about the Japanese inability to admit that, to this day.

The Imperial Japanese militarists, on the other hand, treated their fellow Asians with racist contempt. The 2 Sep 85 _Beijing Daily_ had an article about "The Rape of Nanking" and the ongoing attempt by various elements in Japan to ignore and/or stonewall guilt for that atrocity, which was just one of many. The Japanese contempt for *Chinese* society and culture goes unnoticed in the Smithsonian sentence under discussion.

The article describes how Japanese newspapers featured the beheading (of Chinese prisoners) competitions held between Japanese soldiers. The Japanese people could hardly have been unaware of their Army's abuse and subjugation of the Chinese people. Certainly, Japanese atrocities were being well-covered in the Euro-American press. Even German diplomats on the scene remonstrated with the Japanese commanders ... at least about their indiscretion.

In _Japan at War_ by the Cooks, a basic motive for the war on the part of the Japanese people was apparently simple economic prosperity, brought on by the seizure of natural resources from conquests and the war economy. The machinist interviewed explained that Americans were admired and even liked by most Japanese, before the war. Indeed, machinists had to know how to speak English, so they could read the blueprints and instructions of the machine tools they had been given to use! See also Studs Terkel's _The Good War_.

The Japanese military-industrial complex was not supporting the war for *cultural* reasons, and the war caused fundamental upheaval in Japanese society and morals. "What was good for Mitsubishi was good for Japan!", to paraphrase.

I guess the best way of pointing out the absurdity and bias of the Smithsonian's "Script 1" unqualified depiction of war motives is to see how something like it about the *European* theater would read (hypothetically speaking):

"For the Americans, this was fundamentally a war of vengeance. For most Germans, it was a war to defend European civilization against Jewish-spawned Bolshevism."

That would be just as shallow -- and *offensive* -- as is the Smithsonian's depiction of war motives in the Pacific, for those of us who understand the truth and issues at stake.

I do hope pre-Christian Viking history is treated in fuller context and with greater fairness at "St. Olaf," than it looks like it might be at the Smithsonian (without careful public scrutiny), Robert. :-)

Lou Coatney, mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu

Ed. note:
Because of confusion arising in another posting over the use of the icon :-) , let me explain to those readers who do not recognize it, that it is a symbol of a smile--a joke. To those who know and use such symbols this will seem pedantic, but since many hnet users to not know about such symbolic expression, this may offer clarification.

The two titles referred to above are:

Cook, Haruko Taya and Theodore Failor Cook, _Japan at war: an oral

history_ (New York : New Press, 1992) ISBN: 1565840143

Terkel, Studs, _"The good war" : an oral history of World War Two_

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)ISBN: 0394531035

H-Asia
Item number 988
Wed, 19 Jul 1995 19:37:52 -0700
Enola Gay Redux

Enola Gay Redux: further comment on Enola Gay Scripts

I apologize for my slip of the pen (or keyboard) - the quotation from the first draft of the Smithsonian text said "For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western [not, of course, Japanese] imperialism." My point was that by leaving out the important clause, "for most Japanese," George Will and others, through carelessness or worse, implied that the Smithsonian exhibit defended Japan's aims - when this quotation clearly attributes this perception to Japanese between 1941 and 1945.

That this perception was wrong I don't dispute, but it doesn't mean that the Smithsonian shouldn't report that perception. (Professor Coatney suggests that it would be offensive to report that many Germans believed in a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. Reporting that such a belief existed does not validate that belief, and I think it's hard to understand the Nazi period without knowing what the Nazis believed in.) And there was nothing wrong with the Smithsonian regarding vengeance as a motive in the war against Japan. Japan, after all, did deserve our vengeance.

I certainly don't disagree with Louis Coatney's account of Japanese behavior in the war (except for the reference to the Tanaka Memorial - its authenticity is widely challenged and most scholars regard it a forgery). But I still maintain that the Smithsonian exhibit has been seriously misrepresented, and George Will's column is an excellent example.

Finally, since Professor Coatney brings this up, I'm relieved that even at St. Olaf College we don't have to justify the behavior of the Vikings, even St. Olaf (who earned his sainthood by Christianizing Norway - by torturing or killing those who didn't convert). Nobody says much about St. Olaf here.

