NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE
MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
EXHIBITION PLANNING DOCUMENT
JULY 1993
TENTATIVE
EXHIBIT TITLE:
THE CROSSROADS: THE END OF WORLD WAR II, THE
ATOMIC BOMB, AN THE ONSET OF THE COLD WAR
Projected Dates: May 1995 to January
1996
For the United States, the Second World
War was not only fought on two different fronts, it was,
in many respects, two different wars. While Europe as
well as the Pacific were witness to battles of terrible
ferocity, there is a striking contrast between the
conduct of the war and its ending in Germany and in
Japan. In Europe, American forces battled an enemy
similar to the foe their fathers had met, in a
conventional war of slow attrition culminating in
Germany’s collapse. In the Pacific, opposing forces
engaged an unfamiliar enemy; racial and cultural
differences fanned fears and inflamed hatreds. Perhaps
most strikingly, the war ended abruptly, without the
conquest of the enemy’s homeland.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August
6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later, were the
first—and thus far—the only use of nuclear weapons in
anger. Although mankind has lived with war and violence
throughout its history, the atomic bombings announced
the arrival of a new and qualitatively different peril,
one that still threatens humanity: sudden, mass and
indiscriminate destruction from a single weapon. From
the vantage point of fifty years after these events, the
atomic bombings and the end of World War II in the
Pacific thus mark a turning point, an historic
crossroads.
Beginning in May 1995, the National Air
and Space Museum will mount an exhibit about the end of
the Second World War, the development of the atomic
bomb, and the onset of the Cold War. Museum staff
members recognize that this subject is marked by strong
feelings and a broad range of opinion. The primary goal
of this exhibition will be to encourage visitors to
undertake a thoughtful and balanced re-examination of
these events in the light of the political and military
factors leading to the decision to drop the bomb, the
human suffering experienced by the people of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the long-term implications of the
events of August 6 and 9, 1945. While there will
undoubtedly be other commemorations in connection with
the fiftieth anniversary, this exhibit can provide a
crucial public service by reexamining these issues in
the light of the most recent scholarship. The Museum
hopes that the proposed exhibition will contribute to a
more profound discussion of the atomic bombings among
the general public of the United States, Japan and
elsewhere.
Entry to the
Exhibition
The exhibition will be held on the first
floor of the Museum, in Gallery 103, which is roughly
square and encloses an area of 505 square meters (5436
sq. ft.). The gallery’s entrance will be widened to
create a distinct entrance and exit for exhibit
visitors, but this widening will also allow the movement
into the gallery of the forward fuselage of the Enola
Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima.
Visitors entering the exhibition will
walk past a series of images relating to the end of the
war in Europe. There are pictures of victorious American
soldiers, images of the liberation of the concentration
camps, VE Day celebrations, and newspaper headlines
proclaiming Victory in Europe.
A label will call attention to the fact
that Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen had brought the
war in Europe to a close by forcing the complete and
unconditional surrender of the enemy. They had won total
victory in a just cause. But war continued in the
Pacific, where the fighting was increasingly bitter and
losses continued to mount. The possibility of an
invasion of Japan, and even higher casualties, loomed on
the horizon.
The main label will prepare visitors for
the exhibition by indicating that it is about
technology, war and decisions and consequences: the
decision to drop the bomb and the consequences of doing
so, something that has remained controversial for half a
century. The exhibit will present as objective and
balanced a presentation of these issues as possible.
A notice at the entrance will also refer
visitors interested in the general history of World War
II aviation, on land and at sea, to the Museum’s
galleries that cover those topics.
Unit 1: A Fight to
the Finish
Upon turning the corner after the
entrance, visitors will enter the first of four major
sections of the exhibit. This unit, “A Fight to the
Finish,” will set the stage and create the historical
context for the other units, particularly the second,
“The Decision to Drop the Bomb.” Unit 1 will focus on
the last months of the war in the Pacific, but will also
cover the end of the war in Europe and the increasing
escalation of the strategic bombing of cities, which
began in Europe.
