I know that drives some people nuts, but I didn’t see how protestors could throw paint at this plane yet leave the FDR Memorial or the Truman Museum unscathed. I guess it is a lot like the guns don’t kill people, people kill people. If that plane was downed, then another would have taken it’s place (though there is some interesting debate about the existence of a Third Atomic Bomb mission). If the Enola Gay had been shot down, the other plane ( Bockscar) would have carried out it’s orders. It was just a tool of the pilots who flew, and they, in turn, were just a tool of the miltiary command authority that tooks it’s orders from the President of the United States. The aircraft was named after the mother of pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. It was the first time the explosive device had been used on an enemy target, and it destroyed most of the city. The plane is just sitting there, cold and lifeless, a bunch of metal like a thousand other planes I’ve seen before, although tt’s rather shiny being all silvery with no paint. Enola Gay, the B-29 heavy bomber that was used by the United States on August 6, 1945, to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
A couple of Japanese tourist took pictures in front of the nose (go figure).
The plane is the middle of the museum, but from the catawalk (which is the only real way to view it) it seems rather quiet. 100,000 people, but it didn’t really come across that way.