Robert Entenmann
St. Olaf College
entenman@stolaf.edu

H-Asia
Item number 992
Thu, 20 Jul 1995 12:23:45 -0700
Re: Enola Gay Redux (2)

Enola Gay Redux: two further comments

1.)

One more Enola Gay message: there's a very good article about the way the media mishandled the Smithsonian controversy:

Tony Capaccio and Uday Mohan, "Missing the Target,"
_American Journalism Review,_ July/August 1995, pp. 18-26.

Robert Entenmann
St. Olaf College
entenman@stolaf.edu

2.)

I too am surprised by those who take exception to the Smithsonian's statement that most Japanese saw the war as one of defending their unique culture against Western imperialism (though many of them might have used the term white imperialism). It seems to be perfectly obvious to anyone who's read anything about Japan in the thirties that this was true. Call the view misguided, call it wicked, call it a transparent justification for Japanese imperialism, call it anything you like, but it's still there. And many of the economic reasons so often advanced by Japan for her invasion of China and later invasions of Southeast Asia, grew from this; Japan was, by her own estimation, a "proletarian country," lacking in natural resources, lacking the kind of huge domestic market that the US or the USSR might have, and therefore in the face of rising western tariffs against Japanese exports, she had no alternative (so the argument went) but to expand. All this was set forth very clearly by a Japanese foreign ministry official to Sir George Sansom, who was in those days commercial counselor at the British embassy in Tokyo. And Tokyo's later argument that she came as a liberator to China and to colonial S.E. Asia from the toils of white western imperialism did not go entirely unappreciated in that part of the world (particularly in the beginning, when Japan was still winning most of the battles!)

The Smithsonian exhibit may have been tendentious, one-sided, etc. etc. -- I don't know, because i haven't seen the text -- but on this particular issue it seems to me they were dead right. Once again the obvious point: to state that such and such a view belongs to X does not necessarily mean endorsing it.

Nick Clifford
Middelbury College
clifford@middlebury.edu

H-Asia
Item number 1005
Fri, 21 Jul 1995 15:15:15 -0700
Re: Enola Gay Redux

Enola Gay Redux: further comment

I do not understand what Nick Clifford is trying to say. The devil can quote scripture. Victims are always co-opted by the victimizer. How about a history of the American west in the 19th century introduced as: The Europeans believed they were doing god's work; the native tribes were motivated by revenge. That might be OK if lots of space were then devoted to why they sought revenge.

But if your view is that Asian peoples welcomed Japan, then you can't do that. Did the Smithsonian highlight Japan's inhumanity in Korea and China, everything from gang rape coerced prostitution of many thousands of young girls to the Nanjing massacre? More important, if the goal was to show the bombinbg of Hiroshima as a crime against humanity, which it was and which the world of war is replete with, did it explain it thru American vengeance or did it show how, perhaps starting with the Japanese bombing of civilians in Chinese cities, the restraints against the mass murder of non-combatant civilians disappeared? Was it inherently impossible to celebrate victory over fascist militarist aggression and take on the issue of the dangers and horrors of nuclear war? How much was changed by the last script? These are serious issues. There is something to be said for and against all the sides in this debate. But what I want to come out of it is integrity for public history. I fear that is not happening.

Ed Friedman
University of Wisconsin at Madison
FRIEDMAN@polisci.wisc.edu

H-Asia
Item number 1008
Sat, 22 Jul 1995 03:58:53 -0700
Re: Japanese historians on the War and the Smithsonian

I have been reading in silence the Enola Gay threads for some time now, vowing not to enter the fray, but after reading repeated charges from Louis Coatney about the sins of historians who according to him conduct "irresponsible and/or *fallacious* 'debate'/revisionism" I feel compelled to take the bait and put in my two cents worth.

First of all, I am amazed by the unquestioned certainty with which Mr. Coatney holds his opinions/knowledge--as if for any historical issue there is THE answer and THE Truth. The kinds of questions that so-called revisionists have raised surrounding the issue of the atomic bombings--often based on new documents or valid re-contextualizations of old ones--are the bread and butter of the professional practice of history. I find nothing "irresponsible" or "fallacious" about arguments that have been presented although some arguments are more persuasive than others. All are interesting.

