THIS IS how it was going to be:
On Nov. 1, 1945, 770,000 American troops -- more than five times the number of soldiers who fought at Normandy on D-Day -- would land on Japan's southern island, Kyushu. They would try to occupy half the island -- enough, it was hoped, to force the Japanese to surrender. There was no way to be sure. All anyone knew for certain was that horrific numbers of young men would die.
Already the carnage in the Pacific beggared comprehension. In a futile effort to defend a little island in the Bonins eight months earlier, a speck called Iwo Jima, the Japanese had killed close to 7,000 American Marines and wounded 20,000 more. Nearly every one of the Japanese, some 21,000, had died fighting.
In Okinawa a few weeks later, the butchery had been even more hellish. The Japanese had fought with suicidal fanaticism. With 12,500 Americans dead, and another 36,500 wounded, it had been the bloodiest battle in US naval history. Yet compared with the losses Americans would suffer when they invaded Japan itself, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were just warm-ups.
If the invasion of Kyushu didn't end the war, a second landing would start in March 1946. "Operation Coronet" would send a million and a half US troops onto the beaches near Tokyo. The resistance would be so savage that it would probably take until the end of 1946 to subdue the enemy. Upwards of 500,000 Americans, perhaps 2 million Japanese, would lose their lives.
What averted that catastrophic slaughter was the Enola Gay, the B-29 that delivered the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The explosion and the radiation sickness it caused killed as many as 130,000 Japanese. Up to 70,000 perished when the second bomb was dropped over Nagasaki three days later.
The atomic blasts were horrible. Their awfulness still haunts. But the bombs halted the war that Japan had begun. And as a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans didn't die young.
Fittingly, the Smithsonian Institution plans to mark the 50th anniversary of these pivotal events with an exhibit featuring the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum next year. What is not fitting is the tilt that the Smithsonian's curators seem determined to impart to the exhibit.
"The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II," which will open in May 1995, was conceived not as a balanced presentation of how and why the Pacific war ended as it did, but as an emotional attack on the US use of the bomb.
The script, tendentious and manipulative, plays up the suffering endured by Japanese civilians during the war and the mutilation caused by US strategic bombing. It portrays the United States and the Allies as militaristic and racist. Japan is depicted as yearning for peace -- a yearning thwarted by the US insistence on unconditional surrender. Ninety-six photographs have been chosen to show Japanese casualties of the Pacific war and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To convey the deaths of Americans, there will be seven.
Through so-called "controversy sidebars," the exhibit intends to challenge the view that the bomb was used to end the war and save lives. Instead, visitors will be encouraged to ponder a series of revisionist suspicions: "Would the bomb have been dropped on the Germans?" "Did the demand for unconditional surrender prolong the war?" "How important was the Soviet factor in the decision to drop the bomb?" "Was a warning or demonstration possible?" "Was an invasion inevitable without the bomb?" "Was the decision to drop the bomb justified?"
In all fairness, the exhibit could be worse. In fact, it was worse. Blistering complaints from veterans' groups, the Center for Air Force History, and Air Force magazine have forced the Smithsonian to soften the angry, politicized -- even anti-American -- tone its curators have chosen. As recently as May, the script included such history lessons as this one:
"For most Americans, this war was fundamentally different from the one waged against Germany and Italy -- it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism."
Western imperialism? It was not Westerners who proclaimed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, invaded Manchuria, Malaya, and the Philippines, devastated Nanking, mass-raped Korea's young women, bombed Pearl Harbor, and conducted the Bataan Death March. The theme of "Japan as Victim" would be appalling in a 9th-grade term paper. In a Smithsonian Institution script, it is stupefying.
Twenty-four members of Congress, led by Massachusetts Representative Peter Blute, have written the Smithsonian's secretary, Robert McC. Adams, to express "concern and dismay" about the institution's plans for the Enola Gay exhibit. Retired Air Force Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets -- in 1945 he was the young colonel, commander of the 509th Composite Group, who flew the Enola Gay to Hiroshima -- spits on the exhibit as "a package of insults." Are they wrong?
Forty-nine years ago this month, America wept with relief and danced with joy to learn that the sacrifice of its boys could finally stop. Japan, its warmongers crushed at last, would soon taste the blessings of liberty and be endowed by its conqueror with the gift of democracy. The smoking ruins of Hiroshima would serve as a warning so intimidating that for half a century no despot has dared use atomic weapons -- nor provoke their use.
All this was part of the Enola Gay's payload, too.
Because Colonel Tibbets completed his mission that August morning in 1945, the world was made a better place. Those who would warp history to teach something different -- whether in the propaganda of our enemies or the galleries of the Smithsonian -- slander the United States and merit the ridicule of honest men.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)