To many people, Wendover is the gateway to the glittering gambling casinos just across the Nevada border. They drive past the dilapidated rows of buildings near the airport south of Interstate 80 with no idea this was once the Wendover Army Airfield – where crews trained to drop the world’s first atomic bombs.

Some of the airfield has been restored to those World War II days, when it bustled with 17,500 soldiers and 2,000 civilian staff. Here, the top-secret 509th Composite Group helped fine-tune the world’s first atomic bomb and trained B-29 flight crews to deploy the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The ensuing destruction led to the end of the war.

More than 1,000 B-17 and B-24 bomber crews trained at the airfield ended up conducting combat missions around the world during the war, including bombing Germany and supporting the D-Day invasion.

“In my personal opinion, the airfield is one of the greatest assets in the state of Utah to commemorate our involvement in World War II,” said Teryl Hunsaker, a former Tooele County commissioner who helped support the airfield’s ongoing restoration.

Visitors venturing here today can see the hangar that once housed the Enola Gay and Bockscar, the two aircraft that dropped the bombs. The John T. Brinkman Service Club houses a museum with artifacts such as flight uniforms, equipment, weapons and a replica of the Little Boy atomic bomb, signed by the Enola Gay flight crew that dropped it over Hiroshima. People can take a stool at the bar and imagine young airmen toasting each other, or check out the entertainment hall, where soldiers once danced to big-band music with young women bused in from Salt Lake City.

“Wendover is the most original training base left in America,” said Tom Petersen, historian for the Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation, which spearheaded the restoration. “There are parts and pieces elsewhere around the country, but Wendover really gives a visitor the complete picture. The amount of national and state history here is incredible, and it’s right here in your backyard.”

The airfield has become a destination for tourists and a gathering place for community events in this town of 1,500, said Mike Crawford, Wendover’s former three-term mayor.

Growing up in Wendover, Crawford remembers sneaking through the base’s barbed wire fence to play hide-and-seek in the abandoned buildings, and racing his Corvette on the old runways.

Now when he comes to the airfield, he’s more likely to be presiding over the city employee Christmas party in the Brinkman Club or a “Wings and Wheels” car show in the Enola Gay hangar.


A Bustling Wendover

Wendover was a small railroad town of around 100 residents when the Army began construction on the base in 1940. Its biggest claim to fame was its proximity (10 miles) to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where racing enthusiasts were setting land-speed records.

Wendover’s isolation – about 120 miles from Salt Lake City – plus its excellent flying weather and railroad service made it a choice base location. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought America into the war in December 1941. A few months later, Wendover was activated as a heavy bombardment
training base.

Helen Hutchinson Wahlstrom remembers the sudden influx of people during her childhood. “Wendover really changed when the soldiers came,” she said. Her father, Lind Hutchinson, worked for the Western Pacific Railroad. Her mother, Myrtis, taught at the town’s only elementary school.

Because of Wendover’s desert climate, few houses had lawns and flower beds, so the Hutchinsons’ well-kept yard became an oasis for soldiers. “I think they were homesick for some greenery, and they would come over and sit on our lawn because there wasn’t that much to do,” Wahlstrom said. “My mother would make cookies for them. I still remember a lot of their names, and I often wondered if they ever came home from the war.”

Married soldiers’ families began arriving before accommodations were completed, she said. “They were desperate for a place to stay, and some of the wives occupied my bedroom and my brother’s bedroom for a time.”

Some military wives weren’t prepared for rural living. When one of the officer’s wives moved into a nearby house, Wahlstrom and her mother taught her how to use a coal stove.

Despite the worries of war, the base brought a wealth of recreation to isolated Wendover families.

“I had a pass to go on the base, and they had a bowling alley, swimming pool and a movie theater, and they brought in different shows to entertain the troops,” said Wahlstrom, who now lives in Sacramento, California.

“I got to see Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Wendover was a different kind of town, there were so many people coming and going that it was actually pretty diverse, and I absolutely loved it growing up.”

The base, with thousands of single men, also boosted the gambling industry, which was legal across the Nevada border and thrives to this day. The first casino was the Stateline, which straddled the border between Utah and Nevada. As clubs and casinos sprang up, so did a new town, West Wendover, Nevada.

Sandi Hughes Kimbrell and her teenage girlfriends sneaked into a Halloween dance at the Stateline, where she met Staff Sgt. Cletus Kimbrell, whom she married almost a year later in the base chapel. The couple traveled the world with the Air Force and stayed happily married for 56 years, when Cletus passed away.

“There were only eight or nine boys and girls in my school class, and five of us girls married GIs,” Kimbrell said.

Top Secret

The top-secret nature of some of the base’s operations hit home for Mary Ila Anderson Flinders when she and several other teens were driving an old jalopy around one night and apparently wandered onto the base’s property.

Above the roar of the jalopy, they thought they heard someone calling “Halt.”

“We didn’t stop, and then we heard a second ‘Halt!’ ” she said.

Suddenly, bright lights were flashing on them, as soldiers with guns surrounded the car. “They told us that after the third ‘halt,’ they were to fire,” she said.

At the time, the townspeople had no idea that the base’s activities involved atomic bombs. The project was even a secret to most of the soldiers who were working on it. Jack Widowsky, now 95 and living in New Jersey, remembered when his squadron got orders for Wendover. “I’d never heard of it until we got there,” he said.