It seems as if Mr. Coatney would rather have censorship over _any_ kind of debate. That--like the stripping of the Enola Gay exhibit--I find intellectually troubling, but perhaps it is emotion more than intellect that we are dealing with in Mr. Coatney's case since he has displayed himself to be so fanatical in his attacks and self-righteous diatribes (replete with extreme and hyper-emphasized words). I really don't know what to make of it all--perhaps making nothing of it is the best way to go. I certainly hope that he doesn't take it upon himself to "correct" the views that Japanese colleagues have received about the historical consensus that has indeed been emerging among responsible professional historians on this issue (despite Mr. Coatney's own personal disagreements with that consensus). That would constitute misleading them. I appreciate Mr. Coatney's forwarding of the Japanese "Declaration of Support" but it would have been better without his self-serving commentary.

Finally, I am currently using _A World Destroyed_ in a course on the bomb right now and students have found it compelling. We will soon be reading essays from the latest issue of _Diplomatic History_ which I think give a good overview of latest scholarship, as well as Mike Wallace's piece "The Battle of the Enola Gay" which I recommend as the best overall discussion and contextualiztion of exhibit debacle to date. And, as we have examined the Enola Gay controversy, students have been unanimous in their support (unsolicited) of recent protests that Sherwin and Bird have lodged against the current exhibit. This is more than enough netting about the issue from me; it's back to the classroom where it really counts....

gerald figal
lewis & clark college
(japanese history)
figal@lclark.edu

Ed. note:
Citations on several items noted in the above text:

1. _Diplomatic History_ Vol. 19 No. 2 (Spring, 1995) is a special issue entitled "Hiroshima in History and Memory: A Symposium". The articles by Barton Bernstein, John Dower, Paul Boyer, and J. Samuel Walker are particularly pertinent to the on-going discussions about the bomb.

2. The article by Mike Wallace (of John Jay College--CUNY) is in _Radical Historians Newsletter_ Number 72 (May 1995).

F.F.C.

H-Asia
Item number 1119
Fri, 11 Aug 1995 22:27:52 -0400 Hiroshima & Revisionism

1.)

RE: H-ASIA: A&E/"History Channel" A-Bomb programs

I really wish Mr. Coatney would finally put to rest his fallacious distinction between "objective treatments" of a-bomb history and "revisionist" treatments. It assumes (wrongly, in my opinion) that there is ever a value-free "objective" position in doing history and implies that "revisionist" is a bad word that is synonomous with "bad history". All history that is written (even his beloved pseudo-objectivist) is revision in some sense and carries with it implicit or explicit position(s); none are "objective" in the sense that he implies (objective = neutral = balanced = fair = true = good). Not to recognize this aspect of historiography is to believe naively in the notion that there lies "out there" in the past some preformed, pre-written and only waiting to be "uncovered" static History qua Truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even my undergraduate students recognized the bias (and generally poor and historically simplistic quality) of the CBS program (written by Dan Rather) and judged that they gained much more intellectually from the ABC program (hosted but not written solely by Peter Jennings; Sherry Jones and Elizabeth Sams seem to have been the primary researchers/writers). If you want your students to confront the issues and get them thinking about history *and* historiography, the ABC program is far superior for major network offering.

gerald figal
lewis & clark college
figal@lclark.EDU

2)

RE: "Revisionism"

From: James Andrew Millward (us011151@interramp.COM)

In recent discussion of the atomic bomb and Japan I have been startled to see the word "revisionist" applied in a negative sense to historians who, on the basis of new research and/or re-interpretation, have questioned received wisdom relating to the dropping of the bombs in August 1945. This use of the word as invective seems to have became increasingly common in political rhetoric and journalistic accounts over the past couple years, especially with regard to the Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay and the World History Standards. It's even shown up on TV commercials. Now I find it slung about on H-Asia.

James,

You have made a good point. There is *some* history -- such as what has become the conventional history of the Vietnam War -- that badly *needs* revision. In some of my posts and articles, though, I have maintained that the "Hiroshima revisionists" are giving revisionism a bad name and might be better described as "distortionists," considering the weaknesses of their evidence and/or weighting of it.

