WENDOVER — Wendover Airfield sits in the middle of one of the largest, flattest chunks of nowhere in the United States: millions of acres of salt and saltbush, surrounded by more of the same. In 1944, that made it isolated enough to hide a secret that would change the world.
The mission to drop Little Boy, the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima 60 years ago today, and Fat Man, the bomb that hit Nagasaki three days later, was fine-tuned at the Wendover Army Air Corps base — under such a cloak of secrecy that only one man on the entire base knew what was really going on there. Only later was it revealed that Wendover was a crucial part of the bombing missions credited with both bringing an end to World War II and ushering in the atomic age, distinctions that are at once heralded and fraught with controversy.
Sixty years later, the isolation and secrecy that served Wendover and America well in the mid-1940s are what keep the old air base from getting the recognition it now deserves, say those who would like to see it turned into a tourist destination. Even the Enola Gay, the famous B-29 that dropped Little Boy, now resides in a museum 2,000 miles away in Virginia.
That doesn't stop Jim Peterson from dreaming, though. Peterson is president of the nonprofit Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation, which he founded in 2001; his son Tom is the group's volunteer historian. Both Petersons envision a Williamsburg-like living museum full of people in World War II uniforms working on remodeled bombers, as well as period-piece USO shows, sleepovers for tourists in renovated barracks, rides in World War II-era planes, and maybe an aviation camp.
Currently there are a small museum and a renovated building that serves as the terminal for casino jets that bring in gamblers from around the West and Midwest.
The living museum would cost about $80 million, Peterson estimates. In the meantime, the foundation is trying to raise at least $5 million to renovate the cavernous, corrugated metal hangar that once housed the Enola Gay. With that as a centerpiece — kind of the equivalent of an anchor department store at a mall — says West Wendover, Nev., city manager Chris Melville, maybe more money would start coming in.
"Hopefully out there, there's an old veteran who's made millions who would think, 'I was stationed there and I'd like to contribute,' " says Melville, who adds that since the air base is a "national gem," the renovation should be a national effort.
The way it was
Because the air base was essentially abandoned after World War II, the buildings — the hangars and barracks and officers club —are frozen in time, although now dilapidated and overrun with desert brush. Even though more than 550 of the original 668 buildings no longer stand, the ones that remain have not been touched by the usual forces (developers, freeways) that have destroyed other air bases of the period.
Except for nearby I-80 and the glitzy casinos across the Nevada border to the west, even the land around the base hasn't changed at all in 60 years. Stand amid the shadscale and greasewood, looking south, and the horizon stretches on, flat and empty, just as it did in 1945.
That's what makes Wendover unique, says Peterson. And it is also what makes it a ghost town.
Here's how secretive the atomic project was, says Peterson: If a manufacturer in Pittsburgh was sending a part to the air base in Wendover, he would mail it to a company in Chicago, which would then repackage it and send it on to the base. The people who made the part and the people who received it wouldn't know who was at the other end.
And if a scientist working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., was flying to Wendover to make some technical adjustments to one of the bomb casings that would eventually house nuclear material, his flight orders would say Kingman, Ariz. Only when he was already in the air would the plane be re-routed to Utah.
At the base itself, the B-29 bombsights were kept in vaults guarded 24 hours a day. Base personnel were followed around by the 400 FBI agents assigned to the airfield.
"You have to remember," Peterson says, "knowing how to make an atomic bomb was the event of the 20th century. They didn't want that technology falling into the wrong hands."
People by the thousands
In the early 1940s, the airfield housed 21 bomb groups that sent tens of thousands of soldiers to the European and Pacific theaters. In its heyday during that period, 17,000 soldiers and some 3,000 civilians lived at the base, which was hailed as the largest bombing and gunnery range in the world.
Then, in 1944, Col. Paul Tibbets was asked to pick an airfield suitable to train pilots and bombardiers for a top-secret atomic mission, code-named the Silver Plate Project. Tibbets, the Air Corps' principal B-29 test pilot, picked Wendover and then assembled what became known as the 509th Composite Group. At that point, the base was reduced to 1,700 troops.
Mont Mickelson, now 82 and living in Bountiful, was a machinist with the 509th. He and his colleagues knew something big was happening around them, something that might even bring closure to the war, but they assumed it was "some sort of super buzz bomb like Germany was using," Mickelson remembers.
The bombs that would eventually be loaded into two of the B-29s, the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, were assembled in buildings that themselves were isolated from the already-isolated main part of the base. The bomb assemblers, and the scientists who would visit each week, were all trying to perfect weapons that could fall from a B-29 and precisely hit a selected target.
"It's one thing to come up with a concept (of a nuclear bomb), another to come up with a deliverable weapon," notes Tom Peterson. The assemblers, scientists and engineers had to devise a weapon that was the right size and shape to fall through the air at a predictable rate and explode where it was supposed to. The flight crews had to figure out how to drop the thing and then turn around fast enough so they weren't blown to bits (although at the time they didn't realize the urgency of executing that 158-degree turn).