The main theme of this unit will be the
increasing bitterness and brutality of a war that was
also, for Americans, a war of vengeance for Pearl
Harbor. Visitors will encounter, soon after entering the
unit, a film that will put them back into the spring of
1945 and provide them with some basic historical
information. This video will be primarily made from
American newsreels, but may include Japanese footage or
propaganda films, if these are available and
appropriate. This film will set the mood for the unit by
giving visitors images of the end of the war in Europe,
the fighting in the islands, firebombing, and
exhortations to victory on the home front. Also
striking, upon entering “A Fight to the Finish,” will be
a view of the Japanese Okha suicide bomb hanging
overhead and diving toward the visitor. The kamikaze
attacks expressed and symbolized the bitter resistance
of the Japanese forces, which contributed to American
racial and cultural perceptions and the assumption that
war would end with a fight to the finish on the beaches
and in the home islands of Japan.
“A Fight to the Finish” will have three
major subunits of text, photos and artifacts: “Two
Nations at War,” “Combat in the Pacific” and “The
Firebombing of Japan.” The first of the three sub-units,
“Two Nations at War,” will discuss the attitudes and
atmosphere on the home front in the United States and
Japan, as well as the stereotypes through which each
side saw the other. On the American side, the subunit
will discuss, on the one hand, war-weariness at the end
of the European war and the desire to get the Pacific
war over as quickly as possible, and on the other, the
stereotypes and the assumption of fanaticism that
characterized American views of the Japanese. These
attitudes reinforced and were reinforced by the
bitterness of fighting on the islands, the kamikaze
campaign and the firebombing campaign. On the Japanese
side, this unit will look at Japanese stereotypes of
Americans and Westerners and will discuss the atmosphere
in the country and preparations for a last-ditch defense
of the home islands. Posters, magazine images and
similar artifacts and photos from both sides will make
the atmosphere of the period more vivid.
The second sub-unit, “Combat in the
Pacific,” will discuss the fighting in the islands and
the kamikaze campaign. (The Okha is actually an artifact
of this section.) The sub-unit’s purpose will be to show
how different the Pacific war was for Americans—no
quarter was given and few prisoners were taken—as well
as the Japanese, who increasingly felt compelled to make
the ultimate sacrifice to defend the Emperor and the
nation. “Combat in the Pacific” will focus particularly
on the Okinawa invasion, which began on April 1, 1945,
and which led to frightening casualties among the
Japanese defenders and civilians, as well as among
American forces on the ground and at sea, where kamikaze
and other attacks made Okinawa the most costly battle
for the U.S. Navy in its entire history. This campaign
reinforced the perception among Americans that the
invasion of the home islands was inevitable and would be
very bloody. Okinawa also played a significant role in
the secret deliberations over how to use the atomic
bomb.
Finally, “The Firebombing of Japan” will
begin by looking at the escalation of strategic bombing
in World War II from 1939/40, when President Roosevelt
was appealing to all sides to avoid all indiscriminate
bombing, to 1945, when wholesale destruction of cities
became a matter of course. Most of the sub-unit will
then examine the origins and course of the firebombing,
especially the Tokyo raid of March 9/10, which about
equaled the casualties of Hiroshima in the short run.
Artifacts in this section will include leaflets dropped
from B-29s and, if possible, bombs and incendiary
canisters such as those used in the raids. This section
will point out that air raids killed at least half a
million Japanese civilians in the last six months of the
war—about as many as in five years of bombing Germany.
These raids were an important context for the decision
to use the atomic bomb without warning on Japanese
cities.
Unit 2: The Decision to Drop the Bomb
Upon leaving Unit 1, visitors
will enter a unit which will begin by indicating that,
unbeknownst to the people and fighting forces of both
sides, the United States almost had ready a new and
revolutionary weapon that would change the way the war
would end: the atomic bomb. Visually, Unit 2 will be
dominated by the “Little Boy”-type uranium bomb casing,
such as the one used on Hiroshima, which symbolizes the
availability of this new weapon to decision makers in
the United States.