"Distortionists" tends to make editors nervous, though. :-)

Lou Coatney, mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu

3)

RE: Absence of NONrevisionist historians on programs

From: Mark Lincicome (lincicome@holycross.edu)

Supplement to Louis Coatney's commentary on "History Channel" A-Bomb programs / self-introduction

Those of you who, after reading Louis Coatney's remarks on the program "Rain of Ruin" narrated by Roger Mudd, wish to track down a copy for your video library should not confuse it with another program that carries the same title. "Rain of Ruin: The Bombing of Nagasaki" aired, appropriately enough, last evening (August 9) on PBS. It was produced by Oregon Public Television and is narrated by actress Linda Gates. As the title implies,

SNIP!

why *they* think the second bomb was dropped and who is to blame. Third, it juxtaposes interviews with Gar Alperovitz and Martin Sherwin regarding the American administration's alleged preoccupation with the Soviet Union, with remarks by members of the crew of the Bock's Car about the relief that every GI felt that an invasion of Japan had been avoided in the wake of the A-Bombs. For anyone interested in *this* "Rain of Ruin" film on the Nagasaki bombing, it can be ordered by calling 1-800-440-2651: the cost is $39.95 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.

This reminds me of another basic criticism of these programs. Veterans vs. historians is an inherent mismatch, especially when there are a number of qualified historians--like Robert Maddox, Stanley Weintraub, Polmar/Allen, Gerhard Weinberg--to take the side opposing Alperovitz, Sherwin, et al ... *IF* they are given the time/opportunity to do so.

In the second "History Channel" program, they had veterans representing both sides of the necessity-for-the-atom-bombs debate, but not historians. (At least Maddox was included in the ABC program. Whether or not he was given equal *time* is another, important question, though.)

WHY not? What good is "open debate" -- supposedly being espoused by Sherwin et al -- if it isn't *balanced* debate?

Lou Coatney, (mslrc@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu)

H-Asia
Item number 1128
Mon, 14 Aug 1995 09:51:14 -0400
Hiroshima & Revisionism

1)

RE: H-ASIA: Hiroshima & Revisionism

My response to Susanna Fessler's defense of "objective truth" in "history" rests principally on what appears to be our different notions of what history is. I take "history" to refer to the product of historians' work--that is, historiography, the writing of history--while distinguishing that from "history" taken in the commonplace usage of the word to refer to "the past". Keith Jenkins in his slim volume _Rethinking History_ presents this distinction (as well as that between "evidence" and "materials" and the whole objectivist/relativist debate) very well. From this starting point I would continue by fully agreeing with Susanna Fessler that there are events of the past (such as the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that we all can agree took place, but I would insist that the mere chronicling of such events is not history (the product of historians' work). I was trained to believe that historians deal with the whys and wherefores of past events--to explain and interpret how and why certain things happened as they did and to draw possible connections that map forces of change, etc. It's not enough simply to chronicle "objective truths" such as the detonation of the atomic bombs and I doubt that any serious historian of any methodological persuasion would limit their work to that. That would be very dull (if not impossible to adhere to fully). So, given that, it seems to me that one begins doing history by asking explicitly or implicitly interpretive questions of the available materials (archival texts as well as previous scholarship, etc), which in turn are transformed into "evidence" to support an argument. In all of this process "positions" that are certainly not "objective" abound. That's an unavoidable fact of writing history.

In summary, I'd say to Fessler: sure, there are things that happened in the past which we can know with great if not total certainty, but the second one starts to ask how and why those things happened--in other words, when one starts asking historical questions and doing history--we enter contested territory and "can't know anything for sure" although consensus judgments may rise (and fall) among historians. So, I stand by my statement that "All history ... is revision in some sense and carries with it implicit or explicit position(s); none are 'objective' in the sense that Mr. Coatney implies...". Fessler, I would suggest, misreads what is "at the heart of this statement" by misreading what "history" means within it, or quite possibly by failing to distinguish between mere chronicling and history-writing.

