THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508060138
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: THE ATOMIC AGE TURNS 50
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 115 lines
The old bomber was too big, they said. Only a few pieces would fit in the room available at the National Air and Space Museum.
But last week, as the golden anniversary of the atomic age approached and lines swelled around the nose of history's most important warplane, it seemed clear that the mission of the Enola Gay - not the plane itself - was what really was too much for the museum.
Tucked in a corner, well removed from the throngs of kids who daily scurry through Skylab or rush to touch a moon rock, the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit does its best to skirt the enormity of what the shiny B-29 did 50 years ago this morning.
To no avail.
Even without the eyewitness accounts and the horrific pictures that some historians wanted to display, the sights of the open bomb bay door and the empty atom bomb casing recall the devastation of Aug. 6, 1945.
People walk through silently, almost reverently, peering up at the bombsight Pfc. Tom Ferebee used to line up the plane with a bridge in downtown Hiroshima. They read the faded names of the crewmen stenciled on the side of the fuselage and study the faces in a life-size poster of the crew positioned nearby.
And they ponder - some in relief, others in despair, many in a mix of emotions they can't quite put into words - how the world changed that day.
``This gives you that feeling, takes you back all these years to that time again,'' said Francisco Ferreira, 73, a survivor of the Normandy invasion who 50 years ago today was in Germany, training for an assault on Japan.
Ferreira, who lives in New Bedford, Mass., knows he might have been killed in such an invasion; certainly many of his buddies would have perished. The Enola Gay, he figures, saved their lives and probably the lives of many Japanese troops, too.
It infuriates Ferreira to hear some Americans suggest now that the bombing was a mistake, even an atrocity.
``I write letters to the papers,'' he said. ``I get on the open line. I call and I talk and I pull no punches. I have no patience when they say that. Usually, I find that it's a certain type of people that speaks up like that .
Ferreira made sure he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the names of his old units, the 733rd and 515th Field Artillery, when he visited the Enola Gay last week.
``It's funny, you're young and crazy at the time,'' he said.
As Ferreira stood outside the exhibit to recall those days for a reporter, Mayumi Sakamoto was leading three students from Tenri University, in Nara, Japan, through the gallery.
The young women, born long after the war and raised in a Japan that has gotten rich on exports to America, later spoke through Sakamoto of their disappointment that the United States seems unwilling to confront the devastation the atom bomb's unleashing wrought on their country.
The students ``think it's not enough,'' Sakamoto said of the exhibit. ``They think it should have pictures of Hiroshima, how many people died - everything. . . . It just talks about the Enola Gay.''
Bookbags slung over their shoulders, the women spoke with no sign of rancor toward the country that defeated their grandfathers. Today's Japanese government, Sakamoto volunteered, skirts discussions of the horror the Emperor's forces inflicted on the Pacific in the same way the exhibit skirts the horror of the bombing.
``Americans are proud about the Enola Gay because they won World War II,'' Sakamoto quoted one student as saying. ``Maybe they didn't study anything about World War II, Enola Gay and atomic bomb. They just think: `We are great, we are proud of atomic bomb.' But they should know how many people are killed in the war . . . maybe they didn't know anything about World War II, but they must know.''
It's easy to understand how differences of time and culture can create a gap like the one that separates veterans such as Ferreira from the Japanese students. But the moral questions surrounding the use of the bomb are so complex that many people have trouble formulating answers.
So did the Smithsonian. It's initial proposal for an Enola Gay exhibit, widely seen as sympathetic toward the Japanese and overly critical of the bombing, was discarded last winter in a hail of protests from veterans groups. The Air and Space Museum's director quit over the controversy.
The museum then scrambled to assemble the current exhibit, with its matter-of-fact display of parts of the plane and a 16-minute film in which the Enola Gay's crew talk about the mission and their pride in their role in ending the war.
Near the end of the film, Dutch Van Kirk, who was the plane's navigator, eloquently summarizes the crew's view:
``I think you have to say that you wish the war could have ended without flying missions of this type. But in the long run, I'm thoroughly convinced that the use of this weapon did shorten the war and save lives - both allied lives and Japanese lives.''
Van Kirk's words and the exhibit displays moved Arlene Landis, a New Yorker who came predisposed to be angry about the Smithsonian's avoidance of the devastation to Hiroshima.
``I had read a lot about the building of the atomic bomb, and I was very interested in it,'' she said. ``I've long thought about the destruction we did with the bomb. . . . But I think now I side with the veterans, who felt (the exhibit) should not have underscored the destructive aspect of the bomb, and instead brought out the fact that we were so interested in winning the war.''
Steve Foster, an Atlanta resident who came to the exhibit with his wife and teenage children, agreed.
``They showed it was a fact of life,'' he said, ``something that had to be done, and the results were that it ended the war.''
Landis' husband, Peter Wolmart, was unmoved. He believes there was an element of racism - ``the Anglo-Saxon against the Japanese'' - in President Harry S Truman's decision to use the bomb.
``The whole idea, as far as I'm concerned, was insane,'' he said. ``I think Truman, the fact that he allowed this to happen - even though he did many other good things - I think that what Truman did was just the wrong thing to do.
``What they should show is the bodies and the devastation that is not being shown here. . . . And that's a tragedy. If we came out with that in mind, maybe we would not be walking around so proud about what happened.'' by CNB