Enola Gay Smithsonian Exhibit Disaster Part 1

draft being rewritten

I can not imagine why anyone would care what. I think about anything related to the issues discussed in this post, unless they had some interest in the "popular understanding of history by a citizen" or something of that nature.  I recommend you skip this post unless you happen to be specifically interested in the issues discussed here.

I read a book about the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Enola Gay exhibit, a disaster of monumental scale, a nuclear explosion if you will, in which the veterans, the Air Force, the US Congress compelled the Smithsonian to back off from an exhibit which they were far along in creating.   The book is called "History Wars" and it presents the historians point of view on the subject and the larger issues of the interpretation of history.

I expected the book to be a balanced discussion of the issues that also showed that the situation had spun out of control and that the Smithsonian certainly was not planning to do an exhibit that would have presented the veterans or this country guilty of all sorts of nasty things.   But in fact the book did not do that, the book instead presented the very clear point of view that there was one way to interpret history, it was the historians way, and any other opinion was wrong.

So I wanted to write about this book and the exhibit but to do so I felt I had to explain something about the situation that the book describes and to do that is a Vietnam-like morass of complicated issues.  Issues that do not lend themselves to simple sound bites.

And so this post is the attempt to get a basic synopsis of the issues behind the incident.  I am sorry.  Feel free to ignore it and don't think worse of me because of it.   I don't know whether we should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima or what would have happened if we had invaded the home islands of Japan, or whether the Japanese would have surrendered immediately anyway, or any of dozens of other fascinating and unanswerable questions.   I know that the dropping of the bomb was not a casual decision and I know what the veterans thought about what the sudden ending of the war meant to them and their lives because they were very clear about that topic both at the time and now.

So forgive me, here is the background, and then there will be post on what my impression of the historian side of the story.

The book discussed here can be found on Amazon.com at  "History Wars" 

To recap, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum planned an exhibit about the mission on August 6, 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The centerpiece of that exhibit would be the Enola Gay, the highly modified B-29 that actually dropped the bomb (there were 7 B-29s on that mission that day, but the Enola Gay carried the bomb itself). It might sound straightforward but it was anything but straightforward and here are some of the reasons.

1. The Smithsonian had the Enola Gay for decades but had refused to exhibit it. It was literally left out to rot in the rain and snow getting progressively more decrepit and rusted. Their actions were perceived for what they were, contempt for the history of this country, contempt for the veterans. The Air Force begged for the Smithsonian to give this historic plane to them so that they could restore it and show it in one of their museums, but the Smithsonian refused. The plane stayed in the rain and snow and rotted.  This did not exactly endear the Smithsonian to the Air Force or the veterans.

2. The dropping of the atomic bomb was an unusually specific event that could be said to end one era and begin another. Usually these transitions are more amorphous and take place over years or decades. But because the atomic bomb either was apparently the immediate cause of the end of WW 2 and the beginning of the cold war and the nuclear age, it presented many difficult historical problems that any exhibit either had to address or ignore, but a decision had to be made about them and no decision could be a decision. Realize also that accomplishment of dropping that bomb was the culmination of at least three different important efforts that we, the United States, took during that war.   Most people know of the Manhattan Project, but the creation of the B-29 and the story of the unit that dropped the bomb was no where near as well known.

3. There are very strong differences of opinion about the value of dropping the atomic bomb and its role in ending the war in the Pacific. But there was no doubt in the minds of anyone in the US armed services in the Pacific that it had ended the war and that it had saved their lives by doing so. But many Americans who certainly know we dropped the bomb that day are not as aware of why the veterans thought it had saved their lives.    (3)

4. The people at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum determined that their exhibit about the Enola Gay and the dropping of the bomb was going to be a "balanced exhibit", in their words, that talked about many different points of view about the event.   From the veteran point of view, this meant that they would be portrayed as heartless killers of children who had dropped a bomb for no good reason. . If America had not had to drop the bomb and if it was an immoral act then arguably America could be accused of committing a war crime in doing so and this was obvious to the veterans who were not amused by this.

