Remote Utah Town Became Launching Pad for A-Bomb

It was the fall of 1944, and Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets was looking for the perfect airfield for the job--”an isolated location, the farther from civilization the better.”

When he got to Wendover, he knew he had found it.

“I liked what I saw,” he wrote years later. “It was remote in the truest sense. Except for the nearby village, with a population of little more than 100, that part of Utah was virtually uninhabited. Surrounding the field were miles and miles of salt flats.”

It was here, just outside the lonely desert town that straddles the Utah-Nevada state line, that Tibbets’ men undertook a project so secret that most of them did not know what it was all about until it was over--assembly of the only atomic bombs ever used in war, and training of the crew that dropped the first on Hiroshima 50 years ago today.

Not many shared Tibbets’ enthusiasm for Wendover.

“I nearly died when I first saw it,” said Nita Wadsworth, then a 28-year-old bride whose civilian husband had been called in to work on the project.

“I came from the sort of places where there were water and grass and trees,” she said last week. “In Wendover there was nothing, not even a real town. Just the old State Line Hotel--a saloon with a tiny dance place, a few slot machines and a craps table. It was terrible.”

Wendover is a little bigger now--with a population of 5,000 and a clutch of garish casinos on the Nevada side that cater to the travelers on Interstate 80.

But what’s left of the airfield on the southeast edge of town is still much the same--a scattering of wooden World War II barracks, storage sheds, administrative offices and support structures, dominated by a huge, rusting metal hangar.

During the brief months between September, 1944, and July, 1945, massive four-engine B-29 bombers--then the largest operational planes in the world--were rolled into that hangar for maintenance. One of those bombers was the Enola Gay--named after Tibbets’ mother--the plane he piloted on the bombing run over Hiroshima. Another was Bockscar--named by its training pilot, Fred Bock--the aircraft that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 12, 1945.

Tibbets, now a retired Air Force general and aviation executive, was a 29-year-old veteran of World War II’s air battles over Europe when he was summoned to an Army Air Corps conclave in Colorado and told he would be commanding a force assembled to deliver the most powerful explosive devices yet known to man.

“My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war,” Tibbets wrote in his book, “The Flight of the Enola Gay.”

Tibbets was given 15 B-29 bombers, 1,800 men and a secret password--Silverplate--that would permit him to requisition whatever else he wanted on a top-priority basis. He said he selected the isolated Wendover site because “there was no place nearby for fun-loving men with six-hour passes to get into trouble and leak information.”

Most of his men were chosen from the 393rd Bomber Group, which he reorganized into the 509th Composite Group--a designation, he said, “that would confuse other military people and arouse their unconcealed curiosity in the months to come.”

Fred Olivi, now a retired civil engineer living in Chicago, was a 23-year-old 2nd lieutenant when he arrived at the railroad depot in Wendover in the fall of 1944. Some wag had already posted a sign reading, “Welcome to Alcatraz.”

“Everything was highly secret,” Olivi recalled as the anniversary approached. “It got pretty heavy. They said we were being investigated by the FBI--that they had undercover agents watching us.”

The sprawling base was surrounded with barbed wire fences, with certain restricted areas denied to all but a special few. Phone calls, mail, even off-duty conversations were monitored.

“Don’t ask what the job is. . . . Stop being curious. . . . Never mention this base to anybody,” Tibbets told his crews. “That means your wives, girls, sisters, family.”

Tibbets figured that his men would hate the place from the outset, and he was right, according to “Ruin From the Air,” a history of the project by Don Thomas and Morgan Witts.

“They hated the bleaching heat, the inhospitable desert, the primitive accommodations, the dust, the rancid drinking water, the termites, the rats and mice, the sheer remoteness of their position,” Thomas and Witts wrote. “They hated not knowing why they were here.”

Then, to everyone’s surprise--before the training got under way in earnest--Tibbets granted everyone Christmas leave in December, 1944. What he didn’t tell them was that it was a ploy to test security.

As the men of the 509th headed for home, they were met at the Salt Lake City railroad station by undercover operatives posing as solicitous civilians and friendly servicemen.

