Hiroshima Is History: When Is It Time to Move On?

WASHINGTON (Aug. 6) -- They say history repeats itself. I'm not so sure, but controversies over the past do keep coming back.

Today, as a U.S. representative took part for the first time in Japan's annual commemoration of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I read that the son of that mission's commander was upset. Gene Tibbets told Fox News that sending a U.S. delegation there amounted to an "unsaid apology" and was an attempt to "rewrite history."

Paul Tibbets Jr., who piloted the B-29 bomber and later as a Pentagon general stood by ready to launch a nuclear strike during the Cuban missile crisis, never apologized for the devastation unleashed by "Little Boy" on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. The attack and the atomic blast on Nagasaki three days later killed more than 200,000 people but ended World War II and was credited with saving the lives of millions more on both sides who might have died in a U.S. invasion of Japan.

So history tells us. Or does it? I have never been to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a place dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons and the memory of those who died. Never set foot in Japan. But I know a thing or two about historical memory and how it changes over time.

In 1995, as a reporter for USA TODAY, I covered the controversy over the National Air and Space Museum's exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the bombings. The Smithsonian museum planned to display the restored bomber, nicknamed Enola Gay, along with a few artifacts salvaged from Hiroshima. Curators prepared a 500-page exhibit script that explained why the U.S. developed and dropped the bombs and detailed their devastating aftermath.

Veterans groups and conservatives in Congress went ballistic. Critics called the planned show revisionist propaganda that depicted America as a cruel aggressor against Japan and was nothing more than political correctness run amok. Historians and peace groups accused the older generation and their politician supporters of cultural McCarthyism, historical illiteracy and whitewashing the past.

Smithsonian Secretary Michael Heyman, faced with threats from lawmakers to cut off his funding, eventually caved in to pressure and canceled the exhibit. He ordered it replaced with a blander, nuts-and-bolts exhibit focused on the plane itself.

Richard Rhodes, a nuclear historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," was on the committee that reviewed what he called the exhibit's "innocuous" script. In an interview with me today, he recalled the "extraordinary passion" over including a burned watch stopped at 8:15 a.m., the time the bomb hit Hiroshima.

Now, 15 years later, Rhodes was reminded of historian Shelby Foote, who once said it took 100 years "for things to cool down" before scholars could write dispassionately about the Civil War. Today, even as the Pentagon announced that the remains of a missing airman from World War II had been identified, "we're moving up on that marker," Rhodes said.

The Hiroshima ceremony "can be used to cause contention in domestic politics," Rhodes said, but "for us to send an ambassador is a great step forward. I don't know why anybody thinks it has to do with apologizing for anything."

War and Remembrance

President Barack Obama's decision to send Ambassador John Roos to today's ceremony comes amid Senate wrangling over the START arms treaty and the administration's vision of a nuclear-free world. It also is being viewed as a test to gauge reaction ahead of his visit to Japan in November.

No sitting U.S. president has been to the bombed cities. A visit by Obama, Rhodes said, "would be a remarkable world event" in the countdown to zero nuclear arsenals at a time when terrorist groups would love to grab a loose nuke.

Gene Tibbets told Fox he hoped Obama wouldn't go. "This all sounds like, 'Oh, we did you wrong.' That's what it sounds like," he said.

But the head of the military group that led the opposition to the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit said he approved of Roos' participation and favors a presidential visit, though perhaps not this year.

"At some point in time, we have to move past this," said Air Force Association President Michael Dunn, a retired three-star general who spent five years stationed in Japan and often escorted visiting Japanese dignitaries to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Those visits, like Roos' today, are "a sign of respect and an attempt to put that chapter behind us."

Ed Linenthal, an Indiana University historian whose work has explored the links between war and remembrance, said the Hiroshima ceremony was part of a tradition of leaders and veterans coming together in acts of reconciliation.

"There is nothing new or inappropriate to this at all. There's a long history of old enemies coming together -- sometimes as friends, sometimes as people who have moved beyond war to remember," he said. "This idea that somebody is rewriting history by doing this is nonsensical."

But Obama or a future president who does go to Hiroshima must be careful, Dunn said. "He should never, never apologize for the American decision in 1945 to drop the weapons. That chapter in history is closed, and it's behind us as a nation."

Paul Tibbets might have disagreed. Before he died in 2007, he instructed that his ashes be scattered over the English Channel. It was where he loved to fly, he said. It also was a place where anti-nuclear peace activists couldn't gather in protest.

At the Dawn of a New Era

"Best wishes to Andrea Stone -- Remember Wendover."

That's what Paul Tibbets wrote inside a paperback edition of "The Flight of the Enola Gay," his autobiographical account of the mission. It was April 1995, soon after the Smithsonian uproar, and we and four other members of the Army Air Force 509th Composite Group gathered at an abandoned air base in Wendover, a remote town straddling the Utah-Nevada border. The men who dropped the bombs had returned to this once-secret training base to film a documentary about their role in the dawn of an angst-ridden atomic age that would send my generation of schoolchildren ducking for cover beneath our desks.

As I reported in the newspaper, each man insisted his conscience was clear.

"I didn't owe anybody any justification. I did what was right," Tibbets told me.

"The bomb did materially shorten the war, and it did save lives," said Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk, the Enola Gay's navigator. "I've never regretted dropping the bomb."

I listened to these men, by then in their 70s, and could see it their way. Perhaps it was because as Tibbets and his crew prepared for their fateful flight on the Mariana Island of Tinian, my father was toiling in the jungle heat as a B-29 mechanic just south of there on Guam.

Dad was in the same 20th Air Force, but his unit carried out "more conventional" firebombing of the Japanese mainland. Though lesser known today, their incendiary bombs did far more damage than the atomic bombs combined. About 900,000 people were burned to death in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. The nighttime raids injured 1.3 million others and left half the population homeless.

Years later, I wrote about my late father's wartime service and the growing interest among baby boomers in learning more about the World War II generation.

But today, as I read over the story I wrote after that hot, dusty day in Wendover about a long-ago mission that can still stir debate on cable TV, I was struck by a detail I had forgotten.

Despite insisting they had no qualms -- "It wasn't my business to dwell on it," Tibbets told me -- I noticed a monument that had been erected a few years before by members and friends of the 509th. The sentiments it expressed, from the men who dropped the bomb, seemed particularly apt for today.

"The loss of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, are especially recognized in this memorial for their sacrifice to mankind's struggle for a more peaceful world. May this monument stand as a symbol of hope that mankind will reason and work together for the ultimate goal of world peace."