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Now, the aircraft’s fuselage was headed toward an exhibit that promised to bring those two narratives together in a single museum space. Elsewhere en route, demonstrators from the pacifist Catholic Worker movement unfurled a banner that read Disarm.įor fifty years, these two stories-of a weapon that brought peace and victory, and of a weapon that brought destruction and fear to the world-rested uneasily in American consciousness. One protester sang a song of the hibakusha, those who had survived the atomic bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima (a national peace song in Japan, the reporter noted). For National Public Radio’s reporter pointed out that the aircraft’s route to the museum was not deserted. Louis, and the Apollo spacecraft that brought humans to the moon.Įven though it entered the museum in the dead of night, the Enola Gay was shadowed by another story of war’s end. The aircraft, credited by many with ending a war of unparalleled ferocity, saving countless American lives, and bringing peace to a war-weary world, was now to rest temporarily in the museum that displayed the Wright brothers’ first plane, Charles Lindbergh’s ocean-spanning Spirit of St. Here, under wraps, was the imposing fuselage of the Enola Gay, the famed B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The tube was the front half of the plane that carried the bomb that killed thousands of Japanese on August 6, 1945. A flatbed truck carried a huge tube more than fifty feet long, wrapped in what seemed to be white plastic. At about a quarter to one, under a cloud-covered moon, the reporter began, four police cars cruised down Independence Avenue, escorting what looked almost like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On November 23, 1994, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition informed its listeners that one of the iconic artifacts of World War II had arrived at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.