8.19.2003
Enola Gay in reverse
[Posted 4:51 PM by James Panero]
There is a famous scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in which one of the characters watches a war movie in reverse:
It was a movie
about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who
flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took
off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German
fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments
from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked
American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join
the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in
flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous
magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel
containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The
containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous
devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck
more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few
wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.
Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and
everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were
taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America,
where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders,
separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly
women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in
remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide
them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
This image of a backwards bombing-raid, elegant and fantastic as it is, is something like how history is often viewed by the victor. In our present case, that victor is the pc crowd filling our museums and universities and lording over a fiefdom of doting courtiers. It should come as little surprise that the clever Vonnegut has carved out his place in–not just the hippie generation–but now too the postmodern demi-monde of TAs and assistant curators. The fantasy of running time in reverse is a precept of their form of revisionist history.
Movies are easy enough to control–with the twist of a dial movies stop, run backwards, turn off, whatever–but a ton of nuts and bolts is a different matter. Such has been the awkward fate of the Enola Gay–the bombers of bombers that helped end a world war and has since spared future generations from the outbreak of another.
Like the great gates of the Temple of Janus, when the bomb-bay doors of this airplane closed-up over fifty years ago it ushered in an era of peace and prosperity that came with the nuclear age. Yet the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC has been in a tizzy for years about what to do with a killing machine that brought peace (as opposed to, say–in the Vonnegutian line–a peace machine that brought killing).
Over five years ago, Heather Mac Donald wrote an indispensable critique of the Smithsonian that covered some of the controversy surrounding the Enola Gay (ed note: Armavirumque reader Greg Weston points out that Bockscar, the plane the dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, has long been on display without controversy in his hometime of Dayton, in a hanger on the campus of the United States Air Force Museum.)
Now the Enola Gay is back–this time in a hanger of its own outside Washington–in a display that will focus “on the facts to allow people to view it based on their own beliefs.”
The question is, will these facts play out in forward or reverse? That’s up to your “own beliefs,” one supposes.