ABSTRACT
The Enola Gay controversy proves that the effort to legitimize public memory can become a battle in and of itself. But what is not so clear until one begins exploring the private memories of actual soldiers is the often vast discord between public and private memory of World War II. According to public memory and accompanying public ideology, World War II was a good war, one in which the United States entered the conflict valiantly and heroically to save the world from the evil associated with the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. The hundreds of oral histories that have been collected of soldiers’ memories of World War II impart quite a different viewpoint than the good war notion of public memory. The experience of the Enola Gay exhibition shows the extent to which groups will fight to preserve public memory.