This artifact will probably
follow the first sub-unit, “Deciding to Build the Bomb,”
which will give a quick overview of the origins and
history of the Manhattan Project, from the discovery of
fission in Germany in 1938/39, through the beginnings of
the project in this country, its acceleration in 1941/42
as a project directed against the Germans, and finally
its scale-up to be a huge engineering and industrial
project for the production of fissionable materials. The
section will also discuss in very simple terms the
physics of the bomb and the different mechanisms of the
uranium gun-type vs. the plutonium implosion-type. It
will note that, under President Roosevelt, the
assumption was always that it would be used, either on
Germany or Japan.
The exact order of the second sub-unit,
“Deciding the Use the Bomb,” has not yet been
determined, but it will include the following topics:
Truman’s sudden accession tot he Presidency and his
first encounter with the Manhattan Project; the Target
Committee, the Interim Committee, and the discussion of
a demonstration; the “speed-up program” and the
compulsion to justify the expense of Manhattan; the
Szilard/Frank/Chicago petition; the Soviet factor in
American government deliberations; the change in the
Japanese government and its ineffective peace initiative
through Moscow; American decryption of Japanese
diplomatic traffic and knowledge of the initiative’
plans for an invasion of Japan and likely casualties
(which were projected to be far fewer than the post-war
figures of half-a-million or more American lives); the
question of the Emperor’s role in the post-war era and
the politics of unconditional surrender in the US; final
target selection; Stimson and Kyoto; the Potsdam
conference and Declaration; the Trinity test of July 16,
and the order to drop the bomb.
This complicated material can be made
comprehensible by adhering closely to chronology and
using a telegraphic style with lots of quotations from
participants and original documents. Important documents
and artifacts will also be used in this section to hold
visitors’ interest, including the originals or
facsimiles of Einstein’s 1939 letter to Roosevelt, the
July 25 Army Air Forces order to drop the atomic bombs,
personal effects of Harry Truman, a “Purple Analog”
decoding machine used to decipher Japanese diplomatic
traffic, and physicist Emilio Segre’s goggles and
jumpsuit from the Trinity test.
The purpose of this section, which forms
the intellectual heart of the exhibit, if not its
largest section by area, will be to show that there may
have been no “decision to drop the bomb: in the usual
sense, but rather there was a process of moving toward
use that was difficult to deflect. Neither the atomic
bomb nor an invasion was probably needed to end the
Pacific war, but this is much more obvious in hindsight
than it was at the time. The exhibit will thus point out
to visitors the difference between the knowledge and
understanding of actors in historical events and our
ability to understand them later through research and
the advantage of perspective.
Unit 3: Delivering
the Bomb
The
second unit stops at the point where the dropping of the
bomb is inevitable; the exhibit now turns to how the
weapon was to be delivered. When visitors walk into this
unit, they will immediately see the nose of the “Enola
Gay,” plus some view of the rest of the gigantic forward
fuselage, which is about 18 meters (56 ft) long and 3
meters (10 ft) in diameter. On the port side is the
evocative lettering of the name? Visitors will also be
attracted to the Plexiglas nose, with its view of the
cockpit and the bombsight that was used on the Hiroshima
mission. It will also be possible to view the forward
bomb-bay, with NASM’s reconstruction of the atomic bomb
sway-braces and latch, either through one of the wing
holes in the fuselage or via mirrors under the aircraft.
As space permits, we will also use an engine and a
propeller from the “Enola Gay,” which will give a
further sense of the scale of the aircraft. As a
technological artifact, the engine was particularly
important because it had a troubled history, but it made
the B-29’s range and payload capacity possible.