5. It should be remembered that this was no mere article in a magazine somewhere, this was the premiere United States aviation museum passing judgment on the morality of dropping the bomb on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the event and the end of WW 2.

Before I go further in describing the controversy around the exhibit I want to digress for just a moment on the role of the bomb in causing Japan to surrender and whether Japan knew it was defeated and was planning to surrender anyway.  Both of these issues are fabulously complex and controversial.   Most of all it requires the historian, professional or otherwise, to put themselves into the position of what was known at the time vs what was known later.   And to understand things outside the experience of most normal people (like what is involved in invading the home islands of Japan and what it would mean to delay such an invasion to let things evolve). (2)

6. But drop the bomb we did, and shortly thereafter began a firestorm of controversy about whether the bomb needed to be dropped to end the war. 50 years later, the Smithsonian wrote a draft of the planned exhibit, and that exhibit was leaked both to the Air Force and to various veteran groups. Of course it should have been leaked, it should have been sent for review by those groups. Surely the Smithsonian did not think they could just surprise people with the exhibit and their interpretation of the event?

7. The resultant explosion was everything that could be desired and more so. The veterans went nuclear, so to speak, and called for the Smithsonian's blood. The Smithsonian retaliated by ripping the wings off the Enola Gay and exhibiting it without an exhibition. No interpretation or story at all. It just hangs wingless in the Smithsonian (it has since been moved to the new gallery outside Washington and had its parts restored). The head of the Smithsonian and a few specific historians returned to academia. The veterans got nothing, the historians got nothing, the Smithsonian had completely dropped the ball. 

The Enola Gay without its wings, with one propeller on the wall, and no discussion of what happened

It was an unmitigated disaster for the Smithsonian as they had failed, utterly failed, to represent in any reasonable way the event, the technology, the end of the war, the story of the dropping of the bomb, anything.

A total failure.

But it wasn't over yet.

End of part 1.

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1. The other two are on the origins and legality of the American Civil War and a post on writing the genre of prediction with special reference to lessons learned from Nostradamus, a very misunderstood writer of fiction.

2. There are many, many controversies. A partial list includes: (a) that we were about one month away from the invasion of Japan and we knew this was going to be very bloody (b) that Japan knew we were very close to invading and had every intention of fighting and had worked with initiative to prepare and had done a very competent job of that given their situation at the time, (c) that the bombing of the Japanese cities had caused vast destruction and misery to all sectors of Japanese society and yet had not apparently destroyed their determination to fight and there is no doubt that situation caused many Americans in leadership positions to wonder what exactly was going to be necessary to cause Japan to surrender, (d) that Japan leadership knew they had lost the war but hoped to negotiate an end to the war that allowed them to keep their empire in Korea and Manchuria, although the extent that this is true is certainly debatable, (e) that the American people wanted this war over now, (f) that the USSR having completed the war in Europe was now moving to assist us in the far east in Manchuria and people were sensitive to the role that Stalin and the USSR would play in the post-war world, and some historians consider it immoral for us to consider this issue in the decision to hurry the end of the war by dropping the bomb, (g) and last but not least, unlike Germany, the Japanese armies were undefeated in the field in China and Korea and did not see a terribly pressing need to surrender all that they had been fighting for. Yes, the home islands were suffering, yes in fact they were all suffering, but from their point of view they were far from defeated.

3. It should be no surprise that the average American does not know their own history on this matter, but it is odd that the historians do not. There are those who claim that this is because historians are ignorant of the fundamental issues that they study and there is quite a bit to support that argument. At the time the bomb was dropped, we were in a terrific struggle with the Japanese and people were dying by the scores every day, both Americans and Japanese. We never had a defense against the suicide attacks on ships. They never had a defense against our incendiary bombing of Japan or the unrestricted submarine war on their merchant shipping.

