The Enola Gay, the Fifty-Year Road to Restoration, and the Smithsonian Exhibit That Cost a Director His Job

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 is today one of the most visited aircraft in the world - fully restored, suspended from the ceiling at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Getting it there required not just a fifty-year restoration effort, but surviving one of the ugliest institutional fights in Smithsonian history.

What Made the B-29 Revolutionary

The B-29 was the most technically ambitious bomber of the Second World War. It flew pressurized, with remote-control gun turrets operated by gunners seated inside a warm cabin, targeting through periscopic sights. It cruised above 30,000 feet - out of reach of most Japanese interceptors - with a range exceeding 3,000 miles. Four Wright Duplex Cyclone radials, each producing 2,200 horsepower, drove it.

Boeing’s development program nearly collapsed under its own weight. Early engines ran dangerously hot. In February 1943, a B-29 caught fire during a test flight over Seattle and crashed into a meat-packing plant, killing the entire crew including test pilot Eddie Allen. The program had enemies in Washington who wanted it canceled.

General Hap Arnold pushed it through. He understood what high-altitude, long-range bombers over Japan would mean.

The Aircraft and Crew Behind the Mission

The specific aircraft, serial number 44-86, was built at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Omaha, Nebraska and delivered to the Army Air Forces in May 1945. Months earlier, Colonel Paul Tibbets had been quietly assembling the 509th Composite Group at Wendover Army Air Field in the Utah salt flats - far from anyone who might ask questions. His crews flew training missions carrying inert bomb shapes until the procedures were second nature.

The night before the mission, Tibbets had his mother’s name painted on the nose: Enola Gay Tibbets. He told no one he was going to do it.

The crew numbered twelve men. Captain Theodore Van Kirk navigated. Major Thomas Ferebee served as bombardier. In the bomb bay sat Little Boy - a gun-type uranium weapon approximately ten feet long, 28 inches in diameter, weighing roughly 9,700 pounds.

August 6, 1945: The Mission

At 2:45 AM, Enola Gay rolled down the two-mile runway at North Field on Tinian, heavily loaded, and used nearly every foot of it before lifting off into the dark over the Pacific. Weather reconnaissance aircraft had already reported: Hiroshima was clear.

At 31,600 feet, at 8:15 AM local time, Ferebee released Little Boy. The bomb fell for 43 seconds.

The crew executed a 59-degree break turn at maximum power, putting distance between themselves and the detonation point. The shockwave reached them roughly 40 miles from the blast - tail gunner Sergeant George Caron later described it as feeling like a telephone pole swung hard against the aircraft, twice. When they turned to look back, a column of smoke was already climbing above 30,000 feet.

Enola Gay landed on Tinian seven hours after takeoff. General Carl Spaatz pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on Tibbets on the tarmac, flight suit still on. Within weeks, the war was over.

Neglect: How Close We Came to Losing Her

In the summer of 1946, Enola Gay flew one more significant mission - observation duty during atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. After that, she drifted through the postwar bureaucracy. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. In 1949, she was formally transferred to the Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian had nowhere adequate to put her.

Enola Gay spent years sitting outside at Park Ridge, Illinois, near Chicago, in the open air. Souvenir hunters stole switches from the cockpit. Someone cut a chunk of aluminum from the fuselage. The nose glazing - the large plexiglass greenhouse where Ferebee had worked - cracked and yellowed. Control surfaces rotted. A reporter visiting in the mid-1950s described the aircraft as a rusting hulk. He was not wrong.

The Smithsonian eventually moved the aircraft, disassembled, to its Silver Hill storage facility in Maryland. Fuselage separated from wings, engines stored elsewhere. Veterans of the 509th Composite Group spent decades writing letters and showing up in congressional offices demanding proper preservation. For years, little happened.

The Restoration

In 1984, the National Air and Space Museum finally launched a serious, funded restoration effort. Conservators rebuilt corroded fuselage sections, repaired the flight deck, gun blisters, and bomb bay, tracked down scattered original components, matched paint, and rewired the aircraft. The result is extraordinary: an airplane left to rot outdoors for decades looks today as though it could be towed to a flight line.

The Exhibit That Ended a Director’s Career

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II approached in 1995, the Smithsonian planned a major exhibit around the restored aircraft titled “The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War Two.” The exhibit script was ambitious. It presented photographs of Japanese victims, examined the internal American debate about whether the bomb was necessary, and explored the argument that Japan might have surrendered without it.

The reaction was swift. The Air Force Association, the American Legion, and a broad coalition of veterans organizations accused the museum of revisionism - of framing America as an aggressor in a war it had not started, and of casting doubt on a decision that, in the veterans’ view, ended the Pacific War and saved lives on both sides. Congress got involved. Resolutions were introduced. There were hearings on Capitol Hill, protests outside the museum, and bags of incoming mail.

The museum revised the exhibit script. Then revised it again. With each revision, more contextual material was cut - the victim photographs, the internal debate, the alternatives that had been considered. Veterans groups remained unsatisfied.

In January 1995, Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman canceled the full exhibit. The museum would display only the forward fuselage, with limited interpretive text focused on the crew and the mission. Heyman’s stated position: mounting an exhibit on a subject this contested, at an institution sustained by public funds, was simply not workable.

Martin Harwit, director of the National Air and Space Museum, resigned.

He later published a book about the episode titled An Exhibit Denied.

What the Controversy Actually Tells Us

Aviation museums are, on their face, about aircraft. But aircraft carry human decisions - courage, tragedy, and choices made under impossible pressure with incomplete information. The Enola Gay cannot be displayed without interpretation, and whatever interpretation is offered, someone will say it was wrong.

Tibbets went to his grave in 2007 stating he had no regrets and had never lost a night’s sleep over the mission. Van Kirk said it was the right call given what they knew at the time. Caron said much the same. These were not callous men. They were professional military aviators who flew the mission they were ordered to fly and believed to their last days that it shortened the war.

Where She Is Today

The Enola Gay has been on display at the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center since the facility opened in 2003. She is fully restored and suspended above the floor, with a placard describing the mission factually. Docents at Udvar-Hazy report that visitor reaction to the Enola Gay is unlike anything else in the building - more affecting than the Concorde, the SR-71 Blackbird, or the space shuttle Discovery.

For pilots specifically, there is something additional: understanding exactly what it took to fly a pressurized four-engine bomber across 3,000 miles of open Pacific in 1945, and looking at those four radials and knowing what they were asked to do.

There are a handful of surviving B-29s across the country. Two are airworthy - FIFI, operated by the Commemorative Air Force, and Doc, maintained by a group in Wichita, Kansas. Both have flown at airshows.

The Enola Gay does not fly. She does not need to.

Key Takeaways

The B-29 was the war’s most technically advanced bomber - pressurized, high-altitude, with remote-controlled armament - and its development program nearly failed before General Hap Arnold forced it through
Colonel Paul Tibbets named the aircraft after his mother the night before the mission; the crew of twelve included navigator Theodore Van Kirk and bombardier Thomas Ferebee
After the war, the Enola Gay sat outdoors for years and was stripped by souvenir hunters before a funded restoration began in 1984
The 1995 Smithsonian exhibit controversy - over how much context to provide around the bombing decision - ended with the exhibit canceled and NASM director Martin Harwit resigning; his account is documented in An Exhibit Denied
The aircraft is on permanent display at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and is consistently reported as the most emotionally affecting exhibit in the building