Word: enola
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...hell, and its commemoration, while less lethal, can be just as bedeviling. For the past eight years, technicians at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum have been meticulously restoring the Enola Gay, the B-29 that in 1945 dropped the first atom bomb, destroying Hiroshima and leading to the end of World War II. An exhibit centered on the front section of the plane's fuselage is scheduled for next year's 50th anniversary of the bombing. But Air Force veterans have seen the 559-page proposal for the show. And they are feeling nuked...
...count there were four pages of text on Japanese atrocities, while there were 79 pages devoted to Japanese casualties and the civilian suffering, from not only the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also conventional B-29 bombing. The Committee for the Restoration and Display of the Enola Gay now has 9,000 signatures of protest. The Air Force Association claims the proposed exhibition is "a slap in the face to all Americans who fought in World War II" and "treats Japan and the U.S. as if their participation in the war were morally equivalent...
...Enola Gay, shorn of its wings, its long fuselage in two parts, commands center stage in this singular historical drama. There is something spiritual and awesome about walking up to the silver flank with the stencil that was put on a few days after the B-29's famous mission: FIRST ATOMIC BOMB, HIROSHIMA...
...bomb. A normal double hook for bombs was abandoned by the mission planners, who feared, if one malfunctioned, the armed bomb might dangle in the rack like hell on a tether. You remember the day 44 years ago on a college campus when the news came of the Enola Gay's successful drop and the public dawning of the nuclear age, how you sat up most of the summer night talking and wondering...
...Prizewinner Enrico Fermi arriving for an appointment at the U.S. Navy Department and overhearing the desk officer tell his admiral, "There's a wop outside"; F.D.R.'s 13-word handwritten approval of atom bomb research beginning with "O.K."; the B-29 pilot who named a plane after his mother, Enola...