Enola Gay

Eighty years.  Today.  The B-29 named by its pilot "Enola Gay" dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.  In seconds, thousands died. Over the ensuing days and decades, thousands more would die from the radiation the bomb produced.  Many in the world will pause and contemplate the anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb and, with wars of varying intensity yet still killing thousands in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, Congo, Cambodia, consider current events rather than the past.  The bomb and the plane which dropped the bomb, the "Enola Gay", will likely disappear from the news.

Earlier this year the "Enola Gay" became the subject of news reports when moronic Republicans purged photographs of the plane from Department of Defense websites because it's name contained the word "gay" as part their efforts to eliminate all non-white, masculine, heterosexual images from American history.  Thus another chapter was added to the plane's symbolic history.

The Enola Gay

Few objects or artifacts can represent so many sometimes conflicting things to so many people.  This could be because any object, particularly a piece of technology, that marks the end or the beginning of an era can become emblematic of it.  

Perhaps it's best to start with the simplest description of the plane.  The "Enola Gay" dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, eighty years ago.  Though another B-29, named "Bock's Car," dropped an atomic bomb three days on Nagasaki--it's original target, Kokura, was shrouded in cloud and smoke from a previous fire bombing raid on a nearby city the day before, so the crew of the plane flew on to their secondary target, Nagasaki--it is rather anonymous compared to the "Enola Gay" though it is displayed at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.  Kokura, thanks to the cloud cover that day, avoided mass destruction.

Hiroshima after the atomic bomb

The "Enola Gay," along with jet aircraft developed and deployed at the end of World War II, represented the end result of the rapid evolution of warplanes during the course of the war.  When the war began, most combatants included in their arsenals biplanes with open cockpits which wouldn't look out of place over the trenches criss-crossing France twenty years before during the Great War (renamed World War I, thanks the advent of another world war).  Some of the biplanes demonstrated their utility in the new war, as a small group of British 21 biplanes attacked and crippled a number of Italian battleships in Taranto harbor in November 1940, an attack which inspired the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a little over a year later.  

A Fairy Swordfish, the kind of plane that
attacked Italian battleships in Taranto harbor in 1940

Bombers in 1939 could barely carry one ton of bombs for a few hundred miles.  The B-29 could fly up to 10 tons of bombs for thousands of miles at speeds faster than that of many fast fighter planes flew at the beginning of the war. It was one of the first warplanes with a pressurized cabin, allowing the crew to move about during the long flights without oxygen masks (the flight to drop the atomic bomb lasted over 6 hours each way).

The B-29 was the ultimate tool of strategic bombing, a philosophy of fighting war that seized the imagination of military planners in the aftermath of the First World War.  After the carnage and stalemate of the First World War, some political and military leaders thought the next war could be cut short by bombing strategic targets--bases, factories, whole cities--so that opponents could not continue to fight and thus avoid the carnage and enduring stalemate they recently endured.  The Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the United States Army Air Force (the forerunner of the US Air Force) in particular considered strategic bombing to be among their principal missions in war.  Many leaders worried that with the onset of war would commence strategic bombing raids by enemy bombers which would kill tens of thousands every day, whether with bombs or poison gas (look at pictures of British civilians at the beginning of WWII and they frequently carried boxes containing a gas mask, even children).  

Children on way to school with their gas masks

Many people died in early German bombing raids on Poland, the Netherlands, France, and Britain as well as Japanese bombing raids on China, but the casualties were not as extensive as predicted by pre-war military and political leaders.  After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, the Royal Air Force commenced bombing of targets in Germany (the British could do little else as the British Army left most of its equipment behind in France when its soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk), but the combination of the relatively small loads of bombs that could be carried and the inaccuracy of the bombs that were dropped rendered the effect on the German war effort to be more of a nuisance than a crippling force.  Even when the bombers aimed to devastate whole cities and with it the morale of the German people, the bombing tended to stiffen German resolve rather than dissolve it.  The addition of American bombers in 1943 to the strategic bombing of Germany had a marginal effect--in fact German production of armaments increased despite the bombing of cities and factories.  Sometimes tens of thousands of people would die in one night's bombing.  Though during the war the strategic bombing of cities was presented as critical to winning the war in Europe, sober post-war evaluation determined the bombing's effect to be minor until the final months of the war.

Cologne after British and American bombing attacks

The United States started the strategic bombing of Japan using fleets of hundreds of B-29s like the "Enola Gay" in the spring of 1945.  The raids set fire to Japanese cities, mostly consisting of wood buildings, killing thousands of people.  More people were killed outright in the firebombing of Tokyo than in either of the atomic bombings.  Japanese cities were flattened, production by factories came to a halt, but the Japanese military continued to fight and prepare for an American invasion of the Japanese home islands.  