By far more Japanese were dying than Americans, but that was about to change because we were literally within eight weeks of an invasion of the Japanese home islands that would probably make the invasion of Normandy look peaceful in comparison.  Projected casualties varied wildly depending on who did the predictions. When Truman took office after Roosevelt, probably his single most important issue to address was how to bring the war to a successful conclusion with a minimum of casualties.  What you, the non professional, need to understand is that for an invasion of this scope 8 weeks is almost no time at all, its not even a weekend. You should think of it as 15 minutes before midnight. It means that all the ships, planes, munitions, etc are built and in place, and all the men are trained and in position (not quite, but almost, I exaggerate here a little). It means that the hospital ships are built, and the doctors and nurses trained, and most of the medical supplies are ready to go, or nearly so.

When the bomb was dropped and the war suddenly and unexpectedly ended, there were several million Americans in uniform getting ready to storm the beaches and support that activity. These people to the last person, as far as I can tell from reading mostly secondary sources and a few primary ones, believed that the dropping of the atomic bomb saved their lives because it made it unnecessary to invade the Japanese home islands.   For those who believe that the war was over, and that Japanese knew they had lost, you are invited to learn about the invasion of Okinawa and what that entailed.

But since we did not actually invade Japan, the number of casualties is of course not known, and many people who have studied the issue (but who were not there) have a different opinion of what would have happened had we not dropped the bomb.

A Story from World War 2 for Memorial Day

revised

In honor of Memorial Day, here is a story that my father told us, my brother and I, about his time in the Solomon Islands as a writer for the US Marine Corps in World War 2.

Part of the charm of studying history is to figure out what you need to know to understand the events described.   People are people at some fundamental level, of course, but many other things are different and people at the time had strong opinions on topics we may have never even heard of.   And things are different in subtle ways that can lead to misunderstandings when we try to understand them today.

In the little story that follows, to really appreciate the story you have to know something about the people and personalities not just during World War 2, but after the war as well, in the 1960s in America.   And so while I think the significance of the story below was obvious to someone like my brother and myself, it would be less so to someone who was born in 1980 and did not know much about their own history, which is to say, most people in America.

Another part of the appeal of this little story, at least to me, is that it is possible, if one pays attention, to figure out the punchline of the story by little clues dropped along the way.   

My father was what we used to call in this country a “newspaperman” who was someone who made his living as a journalist for one of the daily or weekly newspapers. Many well known writers of fiction from the 20th century were newspapermen, including Damon Runyan and Ernest Hemingway. Many of these newspapermen knew each other personally as it was a small and incestuous community.

When World War 2 happened, quite a few of these patriotic newspapermen volunteered for the Armed Services and many went to war, often as what was called a “Combat Correspondent”, which is to say that they were professional writers in uniform for the newspapers that the military used for internal communications. In this case, my father volunteered for the US Marine Corps, hoping to get a cushy job in Washington but instead being sent to to the humid, disease ridden, dangerous and annoying Solomon Islands, famous for being the location of Guadalcanal. They gave him a cute little portable typewriter which we still have.

It is a truism of military life that most of the time is spent enduring incredible boredom and usually in uncomfortable circumstances. That was certainly the case for my father who was normally bored out of his mind, at least until he got malaria like nearly everyone else and got sent home within the year weighing about 80 lbs.

One day, while being bored, a friend of his came by that he had known before the war. This man was from Boston, also a newspaperman, and was Irish which of course is an important ethnic group in the history and politics of Boston. I think his name was Joe Flaherty, but I am not totally sure. Anyway, he said that he had received a letter from one of the leading society ladies (doyens) of Boston who had asked him to do a favor for her.

She was writing because she was worried about her son, who had been thought to have been killed when his ship went down a few months ago but had survived the wreck of his ship and had been hiding from the japanese on a nearby deserted island.  Her son had damaged his back and he was laid up in a Naval hospital.

This woman had recently lost her eldest son in the war in Europe and did not believe anything she was told. What she wanted Joe to do was to go visit her son in the hospital and report back to her.

So Joe was on his way to the island where the hospital was located and he invited my father to go along with him. Having nothing better to do, my father said sure, and they took a shuttle to the other island where they spent the day with a nice young man and future President of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy who had damaged his back when his ship went down and was also bored, flat on his back, in this hospital.

Of course the woman who had written the letter was Rose Kennedy, daughter of Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston and married to the US Ambassador to England, Joseph P Kennedy, Sr. The disaster that had nearly killed her son was the sinking of PT 109 by a Japanese destroyer on August 2, 1943.

