Wendover: Where the Enola Gay Crew Trained

The airfield at Wendover, Utah, looks unremarkable from a highway, just a flat strip of tarmac beside the salt flats near the Nevada line. But the massive hangar here holds one of the most consequential secrets of the Second World War. In nineteen forty-four, the Army Air Forces brought the five hundred ninth Composite Group to Wendover to train in absolute secrecy for a mission no one outside a handful of generals and scientists fully understood.

The crews flew modified B-twenty-nine Superfortresses, practicing high-altitude drops of a single enormous bomb before peeling into a steep diving turn. The target was Japan. The bomb was atomic.

The Enola Gay and her sister planes flew from Wendover through Tinian Island to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August nineteen forty-five. The base closed in nineteen sixty-nine, and the complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five. The B-twenty-nine hangar, once named one of America's eleven most endangered historic buildings, has since been stabilized and houses a small museum.