The NASM’s decision to display the Enola Gay in this most historic of years, as the most popular museum in the world, dedicated to preserving and showcasing the most advanced air technology meant that its treatment of this aircraft was always going to be perceived as that of the American Government, as official history. Fifty years later with the commemoration of the end of World War II, this highly emotive event would be brought to the forefront and with it would come a fight between different groups with different agendas and perceptions of that event. The Enola Gay controversy that erupted in 1994 – 1995 with the planned exhibition by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum of the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, had its beginnings on 6th August 1945.