Tokyo after B-29 fire bombings

Any man who was of military service age in 1945 would agree with the sentiment of writer Paul Fussell's essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."  American soldiers and marines began preparing in the summer of 1945 for an invasion of Japan that, after the American bloodshed on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Luzon, where the ratios of casualties to combatants were the highest the US experienced during the war and rivaled the ferocity and carnage of the war between Germany and Russia, promised to be a bloodbath for both sides.  Among the preparations was the minting of Purple Heart medals for the thousands and thousands of soldiers who would be wounded in the invasion.  So many were made that the hundreds of  thousands of wounded of America's subsequent wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other smaller operations since World War II would receive Purple Hearts made in 1945 for the casualties anticipated in the invasion of Japan.  The surrender of Japan days after the "Enola Gay" dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki gave thousands of Americans a reprieve from what many considered a death sentence in the planned invasion of Japan.  

Though many would argue that the worsening Japanese military position, the gradual strangulation of supplies from Japan's conquered lands by the American fleet, and the Declaration of War and subsequent invasion of Manchuria by the Soviet Union on August 8th contributed to Japan's surrender, Emperor Hirohito mentioned the bomb specifically when he told his subjects in Classical Japanese, which many could not understand, of his acceptance of terms of the Potsdam Declaration, essentially surrendering to the Allies:

Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

Thus the dropping of the atomic bomb from the "Enola Gay" helped end a war that had killed tens of millions of people.  Some have argued the bomb was dropped as much to intimidate Stalin as to hasten Japan's surrender.  Others have suggested that after the huge investment in the Manhattan Project, the bomb had to be used against someone to justify its expense (Efforts to build the bomb were partially in response to perceived efforts by Germany to create such a bomb.  It's first use was to be against Germany, but Germany surrendered before the bomb was completed.).  M.J. Madigan was sent durning the war by Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson to investigate the research on the atomic bomb and its costs.  His report was simple:  "If the project succeeds, there won't be any investigation.  If it doesn't, they wont investigate anything else."

Jake Madigan is second from right,
Robert Patterson is third from right.

Digging into resources from the time leads me to accept that the bomb was dropped simply to hasten the end of the war.  Americans were tiring of the war, especially at the increasing loss of life (Until June 1944, the US never lost more than 10,000 dead per month.  After that month, American losses surpassed that figure by growing margins.  As mentioned above, the invasion of Japan was anticipated to surpass that figure, and the duration of the invasion was thought to last through 1946.).  There was worry that the Japanese would start murdering POWs and internees in larger numbers than they already had.  Parts of Asia under Japanese control were experiencing famine as Japan was not able to transport food effectively in its conquered areas, even withholding it for Japanese use.  Japanese casualties in an American invasion were likely to be several times that of the invading forces as well, and the continued firebombing of Japanese cities would continue to kill tens of thousands on a daily basis.

The strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, epitomized by the "Enola Gay," convinced American military and political leaders of the power of air forces in future military conflicts, whether or not the evidence supported that conclusion.  Though the atomic bomb was a simple solution to the problem of ending the war, subsequent use of air power did not typically yield the same quick and unambiguously successful results.  More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than on Germany and Japan combined.  The Vietnamese prevailed against the US.  American Presidents have resorted to the use of air power, from strategic bombing to drone strikes, to solve foreign policy problems ever since the Second World War.  Sometimes its use can serve as a temporary solution, but frequently it plants the seeds for problems later (Nobody likes to be bombed and most tend to remember who bombed them.).

The Air Force had dropped the atomic bomb and, for years afterward, was the only service arm that could deliver nuclear bombs to their targets.  Thus in the postwar reorganization of the American military, it separated from the Army and became an equal of the Army and Navy.  It also became in some ways the darling child of the American military thanks to its monopoly of deploying the atomic and later hydrogen bomb.  Within a decade or so of the war the number the Air Force officers and enlisted men outnumbered that of the Navy and rivaled that of the Army.  Only when the Navy started commissioning ballistic missile submarines in the 1960s did the Air Force's domination of the American military diminish.