Everyone assembled in the base’s theater, and their new commanding officer, Col. Paul Tibbets, announced they were now part of the 509th Composite Group, and that they were going to help end the war. They were also told it was top secret and not to discuss their assignment with anyone – even wives, parents, siblings or girlfriends.

At Wendover, the 509th Composite Group practiced releasing bomb models that mimicked the atomic bomb’s unique shape and weight. Those practice bombings helped engineers refine the real bomb’s ballistics, electrical fusing, detonators and release mechanisms.

Brent Palmer tells the story of his father, John W. Palmer, who also was part of the 509th Composite Group, being picked up while hitchhiking from the base to Grantsville.

The driver asked a lot of questions about the base, but Palmer kept mum. The driver, it turned out, was an FBI agent assigned to make sure the base’s secret mission remained that way. “The agent told him, ‘You’re a good soldier, you kept your mouth shut,’ ” Brent Palmer said.

Widowsky participated in several bombing missions over Japan, and then on Aug. 6, 1945, his crew was ordered to fly to Iwo Jima with the bomber Big Stink and wait with heavily armed guards. They didn’t know it, but the Big Stink was the backup plane in case the Enola Gay encountered flight troubles.

After hours of waiting, Widowsky’s crew was ordered back to the small island of Tinian, and that’s when they heard President Harry Truman’s radio announcement that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, Widowsky navigated one of the weather reconnaissance planes during the bombing mission to Nagasaki. “To this day, I am honored and proud that I participated in that,” he said. “I feel we did the right thing because it saved thousands of American lives.”


After the War

John Palmer took a job with the base’s fire department after the war ended, becoming the assistant fire chief. During his 33 years there, the base downsized its operations, leaving many of the buildings vacant. Young Brent explored many of them.

“The buildings were all under the protection of the Air Force and locked up, but I would sneak the keys that were under the stairs at the fire station,” he said. “I’d go into the telephone exchange building, with all the rows of the switchboards still there with headsets, and I’d sit and pretend like I was one of the operators. All the beds and the medicine cabinets were still sitting in the old hospital complex. It was a neat place to explore.”

Brent Palmer followed his father’s footsteps and became a firefighter, and he served as the airport’s fire chief for a time. He now volunteers in restoring the airfield’s old fire station.

The base was used off and on during the Cold War for weapons development and gunnery and bombing practice. It was declared surplus in 1976 when most of the field, including the water system, was turned over to Wendover as a municipal airport. For many years, the airport manager and a handful of Wendover’s World War II veterans talked about creating a museum.

When Wendover native Chris Melville became the airport manager in 1991, he took it a step further by collecting memorabilia for a small hall of honor. In 1995, Col. Paul Tibbets and the former Enola Gay crew spent a week at the airport filming the documentary The Men Who Brought the Dawn.

“So we were able to get firsthand knowledge about the history from Col. Tibbets and some of the crew members,” Melville said. During Melville’s tenure, the Wendover Airport became certified for commercial service.

 



BIrth of a Museum

Melville left when Tooele County assumed airport operations in 1998. Jim Petersen co-organized a reunion for the 509th Composite group at Wendover in 2001 and founded the Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation. He took over management of the airport in 2003.

The group began seeking donations, volunteers, artifacts, photos and oral histories. To date, it has raised about $2 million through grants, government funding and private donations, which has been used to restore buildings on the base.

“Soon, people began finding us and asking to donate their pictures and memorabilia,” said Petersen’s eldest son, Tom Petersen, historian for the foundation.

When the collection outgrew the airport space, they looked to the run-down service club building next door. Volunteers shoveled out piles of pigeon nests, broken window glass and trash. Texas businessman Jon Nau donated a substantial amount of money to restore the building in honor of his father-in-law, John T. Brinkman, who trained at Wendover as a B-17 ball turret gunner. Intrepid Potash owner Hugh Harvey also provided significant funding to ensure the project would be completed.

The building’s entertainment hall is often booked for community events, from the high school prom and dinners for shooting and Bonneville Speedway racing clubs, to company luncheons and elegant weddings. “It was once a safety hazard, and now it’s turned into quite the jewel,” Crawford said.

The airfield foundation also is restoring the B-29 hangar that housed the Enola Gay and Bockscar. The new exterior is a huge improvement over its former weather-beaten appearance.

The airfield has been a backdrop for movies such as Con Air, Independence Day, Hulk and The Core. After filming Con Air, the moviemakers donated the cargo plane used in the movie, and visitors can go inside this movie prop.

Today, the museum welcomes about 10,000 visitors per year. Some may be coming to race at the Bonneville Speedway, for gambling, concerts and all-you-can-eat buffets in West Wendover, or passing through on I-80 on the way to California.

For many others, however, the museum is a destination.

In 2017, Yuji Sasaki visited from Japan and donated a rare “Sadako peace crane” to the Wendover Airfield. His aunt, Sadako Sasaki, survived the bombing of Hiroshima, but developed leukemia at age 12. She heard a Japanese legend that if she could fold 1,000 cranes, her wish for world peace would be granted. Sadako folded 1,000 paper cranes by the time she died in 1955, and her story gained worldwide attention.

Most of the cranes were buried with Sadako, and her family has presented cranes at only five other American landmarks: the 9/11 Memorial, Pearl Harbor, the Truman Library, the Museum of Tolerance and the Japanese American National Museum.

The plaque, displayed in the airfield museum, says the crane presentation is “neither as an apology nor condemnation of actions by either country during World War II, but rather a hope for nations to resolve conflicts without having to resort to wars and the inevitable devastation.”