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. New B-29s-including the Enola Gay and Bockscar-were brought in to replace the original 15 bombers. Within a week, both men were en route to a new posting on a remote island off the coast of Alaska.īut most of the 509th passed the test, and when they returned to Wendover after Christmas, their training began in earnest. Two enlisted men from the 509th answered the detailed questions of a pleasant “officer,” who said he would soon be joining the unit. What he didn’t tell them was that it was a ploy to test security.Īs 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.
Then, to everyone’s surprise-before the training got under way in earnest-Tibbets granted everyone Christmas leave in December, 1944. “They hated not knowing why they were here.” “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. 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. “That means your wives, girls, sisters, family.” Never mention this base to anybody,” Tibbets told his crews. Phone calls, mail, even off-duty conversations were monitored. The sprawling base was surrounded with barbed wire fences, with certain restricted areas denied to all but a special few. They said we were being investigated by the FBI-that they had undercover agents watching us.” “Everything was highly secret,” Olivi recalled as the anniversary approached. Some wag had already posted a sign reading, “Welcome to Alcatraz.” 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.”įred 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. 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.” 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.
“My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war,” Tibbets wrote in his book, “The Flight of the Enola Gay.” 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. Just the old State Line Hotel-a saloon with a tiny dance place, a few slot machines and a craps table. “In Wendover there was nothing, not even a real town. “I came from the sort of places where there were water and grass and trees,” she said last week. “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. Not many shared Tibbets’ enthusiasm for Wendover. 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. Surrounding the field were miles and miles of salt flats.” Except for the nearby village, with a population of little more than 100, that part of Utah was virtually uninhabited. “I liked what I saw,” he wrote years later. When he got to Wendover, he knew he had found it. Tibbets was looking for the perfect airfield for the job-"an isolated location, the farther from civilization the better.”