Dagley had complained that the earlier script for the exhibit said that while the Japanese were planning their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans were making plans to bomb Japan. "Before, there was only one paragraph on Pearl Harbor," Mr.
Dagley said one improvement in the exhibit was a new section on the history of the war in the Pacific before the bombing. Dagley 2d, the American Legion's director of internal affairs and one of the main negotiators, said he was pleased that Smithsonian officials had agreed to the revisions. Marathon meetings during the last two weeks between museum officials and representatives of the American Legion, one of the groups leading the criticism, resulted in the modifications.
"This appears to be part of an ideological campaign of those who wish to say the dropping of the bomb was unnecessary," Mr. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Pacific forces during the war, said the initial low estimate of potential invasion casualties in the exhibit was preposterous. William Manchester, who teaches at Wesleyan University and is the author of a biography of Gen. Mike Fetters, a spokesman for the National Air and Space Museum, where the Enola Gay will be exhibited, said the "script," which is the text of the exhibit, was distributed to veterans groups and scholars for comments at the beginning of the year. Smithsonian officials said they always welcomed comments on how they would present history. The museum now concedes that reliable military estimates ranged from 260,000 casualties in that first phase to one million American casualties if forces had to fight their way across the Japanese islands.Īt issue throughout the Smithsonian debate, which raged through Congress and history faculties, was not only how the bombing was to be presented but also who would get to influence the content of the exhibit, at Air and Space, which is perhaps the most popular museum in the world, with eight million visitors each year. Smithsonian curators initially planned to say that if American forces had invaded Japan, the United States would have suffered 31,000 casualties in the first 30 days of fighting and that this might have been enough to subdue Japan. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left more than 200,000 people dead, injured or missing, according to one estimate. Truman and American policy makers were aware that the bombings would have devastating consequences but accurately gauged that they would end the war sooner and eliminate the need for an invasion, which would have resulted in more casualties for both sides. The prevailing historical view is that Mr. The issue of the potential casualties is at the heart of the effort by some historians to question President Harry S. The museum will also vastly revise the estimate of how many casualties might have resulted if the bombs had not been used and the United States had invaded Japan instead. The exhibit, which is scheduled to open in May, will also omit items that the critics said dwelt to excess on the horrible effects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, attacks that ended World War II.
The critics said that the discussion did not belong in the exhibit and was part of a politically loaded message that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan began a dark chapter in human history. The exhibit featuring the B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, will no longer include a long section on the postwar nuclear race that veterans groups and members of Congress had criticized. After months of criticism by veterans groups and members of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution has agreed to make major changes in its planned exhibit of the airplane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.