Getting ready
There were 150 trial bombing runs over the west desert. In the beginning, the B-29s dropped simulated bombs filled with thousands of pounds of concrete. Later, explosives — minus the necessary nuclear material — were added. At first, the bombs would drop so erratically, Peterson says, that the photographer who was documenting it said the safest place to stand was in the target's bull's-eye.
All 15 flight crews — for the Enola Gay and Bock's Car and for the weather planes and other support planes that went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki — trained at Wendover. By the end of May 1945, Tibbets decided the 509th was ready to move to Tinian Island in the Pacific, where it would continue training missions. Like nearly everyone else in the 509th, Mont Mickelson was shipped out.
"We were told it would perhaps be a risky operation," he remembers. "There would be a chance we may not come back."
Meanwhile, back at the base, the bombs were still being refined, up to the last minute. As late as Aug. 5, 1945, altimeter adjustments were tested for the Fat Man scheduled to be dropped three days after Big Boy.
On a recent morning, a flock of pigeons was startled when Peterson opened the big metal doors of the maintenance hanger that once housed the atomic bomb-carrying B-29s. The birds immediately flew out through a large hole in the roof. In the almost 30 years since the Air Force turned the base over to the city, the hangar has been the repeated victim of both vandalism and the weather.
The hangar is currently being leased as storage for empty fuel tanker trucks and old gasoline pumps. The oddest tenant in the past 25 years was Robert Golka, who used the hangar to experiment with ball lightning, trying to test the theories of Nikola Tesla. Some of Golka's wires still hang from the rafters.
People refer to it as "the Enola Gay hangar," although of course no one called it that back then. The B-29 wasn't given its name until Aug. 5, 1945, the night before the Hiroshima mission, when "Enola Gay" — named for Tibbets' mother — was painted on the plane's nose. The Army Air Corps called the hangar "Building 18-41."
Wendover's claim
Actually, the actual Enola Gay itself probably wasn't at Wendover very long. For at least the first few months, an older style B-29 was used for the training missions. Still, some people feel that Wendover has a claim to the plane — a feeling that was not shared by the federal government, which ultimately restored the Enola Gay and now displays it at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in Virginia.
That display, and an earlier exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the bombings, have engendered both interest and controversy. The 1995 exhibit angered veterans, who felt that it was too pro-Japanese. A group called the Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current Policy complained in 2003 as the Smithsonian prepared to open its Enola Gay display, arguing that the museum was too neutral in its presentation of the bombing missions, with no hint that not all Manhattan Project scientists at the time agreed with the decision to bomb Japan.
There is something unnerving about seeing the replica of Little Boy — signed by Tibbets and his crews — that now sits in the little Wendover museum. In retrospect, we know how gruesome the deaths down on the ground were and how the threat of nuclear war since then has been a danger, as well as a deterrent. The proliferation of nuclear weapons continues.
But in the summer of 1945, the prevailing view was that an atomic bomb was the only way to end the war and prevent continuing deaths and casualties. By some estimates, up to a million lives, American and Japanese, were saved when Japan, stunned by the bombings, capitulated and ended the war. Jim Peterson's father-in-law would have been shipped off to the U.S. invasion of Japan in the fall of 1945 if the Japanese had not surrendered after the Nagasaki bombing.
Preserving Utah's history
It is Wendover's role in the atomic project and the entire war effort that Peterson wants to keep alive, but that's proved to be an uphill battle. Not long ago, Peterson had to persuade the Federal Aviation Administration not to go ahead with plans for the Wendover airport that included the words "bomb pit to be removed." Peterson has had less luck with Congress, where a bill has been introduced to give national historic site designation to all of the Manhattan Project; Wendover is not on the list.
The air base is already on the National Historic Register, but Peterson would like the extra recognition the Manhattan Project bill would give. "The more recognition, the easier it will be to get funding approved," he says.
He's still hopeful about the Williamsburg-style renovation of the base, although he acknowledges "it's a decade-long project. Probably a couple of decades." Peterson, who lives in Sandy, commutes each week to Wendover, where he is the airport manager.
The potential for year-round visitors to a Wendover Historical Airfield living museum is big, says West Wendover city manager Chris Melville, who notes that more than 8 million people pass by on I-80 each year. That's about 23,000 people a day. "Even if you could pull 1 percent, that would be a pretty significant number." In the meantime, the airfield offers its annual air show; this year's is Aug. 27.
And there is also the little museum. Currently it draws about 50 to 75 visitors a week. Earlier this week, Rita Pawliuk was visiting from Vernon, British Columbia. Standing in front of a tiny model of the Enola Gay, with tiny plastic soldiers loading its bomb-bay, she fretted about the future.
"If only we didn't need all that," she said. "But not in my lifetime. No lessons have been learned."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com