Two enlisted men from the 509th answered the detailed questions of a pleasant “officer,” who said he would soon be joining the unit. Within a week, both men were en route to a new posting on a remote island off the coast of Alaska.

But most of the 509th passed the test, and when they returned to Wendover after Christmas, their training began in earnest.

New B-29s--including the Enola Gay and Bockscar--were brought in to replace the original 15 bombers. The new planes had improved engines and larger bomb bay doors and were stripped of heavy armament to permit the aircraft to maneuver better at high altitudes.

Twelve-hour days were the rule rather than the exception. Aware of the prestige and urgency--if not the precise nature--of their mission, the men bent to their tasks without complaint, according to Tibbets.

Crews made hundreds of practice bombing runs over the Mojave Desert and the Salton Sea in Southern California. Additional runs were made over the Caribbean so the crews would gain experience navigating over the ocean.

The test bombs were full-sized mock-ups of the real thing--the long and slender uranium “Little Boy” to be dropped on Hiroshima and the bulbous plutonium “Fat Man” that would fall on Nagasaki.

Most of the mock-ups were filled with concrete, but some of the Fat Man mock-ups contained everything but the nuclear components--including large quantities of conventional explosives.

On one Salton Sea run, a consulting engineer accidentally dropped one of the explosive Fat Man mock-ups too soon. The bomb narrowly missed the town of Calipatria, burying itself in a hole 10 feet deep but failing to explode. Security men raced to the scene with bulldozers and quickly erased all evidence of the mishap.

Meanwhile, in buildings out on the Bonneville Salt Flats--a mile or more from the main base at Wendover--men such as Joe Badali, now a 73-year-old engineer living in Bountiful, Utah, labored at the painstaking task of assembling the test bombs, working out hundreds of “bugs” that had to be eliminated if the real things were to work.

It was tough, exacting work, Badali said recently, with repeated modifications needed to achieve the high degree of reliability required by the mission.

Tibbets was aware of the pressures, and regular military regulations often were eased. Badali, then a corporal, said enlisted men and officers addressed each other on a first-name basis, and the men were urged to catch a moment of relaxation whenever they could.

With a target date of early August fast approaching, the men finally were told a little more about their mission.

“One day a sergeant came over, patted a bomb and said, ‘This here’s an atomic bomb. If it went off, there’d be a hole where Utah used to be,’ ” Olivi recalled.

According to historians, three nuclear bombs were assembled at Wendover--the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima and two Fat Man bombs, one of which fell on Nagasaki. The nuclear components of the Hiroshima bomb were not installed until it reached the Pacific island of Tinian. The plutonium core of the Nagasaki Fat Man was emplaced at Wendover.

Badali said he helped put together the Hiroshima bomb.

“The day we assembled it they took a lot of pictures,” he said. “We knew it was very special.”

Within hours, the planes, crews and bombs of the 509th left Wendover forever, winging their way west to Tinian and their dates with history. Cleanup crews moved in swiftly, dismantling the bomb assembly buildings and erasing any traces of nuclear activity.

For years, no one in the town was quite sure what the 509th had been all about. Winter winds and summer sun took their toll, scarring the buildings on the silent air base.

The Air Force eventually abandoned the place, and the city of Wendover claimed it as a civilian airfield, now used occasionally by older airliners flying in gamblers on cut-rate tours. Someone finally put up a monument in town explaining the role of the 509th.

Chris Melville, the airport manager, took a visitor on a tour of the base last week, pointing out the old steel control tower, the target range the bombers used to test their machine guns, the bomb-loading pits, the munitions bunkers and the crumbling foundations where the bomb assembly buildings once stood.

Lying in a ditch beside one of the pits was a crumpled dummy bomb, its Army Air Corps insignia still legible beneath 50 years of rust. It was a mock-up of Little Boy.

Olivi and Badali were among the 509th veterans who finally returned to Wendover for a reunion five years ago. They were amazed at the toll time has taken.

“It was kind of an eerie feeling,” Badali said. “Almost like the whole thing never existed.”

* ATOMIC LEGACY: Diagram and chronology of the bomb that changed history. A4