The men who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 49 years ago to end World War II were in Chicago, finding themselves still in the middle of a fight.
More than 100 surviving members of 509th Composite Group, a crack top-secret unit formed in World War II expressly to carry and drop atomic bombs, began their four-day reunion Thursday at the Fairmont Hotel.
The reunion, held every two years, usually is an obscure affair where the former warriors and their spouses get together to swap stories and renew aquaintances. This year’s meeting, however, comes amid a swirl of national controversy over a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum on the atomic bomb and the end of the war.
A growing chorus of critics have complained that the exhibit, scheduled to open in Washington next May, is tantamount to an apology to Japan for using atomic weapons. One major veterans organization has charged that the exhibit casts the American military as “ruthless invaders” of Japan, while treating the Japanese as hapless war victims.
Begging to differ, Martin Harwit, director of the museum, asked to come to the Chicago reunion to explain to the veterans the revisions that have been made to meet their concerns. The 509th told him not to bother.
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“He’s not going to get a chance to speak to the group because we’re ticked off about the display they’re planning,” said Fred Olivi, 72, the reunion’s organizer. Olivi, a retired Chicago city employee, was co-pilot of the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
The Smithsonian exhibit controversy erupted earlier this year after the museum began circulating a detailed 559-page “script” of the exhibit among veterans groups and historians for comment. Since then the museum has heard a steady drumbeat of criticism attacking curators for a “partisan interpretation” of the war’s end.
Titled “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War,” the display, in its early version, was to concentrate on the last few months of the war.
It was to feature the restored, 60-foot front end of the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
But the exhibit’s “emotional center,” as the museum calls it, would be a large collection of photographs of destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The collection would include vivid life-size photographs of civilian Japanese bomb casualties. They are to be interspersed with artifacts taken from the bombed cities, including bizarrely twisted and melted toys and an incinerated school girl’s lunch box. The articles are on loan from Japanese museums.
Veterans groups have been most incensed by a feature called “Historical Controversies” that would be interspersed through the exhibit.
The questions raised in the “Controversies” feature imply that the decision to use atomic weapons on Japan may have been racist (Would the bomb have been dropped on the Germans?); could have been unnecessary (Was a warning or demonstration possible? Was an invasion inevitable without the bomb? Was the decision to drop the bomb justified?); or might have been a cynical geopolitical exercise (How important was the Soviet factor in the decision to drop the bomb?).
The two atomic bombs, which killed 200,000 people in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki, forced the Japanese to surrender shortly after they were dropped. The surrender canceled American plans to invade Japan, an undertaking that military planners predicted would cause 1 million Allied casualties and 5 million or more Japanese casualties.
The 509th Composite Group was an elite bomber force of 1,700 men cobbled together from America’s best flying units, expressly trained to deliver and drop the world’s first atomic weapons.
Group members were told the bombs were designed to end the war, but the group’s members didn’t know they were atomic weapons. Veterans of the 509th, a notably modest bunch that has never sought to paint their experience as heroic, nonetheless Thursday expressed quiet pride in their role in the war.
“If you would have had something to stop that war almost instantaneously, and then you didn’t use it, it would have been unreal,” said Raymond Gallagher, 72.
Gallagher, a retired Illinois Bell employee and, like his crew mate Olivi, a lifelong Chicagoan, flew out on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions.
Gallagher flew in an accompanying plane that dropped scientific monitoring equipment when the Enola Gay dropped its bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, he was on the crew of Bockscar (named after Chicago pilot Fred Bock) when it dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.
“The bombs stopped the war, and we went home. That’s the end of the story, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
The Smithsonian twice has made major revisions to the exhibit to respond to criticism. Harwit has acknowledged early plans did not do enough to explain Japan’s years of aggression that started the war. Nor, he said, did it balance the Japanese civilian agony the exhibit depicts at the end of the war with the agony Japan caused American civilians throughout the war.
Early in the summer, the museum announced it was adding a 4,000-square-foot introductory exhibit on the causes of the war to the 5,500-square-foot main exhibit. The museum also announced it removed several of the most graphic photographs of Japanese civilians suffering and the “controversies” feature.
Though the exhibit was retitled as “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II,” veteran groups remained unconvinced. Air Force Magazine in this month’s issue charges the exhibit was designed by anti-military revisionist historians, none of whom have military experience.
To make its case, the magazine quoted Dr. Thomas Crouch, a museum official, as arguing against the veterans’ position:
“Do you want to do an exhibition intended to make veterans feel good, or do you want an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan? Frankly, I don’t think you can do both.”
Nonetheless, Harwit is scheduled to explain more modifications to the exhibit on Saturday at the American Legion national convention in Minneapolis.
“We’re examining the latest proposal, but we still don’t think they’re there,” said Phil Budahn, a national Legion spokesman. “They are completely losing sight of the objective here.
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“This is an air and space museum, a place to show the moon rocks and the Spirit of St. Louis, not a place to debate the morality of war. It’s sad that the event that ended the war is becoming the biggest controversy in the 50th anniversary of World War II.”