![sparknotes history wars the enola gay sparknotes history wars the enola gay](https://cdn.britannica.com/83/22983-138-ADD07B68/Japan-Hiroshima-B-29-Superfortress-Enola-Gay-dropping-August-6-1945.jpg)
![sparknotes history wars the enola gay sparknotes history wars the enola gay](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266475501i/116231._UY200_.jpg)
Custer and the Seventh Cavalry into a historic site where different-often clashing-stories could be told. After all, for many years I had studied battles over battlefield memorialization, clashes over "sacred ground." In the late 1980s, I had spent much time with National Park Service personnel as they struggled to transform the Little Bighorn battlefield from a shrine to George A. 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.When, in the fall of 1993, Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), asked me to serve on an advisory committee for that museum's upcoming Enola Gay exhibit, I was excited. 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. 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.
![sparknotes history wars the enola gay sparknotes history wars the enola gay](https://theaviationist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Enola_Gay_81-9471-678x381.jpg)
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.
![sparknotes history wars the enola gay sparknotes history wars the enola gay](https://cdn.britannica.com/98/100998-050-A9BF7D25/bomb-pit-B-29-Superfortress-Enola-Gay-Japan-Aug-6-1945.jpg)
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). 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.