As far as my judgment of Jennings over Rather goes I never meant to suggest that Rather was biased and Jennings was not (and therefore Jennings was "good"). They both had their positions. My criteria for judging one better than the other was not based on one being more "objective" (and therefore "good"). Far from it. I judged Jennings' program as being better at raising historical questions and provoking historical thinking surrounding Hiroshima and the bomb. On that count it is a better teaching tool. That doesn't at all imply that I "ultimately know what really happened". It's clear to me that Fessler's reaction to my position on "objective history" and my judgment about the TV programs come from a rather narrow view of historical knowledge, its processes of production, and its purpose or value. I would recommend Jenkins' _Rethinking History_ to anyone who would like to know where I'm coming from (and then you can condemn or praise as you see fit).

gerald figal
lewis & clark college
figal@lclark.EDU

2)

Re Japanese News on WEB / Emperor's Role

During the recent increase in attention to the late Pacific war, I have become confused about an important issue, and seek factual information (in Eigo).

In school, I was always taught (by American teachers using American texts, in international schools in Japan) that the Emperor had been opposed to war from the start, and that he was basically used as a puppet by the militarists. Custom and circumstance were such that the Emperor could not express his concern directly to his people, or to the world. Therefore, he could not take personal culpability for the war - indeed, from time to time during this period he pressed, however gently, for peace among the circle of warlords.

Over a span of seven years I attended five schools in Japan, ranging from an Air Force middle school to ICU, and not once did I hear anything that deviates from this picture. Does anyone have any information here?

Charlie Stevenson, SJC Yokohama '65
Reston, Virginia
IN%"Mendosan@aol.COM

3)

Factoids & Facts

I've been unable to pin down the origins of the "factoid" that Marilyn Young has inquired of, one that has allowed some to rest more easily over this half century in the belief that U.S. planes showered Hiroshima with warning leaflets prior to the bomb. But two matters of fact suggest possible origins.

First, the U.S. did indeed massively leaflet many cities--but not the four reserved for the atomic bomb--in the course of firebombing Japan's cities between February and August, 1945. Throughout July 1945, U.S. planes blanketed dozens of Japanese cities with an "Appeal to the People." "As you know," it read, "America which stands for humanity, does not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities." Half of the leafletted cities were firebombed within days of the leaflets. . . but the atomic targets were not among those that received the warning.

Second, the Nagasaki hibakusha and novelist HAYASHI Kyoko records the fact that a device dropped over Nagasaki to record the force of the blast contained a letter calling on Japan to surrender. It was addressed to Prof. R. Sagane of Tokyo University and signed by three fellow scientists with whom he had earlier studied in the United States. The letter read in part "We are sending this as a personal message to urge that you use your influence as a reputable nuclear physicist to convince the Japanese General Staff of the terrible consequences which will be suffered by your people if you continue in this war. . . .As scientists, we deplore the use of which a beautiful discovery has been put, but we can assure you that unless Japan surrenders at once, this rain of atomic bombs will increase manyfold in fury." Hayashi read the letter at an "Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atom Bomb Exhibit." (Her story "Ritual of Death" is translated by Kyoko Selden in Nuke-Rebuke. Writers and Artists Against Nuclear Energy and Weapons (Iowa City: Spirit That Moves Us Press, 1984).

In Australia during the last two weeks, I had occasion to reflect on the issues of the war and public memory from a slightly different perspective. In contrast to the U.S., where scholarly and independent voices had virtually no access to the press (could the Peter Jennings special on the Enola Gay exhibit constituting an important exception mark the beginning of a reaction to the attempt to silence all critical opinion?), the Australian press and radio were filled with quality broadcasts and discussion airing quite diverse perspectives on the still sensitive issues of the war, even (if briefly) extending the opportunity to discuss the issues to Japanese commentators. Perhaps most impressive was a 12-page V-J Day special supplement of the Weekend Australian of August 12-13, that will also be available for use in the schools. Its contributors included a number of outstanding American and Australian social scientists including Herbert Bix, John Dower, Gavan McCormack, Hank Nelson and Yoshio Sugimoto as well as half a dozen prominent Australian journalists with informative coverage ranging from the celebratory to the probing. [The Australian, by the way, is Rupert Murdoch's flagship newspaper.] It is difficult to imagine any American mass media providing comparable high level discussion and wideranging informed opinion. The gap between scholarly opinion and the version of history conveyed by the media with respect to nuclear bombing and the end of the war appears to be wide and growing in the United States.

