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« Les aventures de l'Enola Gay », Sociétés & Représentations, vol. When news of this rounded approach spread, controversy ensued. The museum also began to create an exhibit based around the plane that included Japanese accounts of the event as well. URL : ĭEBOUZY Marianne, "The Adventures of the Enola Gay", Sociétés & Représentations, 2006/2 (No 22), p. In 1994, the Smithsonian began the restoration of the Enola Gay, the infamous B-29 warplane that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.
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This battle illustrates the opposition between historians who try to approach a complex truth as objectively as possible and social and political groups eager to appropriate the past so as to promote a certain idea of the nation and its history.ĭEBOUZY Marianne, « Les aventures de l'Enola Gay », Sociétés & Représentations, 2006/2 (n° 22), p. It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. This “scandal” has to be set in the political context of the 1990’s: cultural wars, the 1994 Republican victory in Congress, the emerging new patriotism. Enola Gay This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender. The offensive launched against the exhibit as unpatriotic by the lobbies of the Air Force Association and the American Legion was relayed by eighteen Congressmen who asked for the resignation of the director of the Museum and the cancellation of the project. The planned National Air and Space Museum’s exhibit in Washington for the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to put and end to World War II was meant to raise such large questions as: Why were the bombs used? Were there alternatives? Why were civilians targeted? How was the bomb linked to the emerging Cold War? The exhibit did not stick to the “official” version according to which the dropping of the bomb only aimed at saving American lives.