The Prophesy of John Hendrix (1865 - 1915)

This post is part of the "Archaeology of the Cold War" series.

From time to time, we will review entertaining stories of anomalous events, events which are unlikely to have occurred but would be very interesting if they had as that would imply unknown physics or stand as examples of phenomena such as time travel, ghosts, predicting the future and so forth. This category is in opposition to another topic of discussion on this blog, which is the creation of entertainment fiction that purports to predict the future. That however is a different topic from the one in this post. This topic is more in the nature of oral history that, if true, would mean that someone long ago had predicted the future.

The story goes something like this...

Once upon a time, in a very rural area of Tennessee, there lived a man named John Hendrix. Mr. Hendrix, who was born in 1865 and died in 1915, became distraught after the death of his daughter and his separation from his wife and the rest of his family. He became very religious and started to report having visions. Supposedly he told everyone about his visions and nobody paid much attention.

As silent as the grave

Hendrix described the vision that was given him as follows:

In the woods, as I lay on the ground and looked up into the sky, there came to me a voice as loud and as sharp as thunder. The voice told me to sleep with my head on the ground for 40 nights and I would be shown visions of what the future holds for this land.... And I tell you, Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be. And there will be a city on Black Oak Ridge and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock's farm and Joe Pyatt's Place. A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville and then branch off and turn toward Scarborough. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake. I've seen it. It's coming.

Of course no one believed him, John was being just a little crazy, they thought. Well maybe more than a little crazy and it seemed that he was institutionalized for a time. But the years went by and there was no great city in Bear Creek Valley or up on Black Oak Ridge. There was a great war but the war got fought and won without any thousands of people running around in Eastern Tennessee or new railway lines or earthquakes either. John died before what we now call World War I ended and that was all there was to say about the matter until 1942 when the government came to kick the people of the four rural communities of that part of the world off their land.

Army Corps of Engineers picture of the old Hendrix home before they tore it down

About 60 years after Hendrix first started having his visions, the US Army Corps of Engineers began researching potential sites for several very large, experimental industrial plants that needed to be built on a rush basis for some project they would not talk about.   The plants needed to be far enough away from population centers and industrial areas so in the event that they exploded, the damage would be limited. They wanted to find a place that was sparsely settled so that they could quickly evict the people who were there and get started immediately.   They also hoped to find a place that had physical barriers in the case that one plant exploded it would not cause others nearby to also explode.  Access to a dam for water and a lot of electric power was critical.   The further out in the country it was the easier it would be to keep secret.   It needed to be near a rail line and existing road network because that would save time.

So one day the people of the four rural communities in this part of East Tennessee came home to find eviction notices nailed to their door. Some of them were out in the rain within two weeks, some in six weeks. They got a small amount of money for their land, but it was not enough to buy its equivalent somewhere else. And to their amazement, thousands of workers were bused in, a city with hundreds and hundreds of houses and dozens of stores and restaurants was built seemingly overnight, security fences were put up and, strangest of all, very large factories were built behind those fences that had armed guards who promised to shoot you if you did not go away.

These new people chose a name for what was now their community and they chose to modify the name of part of the countryside thereabouts.   They named their town for the same Black Oak Ridge that crazy old John Hendrix had talked about in his visions.  

Only they left out the "Black" and just called it Oak Ridge.

Scarboro?   Never heard of it. 

So as time went by, people remembered crazy old John Hendrix and his visions. You can read more about them in the links below. People marvelled at the amazing story of the man who saw the future and predicted the project that may have won the war.

So what are the possible explanations. On the one hand, Hendrix may have seen the future as described. Who knows, it wasn't particularly written down, it was just something people remembered. Hendrix certainly lived and he was on record for having been institutionalized and people can point to his grave. Maybe he did see the future, or maybe when the future imposed itself so violently on the peaceful citizens of that valley in Tennessee, the pissed-off locals chose to repurpose a member of their community, now deceased, who had truly lived when they said he did and died when they said he did and who had been a little crazy and got put away for a time because of that.  All true, all part of the public record.   Maybe, now that you mention it, this was one of his visions, I seem to recall.

Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, ain't too many people around these days who were around then and would contradict us, so you are going to have to take our word for it, I reckon. And maybe we can make a few dollars selling trinkets and entertaining all those thousands of gullible people who are running to and fro on what used to be our land up there on Black Oak Ridge.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/wp-style/2013/09/13/the-prophets-of-oak-ridge/

Dr. Willis Ware 1920 - 2013

I was devastated yesterday to hear of the passing of one of the most interesting people I have ever met or worked with, Dr. Willis Ware formerly of the RAND Corporation.

Dr. Ware passed away at the far too young age of 93 years old.

Most people at RAND had no idea what he did, just that he was very senior.

I met Dr. Ware at the RAND Corporation when I was just 21 or so years old, and Willis was already some sort of Scientist Emeritus at RAND and while no one seemed to know exactly what he did he, suspiciously, had a three window office and a full-time secretary/assistant. With this information we knew he was powerful beyond measure. They said that he testified before Congress on the issues of privacy, and that of course was important but seemed to only add to the mystery.

Several clues revealed themselves as time went by.

Clue #1 He knew my interest in graphics and he wanted to show me a film he had with a user interface that he thought was interesting. It turned out to be none other than one of the famous films of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis work at MITRE when he was a graduate student at MIT. To this day I consider that user interface to be one of the top five or so I have ever seen.

Clue #2 We were chatting about nothing in particular and he told me the story of how he had worked to bring Dr. von Neumann to RAND after the war and when he was bored at the Institute at Princeton. von Neumann, whose computer architecture you are using while you read my blog, most likely, was going to come to RAND and UCLA and split his time between them. But unfortunately he died suddenly of brain cancer.

Clue #3 Somehow it came to my attention that Willis had received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton in 1939. Look up 1939 in history, recall that the new Intelligence agencies (really the proto-agencies, the ones we know were formed after WWII from these proto-agencies) recruited heavily from the Ivy League and imagine what someone with a PhD in EE might do in the upcoming conflict.

Clue #4 Although Willis did not seem to work on any run of the mill projects at RAND, he did travel every six months and spent a week somewhere in Maryland. Fort Meade, Maryland, as it turned out. In fact, I saw above his secretaries desk an agenda and it said he attended the "SAB" at Ft. Meade, Maryland. Now, what is at Ft. Meade? Well, the National Security Agency is. And what might the SAB be ? Well, it is something called the "Scientific Advisory Board" which meets every six months.

The Scientific Advisory Board of the NSA is the body responsible at a very high level for advising the NSA on technologies of interest and issues that they should be addressing. In short, Willis had some sort of very serious position advising the NSA. A senior spook, at least in part.

Clue #5 Willis and I were discussing WWII and Enigma one day and I told him that I was guessing that there were still secrets from WWII that had not been revealed. And he said to me that he knew for a fact that there were secrets and events from WWII that had not been released and that, in his opinion, they should be.

Clue #6 At random intervals, maybe once or twice a year, Willis would travel on a short trip to Washington, DC. No one knew what he did there, but it was suggested to me, by someone who knew Willis well, that he was used by various elements of the Intelligence Community when it was necessary to liason with another part. In other words, he was some sort of prestigious messenger when some sort of issue or discussion needed to take place. Now, I may have that wrong, or incomplete, and of course it is vague, but I think it still has valid information.

Clue #7 In 1967, DARPA commissioned a report on "Security Controls in Computer Systems".  The report was reissued in 1979.   Written by Dr. Ware, you may find this report on the Cryptome site at http://cryptome.org/sccs.htm

And so, who was Dr. Willis Ware ?

I think he was a pioneer of computing and information technology, and a recognized authority on the impact on policy, particularly the policy of privacy, at very high levels of government. I think he was in some sense a spook during WW II and that he maintained his relationship with the primary user of computers in intelligence, the NSA, and was on their advisory board. He maintained an office at RAND and did his own work because it was a useful platform that kept him in touch with Washington, yet outside the beltway madness that so many succumb to. RAND gave him a certain long term cachet, and RAND management of course loved him because their very raison d'etre is to influence policy in Washington, and clearly Willis did just that.

