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Visitor comments were overwhelmingly favorable. From 1995 to 1998, the museum displayed the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay in a depoliticized exhibit that drew four million visitors, the most in the museums history for a special exhibition. Under new management, the Air and Space Museum returned to its mission to collect, preserve, and display historic aircraft and spacecraft. The exhibition was concealed in 1995 in response to public and Congressional outrage, and the museum director was fired. The centrepiece of the exhibit was supposed to be the restored Enola Gay, the airplane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. When the museums plan were revealed, initially an article in Air Force Magazine in 1994, a raging controversy ensued. On January 30, 1995, the National Air and Space Museum capitulated to popular and political pressure and scuttled an exhibit. The exhibit, scheduled to open in the spring of 1995, the 50 th anniversary of the end of World War II, would focus on the legacy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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It depicted the Japanese more as victims than as aggressors in World War II. A partially restored Enola Gay, the plane that. In the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institutions National Air and Space Museum laid plans to use the Enola Gay as a prop in a political horror show. In April of 1995, I visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washingotn, D.C. Fifty years after Hiroshima, the airplane flew into controversy of a different sort. The bombing of Hiroshima was a famous event, a defining moment of the 20th century, but the aircraft that flew the mission was largely forgotten and left to deteriorate, until restoration finally began in 1984. 56 Group Seeks Cancellation of Enola Gay Exhibit, New York Times, 20 January 1995, OAH Files. By eliminating the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, the atomic bombs prevented casualties, both American and Japanese, that would have exceeded the death tolls at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. However, these missions brought an end to a war in which 17 million people had died at the hands of the Japanese empire between 19.2 Until the atomic bombs fell, Japan had not been ready to end the war. At Hiroshima, more than half the city was destroyed in a flash, and 80,000 were killed instantly.
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6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The newly-configured exhibit, which opens to the public Wednesday, centers on the front half of the Enola Gay's fuselage and also contains its tail, an engine and a facsimile of the atomic bomb it.