Dayton, Ohio -- The Smithsonian Institution may decide today to save its beleaguered World War II atomic bomb exhibit by taking this cue from the U.S. Air Force Museum: keep it simple.
Since 1961, the Air Force Museum here has displayed Bockscar, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, the second nuclear blow that forced Japan's unconditional surrender and ended the war. There have been no public protests, no petition campaigns, no tumult in the museum hierarchy.
Many veterans who are protesting the Smithsonian's plans to display part of the Enola Gay, which dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, say the Air Force Museum succeeded where the Smithsonian failed. And they say it did so more by what the Bockscar display does not show.
No photographs of burned bodies, no examination of President Harry S. Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb, no discussion of the political implications of the bombings through the Cold War.
This morning, the Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents is expected to determine the fate of the Enola Gay exhibit, which has been engulfed for months in a storm of criticism from veteran's organizations and members of Congress.
Critics say the exhibit portrays the Japanese as victims of American brutality and glosses over Japanese aggression and war atrocities. They also say the exhibit underestimates the number of American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan.
The American Legion has called for cancellation of the show, which was expected to cost $600,000 to produce. And 81 House members -- 68 of them Republicans -- have signed a letter demanding the resignation of National Air and Space Museum Director Martin Harwit.
The Regents may decide to cancel the show, which was scheduled to open in May, or they may try to quell the storm by creating a simpler display similar to the exhibit in Ohio.
With the Republican-controlled Congress already gunning for federal funding of the arts and public television, the Smithsonian may face more pressure to appease veteran's groups and their conservative supporters on Capitol Hill. Last year, 75 percent of the Institution's $458 million budget came from its federal appropriation.
"Political correctness may be OK in some faculty lounge," said House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Friday, "but . . . the Smithsonian is a treasure that belongs to the American people and it should not become a plaything for left-wing ideologies."
Both Mr. Gingrich and his new appointee to the Board of Regents, Texas Republican Rep. Sam Johnson, say Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman is contemplating a sharply scaled-down version of the show, including a section of the restored Enola Gay fuselage with a few photographs and comments from members of the crew. That would mean scrapping a several-hundred page script, now in its fifth draft, that illustrates events leading up to the bombings, details of the injuries and destruction caused by the bombs, and the continuing historical debate about Truman's decision.
The Air Force Museum display of Bockscar includes none of that. And many World War II veterans -- especially those who believe their lives were saved by the atomic bomb -- like it that way.
BTC "I think they do all right, they don't overdo it," says Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Fred Olivi of Chicago, who was co-pilot on the Bockscar's Nagasaki mission.
Mr. Olivi, who donated some of his aviator's gear and his Distinguished Flying Cross to the Air Force Museum exhibit, is part of a group of B-29 veterans protesting the Smithsonian show with a national campaign that has gathered 19,000 petition signatures.
"The Air Force has clearly handled the Bockscar with more dignity and respect than the Smithsonian has handled the Enola Gay," says Phil Budahn, spokesman for the American Legion, the nation's largest veteran's organization with 3.2 million members. seemed prudent to do more than just put a plaque on the [Enola Gay] and say 'Here it is.' But with all the problems we've had perhaps that's all you can do."
From the start, the curators of the National Air and Space Museum show planned to do much more than that. The B-29 Enola Gay has been undergoing a $1 million restoration so that the forward fuselage could be used as the centerpiece of an exhibit that the curators said would view the bombings in terms of the history of World War II and the Cold War.
Air and Space Museum officials knew from the beginning they were stepping into a minefield of emotional image and historical interpretation.
"When we began discussions of the exhibit, there were two points everyone agreed on. One, this is a historically significant aircraft," Mr. Harwit said in an interview with The Sun a year ago. "Two, no matter what the museum did, we'd screw it up."
According to many veterans, they did. Too many graphic pictures of burn victims, too many images depicting Kamikaze pilots as heroic, too little focus on such Japanese atrocities as the Bataan Death March, massacres in Nanking, China, and abuse of prisoners of war.
Critics have seized upon one line in an early version of the script that the curators say was an attempt to capture the wartime perceptions of Americans and Japanese. For Americans, the script said, World War II "was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism."
The Air Force Museum did not try to examine Hiroshima and Nagasaki from both sides or look at the long-term consequences of the decision to use the bomb. The 72-year-old institution, devoted chiefly to the history of military aviation, focused its Bockscar exhibit on the airplane. The bomber is displayed whole in a cavernous gallery alongside other military planes, its aluminum skin and black propellers gleaming.
Each year 1.5 million people visit the museum. Its director, Richard L.Uppstrom, said that as far he knows, no one has ever protested the exhibit.
The Bockscar, which is identical to the Enola Gay except for the decals and numbers on the nose, stands about three stories tall near a corner the gallery. In two wall alcoves, visitors see full-size steel casings of the bulbous "Fat Man" bomb Bockscar dropped on Nagasaki and the slimmer "Little Boy" dropped by the Enola Gay. Between the bombs, a photograph shows two Allied invasion routes planned for November 1945 and March 1946. The caption explains that the atomic bombings forced Japan to surrender unconditionally, thus avoiding the invasions, which "the best available Allied experts estimated . . . could cost up to 1,000,000 Allied casualties."
Two photographs show distant views of the destroyed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no other illustrations of the effects of the two bombs, which are estimated to have killed more than 100,000 people in Hiroshima and about half that number in Nagasaki. There is no examination of Truman's decision to use the bomb, and nothing to suggest there were more than two ways the war could have ended: invasion of Japan or atomic bomb.
On all these points, the Smithsonian ran afoul of veteran's organizations.
It seemed in the fall that the antagonists had resolved their differences. Representatives of the Smithsonian and the American Legion met for 22 hours over two days in Washington in September. They went over the 500-page script line by line. They agreed to delete some photographs and add others. They agreed that the script would say Truman had reason to fear casualties ranging from more than 200,000 to as many as 1 million, based on Allied deaths and injuries during the invasion of Okinawa.
The Smithsonian also agreed to shift the show's focus back in time. Rather than starting with the spring of 1945 and the war in the Pacific, the exhibit would begin with the roots of the war in Japanese aggression in China in the late 1930s. The section on the Cold War was shortened.
Some peace activists and historians objected to the changes, saying the Smithsonian had caved in to political pressure. But the loudest critics, the veterans, were mollified by the revisions, even if they were not ready to give the new script unconditional approval.
After the discussions in September, Mr. Budahn says, Mr. Harwit told the American Legion that "the input phase was over." Early this month, however, Mr. Harwit wrote to the American Legion saying he had decided to undo an important change that two sides had agreed upon in September.
After conferring with Stanford University history professor Barton Bernstein, a member of the exhibition advisory board, Mr. Harwit said he decided to change the anticipated invasion casualty figure to 63,000. This was based on Dr. Bernstein's interpretation of a June 1945 diary entry of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's chief of staff.
Mr. Budahn says the Legion viewed that change as a violation of trust. William M. Detweiler, the Legion's national commander, responded by writing to President Clinton urging cancellation of the exhibit and a Congressional investigation of the process by which the show was created.
He also urged that the Enola Gay "be displayed outside any political or philosophical context by an institution willing and able to do so." He advocated a "neutral display of the aircraft."
That is, keep it simple, straightforward. It remains to be seen if the Smithsonian will take that tack.