I also suspect that there is more public history here than I know and will no doubt discover over the next few weeks. Willis was probably involved in the Mathematics Division of the RAND Corporation back when RAND had two mathematics-related departments: abstract and applied.   Computer science, such as it became, came from the applied math department.   When I was with RAND, we had a small computer science department that was in some way derived from these much larger efforts of the past. Today, RAND has no computer science department although there are individual computer scientists and programmers lurking in the hallways. (1)

Finally, Willis is one of the reasons that I am so screwed up today. You see, back then, at RAND, I was treated as a real human being, with intelligence and something to contribute. Today I am treated like garbage by nearly everyone but especially in my own field and it was those expectations that got set at RAND that led inevitably to my downfall.

I will really miss you Willis, wherever you are.

[The NY Times has an obituary of Willis at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/technology/willis-ware-who-helped-build-blueprint-for-computer-design-dies-at-93.html?_r=0]

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1. Part of the reason that RAND had a computer science department(s), was because RAND believed it was of strategic importance to the US Government. As time went by, computer science spread to the more traditional venues of University and Industry and so RAND no longer needed to do that. There were other things that were more important and more in line with their specific missions in the context of Congressional limitations on the maximum size of the annual budgets of places like RAND.

The Mexican Suitcase

In 1979, the brother of a famous photographer wrote a note about his late brother's work on the occassion of that work being featured in the Venice Bienalle, arguably the world's most famous art show, held every two years in Venice, Italy.

He said

In 1940, before the advance of the German army, my brother gave to one of his friends a suitcase full of documents and negatives. En route to Marseilles, he entrusted the suitcase to a former Spanish Civil War soldier, who was to hide it in the cellar of a Latin-American consulate. The story ends here. The suitcase has never been found despite the searches undertaken. Of course a miracle is possible. Anyone who has information regarding the suitcase should contact me and will be blessed in advance.

Four years earlier, in 1975, a colleague of the photographer wrote the brother and explained that he had taken the negatives out of Paris in advance of the Germans and had entrusted it to a Chilean he had met in the street in Bordeaux who promised to take it to a Latin American consulate. Nothing more was ever heard. It was assumed that the photographs were lost forever and presumably destroyed.

But it turns out that somehow, no one knows how, the suitcase, unopened, ended up in the possession of a the Mexican ambassador to Vichy France in 1941, General Francisco Aguilar Gonzalez. General Gonzalez returned to Mexico with the suitcase in his possession and passed away 30 years later, in 1971, possibly without having ever opened it. The suitcase was in the possessions of a woman who was the aunt of a Mexican documentary filmmaker. He inherited the suitcase, opened it, and reviewed the negatives. He realized that they were of the Spanish Civil War and contacted a professor at Queens College who studied the history of the conflict. The professor realized whose photographs these were, and contacted the brother of the late photographer.

The brother was Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center for Photography, and these were the rumored missing negatives of his brother, Robert Capa, arguably the most famous photographer of war in the history of photography.

But Capa was unable to contact the filmmaker who had found the negative and they were never received. Finally in 2004 a special effort was made to locate the person who had inherited the negatives and in 2007,  at the age of 89, Cornell Capa finally received the contents of the suitcase his brother had packed in Paris when the Germans attacked in 1940.

The 126 rolls of black and white negative are still being scanned and the ICP will hold an exhibition for them when they are prepared.

The guy in the center is a journalist named Ernest Hemingway

We must all be grateful that Capa and his friends had used film, of course. Had they been digital, no doubt they would not have survived. The storage media would have completely disintegrated over 60 years, it would be like trying to read a 1,000 miles of punched paper tape.

The complete story of the history of the Mexican suitcase can be found at the following link, at the International Center of Photography website:  http://museum.icp.org/mexican_suitcase/

Magnum Photos, the famous international photography agency, has a discussion of Capa at

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL535353

Imaging Resource Article on the Suitcase:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/04/05/famed-photojournalist-robert-capa-and-the-mystery-of-his-mexican-suitcase