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Enola Gay
Enola
Gay: Mission to Hiroshima
by Gordon Thomas, Max Morgan-Witts
Hardcover (1995)
Excellent. Well researched information and
fast paced.
From the very beginning this narrative grabs your attention. It wasn't until
one hour away from Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, that Enola Gay's pilot, Paul W. Tibbets
turned around and announced to his crew that they were about to drop the world's first atom bomb.
The crew was handpicked by Tibbets. Their training was so secret and
compartmentalized that they didn't even discuss it among themselves.
They all
"knew", but they didn't "know" until they were told.
Survivors of "Little Boy" were also interviewed for this story.
Michelle deBreuil Farrell - Military Aviation Photojournalist.
Martin Harwit's An Exhibit Denied is a cautionary tale
about what happens when politics intrudes on the objective quest for truth.
The year 1995 marked the 50th anniversary of the flight of the Enola Gay, the plane that
dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
In preparation for that anniversary, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space
Museum began work on an exhibit that would not only reprise the events surrounding the
bombing, but would also examine the bomb's impact on people -- both Japanese and American,
civilian and military. Under the guidance of Martin Harwit, a former professor of
astrophysics at Cornell University, the planned exhibit included, among other things,
Japanese civilian artifacts from the bombing and documents showing that high-ranking
military leaders such as Dwight D. Eisenhower had grave
doubts about dropping the bomb. Most controversially, the exhibit did not
support the commonly held belief that the bombing saved countless lives by preventing a
land invasion, and this is what eventually led to its downfall. Harwit pointed
out that there was no way of knowing how the war would have ended without bombs; the
American Legion national commander demanded that President Clinton shut the exhibit down.
What followed was a donnybrook of epic proportions as the media, the Republican-dominated
Congress, and veterans' lobbying groups all portrayed Harwit's attempt to present the
Enola Gay in an objective light as antipatriotic, left-wing propaganda.
Eventually, Harwit was dismissed and the Enola Gay exhibit was drastically
rewritten. In An Exhibit Denied, Martin Harwit once again brings his
scientific method to the telling of this story, presenting both sides of the argument and
letting the facts speak for themselves. What those facts tell us is truly
disturbing.
The New York Times Book Review, Murray Sayle
You may be looking for the famous generals of the US civil
war, the hunt for Osama bin
Laden, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis
or the
holocaust,
Vietnam or the Second World War, weapons through the
ages, US Military
Regulation Dress Swords, Medieval
Swords, costumes and uniforms,
Napoleon Bonaparte, the French
Revolution, Masonic Pope
or
Royal Regalia or GI Joe.
Australian Order of Precedence
Missile Crisis in Cuba - President John F. Kennedy - Bay of Pigs
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