mark selden
ms44@cornell.edu

H-Asia
Item number 1159
Sat, 19 Aug 1995 12:56:32 -0400
H-ASIA: Enola Gay Exhib. in Context

The following information may help to contextualize the events surrounding the planned exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian Institution is one of the largest museum complexes in the world; the Air and Science Museum, the site of the planned display of the Enola Gay, is said to be the best attended of all of its affiliate museums. Unlike the Freer Gallery of Art or the adjacent Sackler Galleries, both of which specialize in Asian Art, the Air and Science Museum specializes in exhibits of technology, including the weapons of war. Thus, one can anticipate massive attendance from a broadly diverse client base that has a special interest in technology, including military rockets and aircraft. The potential appeal to veterans groups is self evident. The Smithsonian is a federally funded institution, perhaps the only museum complex in the United states that must depend on the federal government for its basic operating budget. In the past, the directors of the various museums within the system had to testify before congress for the funding of their individual units. Irrespective of the details of current budgetary practices, the central point is that the Smithsonian system is unique among public museums in its dependence on the federal government for its basic appropriation and each wing of the system is also subject to these restrictions. It is not likely that one could camouflage the funding of any individual unit within the broader system and certainly not the Air and Science Museum which is the most visible unit of them all.

The physical proximity of the Smithsonian Institution to the Congress and the fact that the officers of the Smithsonian must maintain amiable contact with members of the Congress places them under constant public scrutiny. On the Congressional side, members of the Congress who might otherwise have little interest in the activities of museums in their home constituencies are very likely to be aware of what is going on in Washington, especially if the activities of the Smithsonian have caught the attention of the lobbyists for any special interest groups such as those representing the veterans who were disturbed by the text accompanying the planned exhibition of the Enola Gay.

The timing of the exhibition is important for it came on the heels of the furor surrounding the production of homo-erotic (hostile critics would say pornographic)photographs by the late Robt. Maplethorpe whose work had been supported by a federal grant. The exhibition of a "Crucifix in a Bottle of Urine", also a publicly funded project, added fuel to the public outcry, led by Senator Helms, and a call for censorship of publicly funded projects (consult the H-Net postings for the funding decisions which included a prohibition sponsored by Senator Helms against funding obscene or pornographic material under the guidelines of the NEA).

That the nature of the institutional locus, the geographic location of the planned exhibition and the cultural climate of the moment might present some special problems is obvious. The coupling of this exhibition with the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan only served to compound the issue for it naturally brought the exhibition policy of the Air and Science Museum to the attention of the groups of World War II veterans (and others) who might otherwise be indifferent to museum activities. Veteran discontent with the exhibition text which was perceived as being overly apologetic was quickly expressed through lobbyists to the keepers of the Smithsonian purse, the members of Congress who were already wrestling with the problems of a massive federal deficit, the funding of welfare programs, social security entitlement, and who now had to deal with the question of voter discontent at what must have seemed like a very small issue in the context of their total responsibilities. All of the ingredients for a major conflict were at hand. To this we must add yet one more factor, namely, the attitude of those who planned the exhibition and how they went about preparing the public for what they had in mind. I cannot speak with direct authority about this case. But as an art historian and sometimes curator, sometimes administrator, in both public and private museums, I can talk about standard procedure which is, I assume, applicable in this case.

The idea for an exhibition usually begins with a curator and works its way up the administrative ladder through an exhibition committee for final approval by the director and the board. From first draft to final scheduling, confirmation of funding, designing the exhibit, writing text, etc., usually takes a minimum of two years and often more than that. There should have been at least that much lead time for the planners of the Enola Gay program. In recent years it has become customary to present various stages of the design of an exhibition to public test groups (comparable to the focus groups used in the advertising industry)to ascertain what they like, or do not like, about a planned exhibition. All of this is done to produce a "better" exhibition (or at least what is hopefully a more popular one) and of course to avoid the kind of disastrous situation which led to the cancellation of the Enola Gay exhibit as it was originally planned.

