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One of the bins in the shop is cluttered with wing sections, striped fabric, fuselage stringers and bulkheads. No plane is immediately discernible in this jumble of disparate parts. You stare for a few seconds, and then the puzzle begins to come together -- a Hawker Hurricane. You drift back 49 years, and you can hear again the urgent voice of Edward R. Murrow coming over the old cathedral radio, describing the dogfights above him in the Battle of Britain. Hurricanes, though less glamorous than the legendary Spitfires, took more punishment and could be patched up and sent back into battle quicker. "I'm an Anglophile," shrugs Dave Peterson, 39, who is directing the Hurricane's restoration. Peterson's British-born mother watched the great air battle and passed on her stories. "Hurricanes were the underdogs," says Peterson. "They stopped the Germans. I like that."
The Enola Gay, shorn of its wings, its long fuselage in two parts, commands center stage in this singular historical drama. There is something spiritual and awesome about walking up to the silver flank with the stencil that was put on a few days after the B-29's famous mission: FIRST ATOMIC BOMB, HIROSHIMA -- AUG. 6, 1945.
William Stevenson has worked up in the bomb bay, and he says softly, "It's eerie. There are not many artifacts about which you can say, 'That altered the world.' This one did." You know what Stevenson is talking about when you climb into the plane's greenhouse nose, and you try to imagine how the nuclear fireball must have etched the day with its hideous brightness.
There are two plywood circles showing where gun turrets were taken out to save weight when hauling the 9,600-lb. Little Boy atom bomb. Back in the bomb bay work is going on to reconstruct the single hook used to suspend and release the bomb. A normal double hook for bombs was abandoned by the mission planners, who feared, if one malfunctioned, the armed bomb might dangle in the rack like hell on a tether. You remember the day 44 years ago on a college campus when the news came of the Enola Gay's successful drop and the public dawning of the nuclear age, how you sat up most of the summer night talking and wondering.
The Garber Facility is named for a diminutive 90-year-old man who still goes to work every day as historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution and has done more than any other person to preserve the record of the nation's great venture into flight. Paul E. Garber was born just as the Wright brothers began to inquire about flying machines. When Garber was five, his uncle gave him a kite, and his fascination with the sky was fixed for a long lifetime.
At nine, Garber read in the evening Star about an airplane demonstration. He mooched 50 cents from his father and hopped the Washington trolley to Arlington National Cemetery. When he stepped down, he heard a strange sound, looked up and saw Orville Wright steer his Military Flyer above him with Lieut. Frank Lahm, one of the first military pilots, at his side. Garber ran up the hill to Fort Myer, where President William Howard Taft was witnessing the birth of American air power. Years later, Garber, by then a friend of the Wright brothers, acquired both their original plane and the Military Flyer for the Smithsonian.