Controversial History of the Enola Gay

Re “Ugly History Hides in Plain Sight,” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin (Commentary, Dec. 17): It would be a good idea to list the Japanese casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The display should also contain the number of Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian and Filipino civilians murdered by the Japanese military before the end of the war in the Pacific. Bird and Sherwin also failed to mention the thousands of American sailors and Marines who were killed by kamikaze pilots in the taking of Okinawa early in 1945.

It is clear that Bird and Sherwin want to instill some kind of a guilt trip on the American people because the use of the bombs ended the war quickly without starving millions of Japanese people to death or killing any more American soldiers.

Larry Zini

La Quinta

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Bird and Sherwin parade standard-issue, leftist anti-Americanism in their critique of the Enola Gay. Millions of lives were saved by the atomic bomb; a U.S. invasion and conventional victory would have cost more lives -- both Japanese and American -- than did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As an American, I am proud of the technology and the guts that produced the first atomic bombs, and I offer no apology for their use. Let Bird and Sherwin contemplate Pearl Harbor if they seek a reason for using atomic weapons. Sneak attacks during peacetime, which also kill civilians, evidently do not matter to them. And they have no tears for the British victims of Hitler’s “vengeance weapons” or even the civilian victims of Jimmy Doolittle’s Army Air Force raids.

James F. Glass

Chatsworth

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Bird and Sherwin expressed my thoughts. That the Smithsonian has missed the mark by displaying the Enola Gay as simply a great piece of engineering instead of the first craft to drop the atomic bomb on an enemy does not surprise me. By not depicting the controversial historical event in a rational manner, it took a page from history instead and provided a “Roman-like” remake of history in the name of patriotism. I think it says a lot about the Smithsonian!

Bob Boydston

Garden Grove