The Smithsonian simply brushed the petition aside, as it did protestors who challenged the exhibit’s opening. Many historians, this author included, signed a petition to protest the museum’s uncritical and ahistorical portrayal of the Enola Gay. According to news reports, the plane is displayed with a plaque that calls it “the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of World War II” and mentions without comment that it dropped the bomb. Near Washington’s Dulles Airport (named after John Foster Dulles, whose nuclear brinkmanship in the 1950s made nuclear war into a game of chicken), the Smithsonian has opened a new exhibition hall that features the Enola Gay as part of its centennial celebration of the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk flight. 6, 1945 – a marvel of technology? A worthy subject for a historical exhibit, rather like Disneyland’s Robot Lincoln? The Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum seems to think so. The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug.
