Enola gay plane history
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In the same passionate vein, the more extreme defenders of orthodoxy barely conceal resentment toward what they perceive to be divisive revisionism born of Vietnam-era, antiestablishment, anti-American attitudes. Extreme adherents to this latter, critical or, as it is usually labeled, revisionist view impute less than honorable motives to the administration of President Harry Truman, arguing that the bombs were dropped in order to intimidate the Soviets in the opening stages of the cold war. American scholarship is divided between those who more or less accept the orthodox view that the bombings were necessary to end the war sooner and thus ultimately saved lives and those who insist they were unnecessary since Japanese leaders knew they had already been defeated by the summer of 1945 and other means existed to compel the Japanese leadership to surrender. And perhaps few areas of scholarship have caused as much frustration, because the reader finds himself either at the opposite end of a polarized debate or somewhere in the middle wishing for less vitriol and more dispassionate analysis or at least an appreciation of nuance. Newman did not consult either primary sources or relevant scholarly literature before arriving at his conclusions instead he relied heavily on a conversation with the scientist whose research was at the center of the controversy.įew events have elicited as much passionate scholarship as the atomic bombings at the end of World War II. But he is guilty of the same offense in a brief but highly opinionated discussion of a complex and controversial study of the effects of radiation on workers at nuclear weapons plants. 98), for failing to conduct primary research in the records of the Strategic Bombing Survey in the process of planning the ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit in the early 1990s.
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He is sharply critical of curators at the Smithsonian Institution, whom he claims "bought the Nitze-Blackett narrative in toto" (p. Worse, Newman occasionally applies a double standard in making his judgments. Bernstein, with doctrinaire revisionists. The best chapter in the book deals in an informed and discerning way with the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.īut Newman fails to employ the same analytical skills in his discussion of the traditional position on the use of the bomb he turns a blind eye to the fallacies, or at least the uncertainties, of the "official narrative." Further, he does a serious injustice to scholars who stand between the polar extremes by lumping them, with the partial exception of Barton J. He is equally persuasive in pointing out the flaws and distortions in the revisionist view of President Truman's decision. Newman demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that Nitze's conclusions were not consistent with the evidence the Strategic Bombing Survey collected from high-ranking Japanese officials. Blackett contended in a 1948 book that the United States dropped the bomb more to intimidate the Soviet Union than to defeat the Japanese. Blackett laid the foundations for what later became the revisionist interpretation by challenging the "official narrative." Nitze concluded in the 1946 report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey that Japan would have surrendered by 31 December 1945 without the use of the atomic bomb, the invasion of Japan, or Soviet entry into the war. Newman shows that the competing positions over using the bomb emerged within a short time after World War II. But the book still has value as a lively and engrossing summary of the views of a leading scholar in the controversy over the decision to use the bomb.
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There is little in it that is new or surprising Newman has aired most of his arguments in earlier articles and in a previous volume, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (1995).
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At the same time, the book is partisan, contentious, and, in important respects, unconvincing. Newman's latest entry into the historiographical debate over the atomic bombing of Japan is engaging, vivid, and, in important respects, convincing.