Wow. I take half a day off from WIX and look what happens. Well, even though I helped instigate this topic, you guys have done such a good job of laying out the sides that I have not much more to add.
I think rwdfresno's last post illustrates the fallacy of his own position that you can just "state the facts" and avoid politics or interpretation. There are an infinite number of facts to be stated about anything. You have to choose some. The selection you make will result in a "slant."
Consider the very decision that the B-29 Enola Gay and the crew are important and worth preserving or remembering. This position is by no means self-evident. Consider the following quote from the second link I posted yesterday, which by the way is well worth reading if you haven't yet.
Quote:
Strategies of air warfare are certainly a most important historical subject, but this is quite a different one. This has to do with -- and I am looking for a word stronger than "propriety" -- . . . the validity . . . of exhibiting the Enola Gay in this institution. As I see it, she has a noble distinction as an aircraft, like any one of 50 others. The mission over Japan was not in any tactical or operational sense distinctive.
The Japanese were essentially defeated. We were flying airplanes all over the empire, at will. I was the operations officer of the task force at that time -- with Japan and defined ports for us to strike. And except for accidents, we didn't lose any airplanes.
So there was nothing aeronautical about it. The thing that made the mission distinctive was . . . that we used the nuclear weapon for the first time against human beings. . . .
The writer of these words was Admiral Noel Gayler, former commander in chief of Pacific forces and later Director of the National Security Agency, speaking as an advisor to the NASM when it first considered exhibiting Enola Gay. Not exactly an anti-American pinko, although he has turned anti-nuke.
Or consider this position on whether the NASM should display Enola Gay upon its opening in 1976:
Quote:
What we are interested in here are the truly historic aircraft. I wouldn't consider the one that dropped the bomb on Japan as belonging to that category.
That's Barry Goldwater talking!
The Gayler-Goldwater point is that from a technical and broader historical perspective, the Enola Gay was just a delivery system and its crew were highly trained truck drivers. The real point of the mission was THE BOMB and its causes and effects. The aircraft and crew are not really important from a historical perspective except as a focus for talking about THE BOMB.
Now that's just one view, of course, and by placing the Enola Gay and Bockscar prominently on display, NASM and USAFM (sorry I'm a curmudgeon, I'll keep calling it the USAFM no matter what it changes its name to) disagree with Adm. Gayler. They appear to think that the tactical and operational aspects of the mission are important. Or, perhaps, their focus on those aspects are a way of dealing with THE BOMB without actually saying anything important about it.
Now, I don't hold this against the USAFM. The USAFM is more or less explicitly a PR/propaganda device for the USAF and no one would have it be otherwise. THE BOMB was not an Air Force project; its delivery was. So we expect that museum to focus on the USAAF's role in its delivery and that's all well and good.
As for NASM, as a Smithsonian museum, we might reasonably expect that to have reflect a broader picture of American views than merely the military's perspective. Given the military's role and influence in Congress, public opinion, and the NASM's own Advisory Board, which is basically required by statute to be dominated by career military officers, that is perhaps not realistic. So it is not too surprising that the NASM presents things pretty much the way the USAFM does and any deviation from that by a rogue Director gets him burned badly and quickly.
We might also expect the NASM to be a seat of scholarship on aviation history. Good historical scholarship almost always takes a point of view. Historians don't just assemble facts and data about the past, they put them into narratives driven by a thesis that they think and hope is useful in understanding what happened, why, and with what effect. Then they disagree with each other and get into arguments; it is all part of the scholarly process. It is also not in the nature of good history to confine itself arbitrarily and narrowly to just one aspect of something (like the "aviation" component) but rather to address larger issues of society and culture. Such a narrow focus, driven by personal interest in the thing studied for its own sake, is the hallmark of buff literature rather than historical scholarship. Now, again, the NASM is closely watched by military people and vets' lobbyists to be sure that any scholarship it undertakes resembles what the military would do; and military scholarship is to scholarship as military music is to music -- suitable for the services' purposes, but not much good otherwise.
Does all this really matter? Maybe not so much. Enola Gay is an opportunity for serious discourse about THE BOMB, but certainly not the only one. All those liberal-wiggie academic historians, and their reactionary colleagues, have no need of a big shiny aeroplane to study and debate the whys and wherefores of THE BOMB. The Enola Gay exhibit might be an occasion for presenting some of that research to the broader public, but the public may not be interested in, or ready to, hear it. Public discourse on WWII is still dominated by an unreexamined repetition of the themes of wartime propaganda, now overlain by a sloppy layer of greatest-generation sentimentality and opportunistic false analogies to the wars and issues of the present day; this is certainly what comes over the loudspeakers at the airshows we attend. Maybe we need another few decades to see that clearly or maybe, like many long-debunked "facts" about our own revolutionary war, it will be enshrined permanently in national myth. There are certainly those who are ideologically committed to seeing it so.
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I knew there was more than one of us who is sick and tired of all of the big-brained people trying their damndest to force-feed us this pathetic crap about us being wrong for dropping THE BOMB! Get over it already! If you are offended by the sight of the Enola Gay or Bockscar or what those brave men did that flew them, then I say shame on you 