The
theme of Unit 3 is thus the creation of the instruments
for delivering the bomb—the B-29 aircraft and the
special atomic weapons unit, the 509th
Composite Group—and the actual missions against
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as viewed by the crews. The first
major sub-unit of “Delivering the Bomb” will discuss the
history of the B-29 Superfortress, which was not
designed with the atomic bomb in mind but rather as the
next-generation conventional strategic bomber. Among the
aspects that will be covered are: the early troubled
history of the aircraft program, the huge industrial
investment in its manufacture (twice the $2 billion
expenditure of the Manhattan Project), the difficulties
of deploying it against Japan from India, China and the
Marianas, the construction of the airfield on Tinian,
and the final breakthrough to effectiveness with the
fire raids, although not without considerable cost to
the many B-29 crews who carried out these dangerous,
long-range missions.
The second sub-unit of “Delivering the
Bomb” will cover the origins and history of Col. Paul
Tibbets’ 509th Composite Group which was
formed in 1944 to drop the atomic bomb, although only
one other person in the unit besides Tibbets was
informed of the nature of the weapon. Through labels,
photographs and artifacts from members of the 509th,
the sub-unit will then discuss training in Utah and the
Caribbean in 1944-45, then transfer to Tinian and
practice and combat missions in the Pacific during the
summer of 1945. Personal items and photos from the
veterans themselves will convey a sense of the
personalities who made up the 509th and their
life at various bases.
Finally, after passing the “Enola Gay’s”
fuselage, the last sub-unit will discuss the
preparations for the atomic missions, the loading of the
bombs and the actual missions themselves, as experienced
by the crew members of the attacking and accompanying
aircraft. After discussing the historic Hiroshima
mission, the exhibitry will go on to discuss the hurried
preparations for a second atomic mission before the
weather turned cloudy over Japan. The labels will make
the point that there was an order to drop “bombs” on
Japan and no separate decision regarding what became the
Nagasaki attack. This part of the exhibit will be
dominated visually by the “Fat Man” atomic bomb casing,
which is over 1.5 m (5 ft) in diameter and 3 meters
(10.5 ft) long. This section of the exhibit will
conclude with the trouble-plagued mission of “Bockscar,”
which attempted to drop the “Fat Man’ three times on
Kokura before unleashing it on the northern part of the
secondary target, Nagasaki. This sub-unit will also have
a 5-6 minute video on the preparations for the missions,
the missions themselves and aerial views of the mushroom
clouds.
Unit 4: Hiroshima,
8:15 AM, August 6, 1945/ Nagasaki, 11:02 AM, August 9,
1945
When visitor go from Unit 3 to Unit 4,
they will be immediately hit by drastic change of mood
and perspective: from well-lit and airy to gloomy and
oppressive. The aim will be to put visitors on the
ground during the atomic bombings of the two cities. The
opening of “Hiroshima…/Nagasaki…” must convey that
stunning, searing moment of the initial flash, heat and
burns through pictures, through the words of survivors
themselves and through bomb-damaged artifacts that will
be lent by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if their city
governments are agreeable. The opening to this unit
could include burnt watches and broken wall clocks,
symbolizing moments frozen in time: the cataclysmic
explosions of the atomic bombs on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.
Stark pictures of burned-in shadows and possibly a
wooden panel from Nagasaki of washing on a line would
also help to bring this moment home.
If Unit 2 is the intellectual heart of
the exhibit, Unit 4 is its emotional center. Photos of
victims, enlarged to life-size, stare out at the
visitor. Photographs of dead bodies will, however, be
presented in such a way that parents can choose whether
or not to allow their children to see them. The emphasis
will be on the personal tragedy of this experience. The
people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will tell their own
stories.
The first major subunit will cover the
bombings in the two cities chronologically, that is,
since the experiences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the
moment of the explosion are fundamentally the same, the
two will be treated in parallel. Through labels,
pictures and artifacts, this sub-unit will cover the
initial flash, the blast wave, the ignition of fires,
and in Hiroshima, the creation of a firestorm. This
approach can be made much more affecting and real at
each stage by using the words, the personal artifacts,
and in some cases, the drawings of the survivors to give
individual stories of death, suffering and survival.
