Wendover Airfield: Where the Bomb Was Born in Secret
Utah
Out here on the Utah-Nevada border, in one of the most isolated corners of the American West, the United States rehearsed the end of the Second World War. The desert scrub, the salt flats, the vast empty sky, all of it made Wendover the perfect place to keep a secret.
Wendover Army Air Base opened in nineteen forty-two as a training facility for heavy bomber crews. By nineteen forty-four it had been quietly assigned a different mission entirely. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets arrived in September of that year to build the five hundred ninth Composite Group, a handpicked unit of roughly seventeen hundred officers and men who would deliver the world's first atomic bombs.
Tibbets chose Wendover for several reasons. The bombing and gunnery ranges were extensive. The base was close enough to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the weapons were being designed, for coordination. And the isolation was total. There were no neighbors to notice strange aircraft, strange cargo, strange behavior.
For nearly a year, the five hundred ninth flew practice runs over the salt flats, dropping dummy bombs shaped like Little Boy and Fat Man to calibrate their fusing, ballistics, and release mechanisms. The project was given the code name Kingman. More than one hundred fifty prototype weapons were tested. Flight crews had no idea what they were ultimately training to do.
Then, on August sixth, nineteen forty-five, Paul Tibbets climbed into the cockpit of a B-twenty-nine he had named after his mother, the Enola Gay, and flew from Tinian Island in the Pacific to Hiroshima. The bomb he released had been perfected in the desert outside this small Utah border town.
The hangar where the Enola Gay was maintained at Wendover still stands. It was named one of America's eleven most endangered historic places. The rest of the old base is a museum and a casino town, sitting quietly at the edge of the salt, holding one of history's heaviest silences.
