Explore the Abandoned Base Where WWII-Era Planes Tried A-Bombs on For Size
Wendover Air Force Base in Utah was the training home of the 509th Composite Group, a unit made up of B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers specially prepared for the Manhattan Project’s nuclear weapons goals—including the Enola Gay and Bockscar, which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. The bombings killed as many as 225,000 Japanese people in the moment and up to five years later as a result of radiation poisoning and other health effects. Most of them were civilians.
Today, Wendover Airport sits on the site. The base has been unusually preserved due to its extremely low-humidity environment. The nearby town of Wendover has just 1,500 people, while West Wendover, across the border in Nevada, has a population of about 4,400. Those familiar with the Utah border can guess why the Nevada side has its own town that also has far more people: the town is home to five casinos as well as a legal marijuana dispensary. Border towns also often have huge liquor stores, because sales of alcohol are heavily restricted in Utah.
Salt Lake City-based photographer Jordan Utley visited Wendover Air Force Base, Wendover, and West Wendover over the long Independence Day weekend. Some photos show everyday people’s activities for the holiday, like young people in uniform performing color guard for Wendover’s Independence Day parade or viewing West Wendover’s fireworks from a sandy outlook outside of town. But a pair of small towns with so many sites of interest is used to tourists and looky-loos.
During World War II, Wendover Air Force Base was used to test how the Manhattan Project’s emerging atomic bombs fit into aircraft; these massive bombs had to actually fit in order to be carried and dropped. Military aircraft must always find a balance between carrying all the equipment and weapons people need and ensuring the aircraft is still safe to fly. The base has areas for storage of bombs and bomb components, as well as spots where airplanes could park and test-fit the different sizes.
Today, computers and other advancing technologies mean scientists likely have a better idea of what the optimal shapes are for different weapons. Most conventional war weapons rely on controlled explosions: gunpowder is sparked, and that reaction forces a bullet from a gun chamber or a cannonball from a cannon. Without the metal casing, these explosions would go in all directions. Focusing their energy creates huge propulsive energy.
In the case of the atomic bomb “Little Boy,” which was dropped on Hiroshima and killed as many as 145,000 Japanese people, an initial explosion was used to propel a specially prepared uranium projectile into a waiting uranium cylinder. The projectile was backed with tungsten carbide, a material so tough it can only be polished by things like diamond dust. When the uranium projectile met the uranium cylinder, this triggered a nuclear reaction.
All of this means that the physical shape of Little Boy was of vital importance. Like an aircraft carrier, this atomic bomb had to use linear space in a very exacting way in order to reach the right velocity to initiate the nuclear reaction. As a result, any plane that could carry Little Boy needed a cargo space that could hold a 10-foot-long bomb assembly that weighed 10,000 pounds. That seems like no big challenge for a 99-foot-long heavy bomber that weighed 100,000 pounds itself and had a wingspan of over 141 feet.
But the B-29’s bomb load was a much smaller number at just 20,000 pounds, and its fuselage had a diameter of just 9 feet, 8 inches at its widest. And something 10 feet long represents just over 10 percent of its entire length, with a diameter of 24 percent—imagine if you walked onto a passenger Boeing 747, which might be 200 feet long, with a piece of luggage that was 21 feet long and 5 feet in diameter. The plane is enormous, but that’s still a big piece to fit.
After B-29s were prepared at Wendover Air Force Base, they flew to an island in the Northern Mariana Islands, an archipelago colonized by the United States because of its strategic location in the Pacific Ocean. The B-29 had a range of up to 5,830 miles, meaning it could fly from Northern Mariana to Japan (a journey of about 1,500 miles), have leeway to spend time finding the right position and weather opportunity, and then safely return to Northern Mariana.
Physicist Luis Alvarez flew to Hiroshima with the group of B-29s that included Enola Gay. He wrote a letter to his son from the journey, attempting to document what happened for posterity. These four pages include logistics about the trip and the crew’s activities, but what stands out most is one of Alvarez’s opening paragraphs.
“What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would have that effect, by making wars too terrible, but unfortunately it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel’s dream.”
These bombings were an atrocity, something that Alvarez does not deny. His reasoning that this was the only way forward does not ring right to many of our ears today, but he and other scientists were not alone in believing it. And, indeed, they had years, and many, many hours of careful work in subjects as tedious as cargo logistics, to think about what they were deciding to do. Even Alvarez, a scientist, knew the plan was guaranteed to kill an unprecedented number of civilians.
You Might Also Like