This last element, the survey of client interest, whether conducted voluntarily or by force of public opinion, constitutes a critical juncture in the decision making process. The obvious questions, for which I propose no answer in this communique, touch on deep sentiments of freedom and professional pride: what should be done if the reception by the people, the client for whom the exhibition is designed and paid for with public funds, is at odds with the intent of the curator and the publicly funded institution mounting the display; whose will should prevail; how far can one go in the spirit of self-control before the climate of censorship prevails? The immediate intellectual and psychological precedent in certain circles of the museum world (which was self-perceived as being "politically correct") at the time of the Enola Gay incident favored the will of the curator. For, irregardless of what the public might think about Maplethorpe's photographs (one could be arrested for exhibiting them in certain circumstances) or what seemed to some to be a vicious desecration of religious icons, both the photographs and the sculpture went on view. More germane to this issue was the basis for exhibiting these works. It was argued that more than professional prerogative was involved, this was a case of freedom of expression.

The controversy over the display of the works of Maplethorpe, and other similar cases, contributed to the climate of the debate about museum exhibition policy at the time of the proposed Smithsonian exhibition. Although the Enola Gay exhibit had nothing to do with art it had very much to do with exhibition policy in public museums and to that extent the Smithsonian curators were seen as either as heros or villains by the same people who were involved in the earlier debates. Indeed, it may well be that the identification of the Smithsonian case with these other controversies made it impossible to reach a compromise that was satisfactory to the Smithsonian staff and their critics.

The most recent response on the part of the Congress to these issues is contained in the more restrictive legislation, sponsored by Senator Helms and endorsed by a congressional committee, that now serves as the law governing the federal funding of the arts and art exhibitions. Presumably, the climate engendered by these laws will have a profound effect on all future exhibitions, including those in the Air and Science Museum and other museums, both public and private, throughout the land.

Robert J. Poor (IN%"poorx001@maroon.tc.umn.EDU)

H-Asia
Item number 1394
Mon, 25 Sep 1995 00:01:47 -0700
H-ASIA: The Bombs, Japan, and the U.S.

_Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars_ Special Issue, "Remembering the Bomb: The Fiftieth Anniversary in the United States and Japan"

Remembering the Bomb: The Fiftieth Anniversary in the United States and Japan Special issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.

This special issue uses the controversy over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution and a similar one over a proposed war museum in Tokyo to explore problems of commemoration and memory of the end of the Asia-Pacific war, and particularly the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, the articles explore the ways in which Americans invoke contemporary and wartime actions by Japanese to influence their own domestic debate, and Japanese use America in the same way. Contributors include historians of both the United States and Japan. The issue also reproduces several relevant documents, and all the articles are lavishly illustrated.

Contact BCAS, 3239 9th St., Boulder, CO 80304-2112, U.S.A. E-mail . Phone: (303)449-7439 or (303) 449-9529. This special issue is vol. 27, no. 2 (officially dated April-June 1995) of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. It costs $5.50, and the usual discounts are available for classroom use.

* Contents *

Laura Hein, "The Bomb as Public History and Transnational Memory" (13 pp.)

Edward T. Linenthal, "Between History and Memory: The Enola Gay Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum" (3 pp.)

Michael S. Sherry, "Patriotic Orthodoxy and U.S. Decline" (7 pp.)

Lane Fenrich, "The Enola Gay and the Politics of Representation," (5 pp.)

Kurihara Sadako, "America, Land of Mercy" (poem)

Sodei Rinjiro, "Hiroshima/Nagasaki as History and Politics" (5 pp.)

Yui Daizaburo, "Between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki: A Psychological Vicious Circle" (14 pp.)

Ellen H. Hammond, "Politics of the War and Public History: Japan's Own Museum Controversy" (4 pp.)

Three documents (5 pp.) and Martha Winnacker's related article "War Crimes and Heroism in Vietnamese Commemorations of the U.S. War: Observations in 1977 and 1992" (7 pp.)

From: Bill/Nancy Doub (doub@csf.Colorado.EDU)


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