Among the artifacts that could be used, if permission
were granted are a schoolgirl’s lunchbox with completely
burned contents, burned and shredded clothing, and
melted and broken religious objects. Where possible,
photos of the persons who owned or wore these artifacts
would be used to show that real people stood behind
these artifacts. Photographs of the cities before and
after would also be used to make the extent of the
destruction more comprehensible. Of course, the sub-unit
would also indicate the differences between Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, particularly how geography and weather led
to a more powerful bomb in Nagasaki only producing about
half the victims.
The second sub-unit of
“Hiroshima…/Nagasaki…” would then look at the two cities
and their people in the days, weeks, months and years
after the bombings. Among the most important subjects to
be covered in this sections are the overwhelming medical
crises in the two cities and the lack of hospital
facilities, the search for relatives and loved ones, the
confrontation with a mysterious and, for a few weeks,
steadily worsening epidemic of radiation sickness, and
the long-term radiation effects of the bombs. The story
of the later wave of cancer, particularly the leukemia
wave of the 1950s, can be told through the story of
particular victims, such as that of Sadako and the paper
cranes. For the period immediately after the bombings,
there are also many powerful visual images from both
cities, but particularly from Nagasaki. Hibakusha
(bomb survivors) would also give their stories in a
video or on a videodisk system that would allow visitors
to select particular ones to watch.
Finally, the last, brief sub-unit of Unit
4 would look at the surrender of Japan and the role of
the atomic bombs (and the Soviet declaration of war on
Japan) in producing that sudden event. It would look at
the intervention of the Emperor in breaking the deadlock
of the Japanese government and at the thinking of
President Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes in
formulating their replies. If possible, this section
will include a recording of Emperor Hirohito’s historic
radio address of August 15, alongside a Japanese radio
of the period. This section of the exhibit because it
provides viewers with information about the
controversial question as to whether atomic bombs were
needed to shock the Japanese government into ending the
war and whether the human suffering they produced was
outweighed by the lives saved by an early surrender.
These are, of course, difficult moral and political
questions and the Smithsonian Institution can take no
position in that regard. All the exhibit can do is
provide visitors with the information needed to think
more deeply about these questions.
Conclusion: The
Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Upon leaving Unit 4, those visiting the
exhibit will emerge into a solemn and contemplative
space near the exit, where they will be invited to think
about and respond to the exhibit. The brief labels in
this section will note that the bombings are not only a
subject which will forever remain debatable, they also
heralded a new age of nuclear weapons. If Hiroshima and
Nagasaki did not trigger the Cold War and the nuclear
arms race between the United States and the Soviet
Union, they certainly symbolized the new age and gave a
glimpse of the reality of nuclear war.
The Conclusion will include a video
giving a range of perspectives on the bombing—from 509th
or other veterans (or Paul Fussell) talking about how
they believe the bombings saved lives and giving their
views and peace messages, if they accept our invitation
to do so. This video will encapsulate the many
perspectives of the bombings, but it (and the exhibit)
will embody one common wish: that nuclear weapons never
be used in anger again.
We will end by recapitulating the legacy
of the atomic bomb after World War II—fusion bombs a
hundred times more powerful than the fission bombs
dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima; warheads numbering in
the tens of thousands making up the nuclear arsenals of
the United States and the former Soviet Union at the
height of the Cold War; war heads which may have become
lost as the Soviet Union has unraveled; and smaller
countries like South Africa or North Korea producing or
trying to produce atomic bombs of a caliber comparable
to those of World War II—all of which suggests an
uncertain, potentially dangerous future for all of
civilization.
At the exit, visitors will be able to
share their own feelings and thoughts by writing on
prepared cards, in comment books or with a light pen on
a computer screen. Interesting comments written by
previous visitors can be made visible in some way,
increasing the feeling of participation. Those who have
toured “The Crossroads” will thus leave, we hope,
thinking and debating these most crucial historical
events of the twentieth century.
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