The people of Japan are not as enamored of the "Enola Gay" as the people of America.  The hibakusha, those people affected by the bomb, didn't all die on August 6, 1945 or the following days.  They continued to die in the years that followed.  They were shunned by other Japanese (The effects of radiation were not understood at the time, as many thought it was contagious.  Even Americans did not understand its effects, as shown by the nuclear tests of the 1950s in which American soldiers and Marines would witness nuclear bomb tests and then perform maneuvers of the area of nuclear explosions.) Even their children were discriminated against.  It's only use against an Asian nation has been pointed to as an example of western racism toward the peoples of Asia (that it was intended for use against Germany as well as racist attitudes of Japan toward the Asian people it conquered culminating in mass murder and atrocities as well as forced labor in factories, construction projects, and comfort stations for horny soldiers, is all conveniently forgotten.).

The legacy of the "Enola Gay" was that of a double edged sword.  On one hand, it was a Damocles' sword, dangling the prospect of wholesale murder and destruction on the world.  The possibility of nuclear war felt real for decades.  Between movies and books of the time, duck and cover drills, fallout shelters, air raid sirens near schools, and peculiar first aid books for families (see the page below from my middle school first aid class), the prospect of nuclear war was, if not always a daily concern, a source of existential worry. 

When I was a kid, a shelf in our basement had a couple old boxes of Carnation Instant Milk.  I asked why it was there and my parents told me that during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (when I was barely one year old), people were so worried about a possible nuclear war that my parents stocked up on the instant milk so that, if our family should survive (we lived just outside Washington, DC, a likely target in any nuclear war), I would be able to have some milk. 

Ironically, it had a positive effect.  If you are reading this, there is a chance you have travelled in Europe, whether backpacking from hostel to hostel when young, taking a get away to Paris, Rome, London, or some other city, or traveling down a river on a river cruise, reveling in the scenery and a comprehensive drinks package.  Atomic bombs and their children, hydrogen bombs, created a nuclear umbrella that, apart from the struggles between Serbians and the other peoples who made up Yugoslavia in the 90s and the recent Russian invasions of Ukraine, has kept Europe relatively free of war for eight decades, a record for a continent of nations which for centuries were routinely at war, and allowed a level of prosperity surpassing that even in America.  

The mere display of the "Enola Gay" became a battle in America's now perpetual culture wars.  The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum set out to exhibit the plane in 1994, complete with materials to show the plane's context in the war.  Though curators endeavored to present the context of the bombing in the course of the war, their attempt to suggest the challenges the use of the atomic bomb presented to the world in the ensuing five decades after its use provoked furious criticism from Republicans, veteran's groups, and the aerospace industry.  Though other branches of the Smithsonian have few inherent constituencies, the Air and Space Museum, as it showcases American military might and technological prowess, is sensitive to the largess and thus opinion of both the military and aerospace industries, as one may observe at the soon to be reopened Boeing Milestones of Flight Gallery, the McDonnell Douglas Gallery, or the newly renamed Northrup Grumman Planetarium (previously named after a noted scientist, Albert Einstein).  The galleries showcasing military hardware at the museum on the mall are being renovated, but given the current administration's rather focused vision of American history, there is a good chance that they could stimulate some harrumphing (and some political fundraising) from Republican politicians at all levels upon their reopening.  The planned exhibit was finally cancelled.  Instead a bare bones exhibit was created, with little information about the plane or its place in history.

Final exhibit in 1995

When built, B-29-45-MO 44-86292 was one of 3,970 B-29s built by the United States between 1943 and 1946.  It was named "Enola Gay" after the mother of its pilot, Paul Tibbets, the commander of the 509th Composite Group that trained to drop atomic bombs.  In the 80 years since it was built, it served many purposes.

• It was the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima
• It epitomized the development of aircraft, particularly bombers, during World War II
• It was the ultimate tool of strategic bombing by dropping the first atomic bomb
• It was the savior of soldiers who would have been in the invasion force of Japan
• It was the plane that helped end World War II
• Its action helped create a separate US Air Force
• It set the unfortunate precedent for Presidents that air attacks can solve problems
• It bore the weapon that caused the death and agony of thousands of Japanese casualties from nuclear bombings
• It was a symbol of the beginning of the nuclear age and cold war
• It was weapon in America's culture war over American history

            and just this year:

• It was an example of the ridiculous Republican attempts to censor American history

The list could go on, which proves that the importance and interpretation of objects and artifacts, like beauty, lie in the eyes of the beholder.  Since 2003 the entire aircraft has been on display at the Museum's Uber Hazy facility in Virginia among other large artifacts, including the NASA Space Shuttle Discovery which may be moved to Texas at a likely cost to the US taxpayer of a couple hundred million dollars to satisfy the Texas US Senate delegation thanks to the recently passed budget bill.  The museum has some FAQs about the bomber, no doubt thoroughly vetted to prevent additional controversy.  Though other planes are more famous, few have made a greater impact on world history.

The Enola Gay today