Enola gay wendover
In 2017, the family of Japanese bombing victim Sadako Sasaki offered to donate one of the legions of origami paper cranes the girl fashioned as a peace gesture before her death from leukemia at age 12. Petersen’s nonprofit has grappled with a critical question: Whose stories deserve be memorialized here? Just the bombers, or the people bombed as well? (Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal) when you excavate any military past, you can dig up controversial memories. William Bishop, whose father, William Ellsworth Bishop, served in the 509th composite group for the Enola Gay, takes in the sight of the Enola Gay hangar while visiting the Historic Wendover Airfieldin Wendover, Utah, on Saturday, May 15, 2021. “It could be a place where veterans, their families and the American public can walk through and feel like they’ve been transported back in time.” His dream is to create a first-ever Army Air Force museum, what he calls a Williamsburg of the West. He’s a private pilot and electrical engineer who designed computers for the Air Force in Vietnam before starting a defense contract business in Salt Lake City. Petersen brings a military history to his work. The barracks were shared by upstarts from Brooklyn, New York Bozeman, Montana and Biloxi, Mississippi - youths who learned firsthand about fraternity, racism and the limits of their own mortality. In its heyday, this was the Army Air Force’s largest bombing and gunnery range, its 668 buildings home to 20,000 people - a cross-section of mid-1940s American youth culture during wartime. (Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal) of the Westįor Petersen and others, the Wendover base is more than just a former home of a plane that dropped the atomic bomb. Jim Petersen, president and founder of the Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation, right, lead a tour with historian and tour guide Thomas Petersen inside one of the original hangars at the Historic Wendover Airfield, a World War II-era base in Wendover, Utah. Petersen is now executive director of the Historic Wendover Airfield group, an ambitious nonprofit that has raised $2.5 million to begin rebuilding not only the hangar but the airman’s dining hall and the facility’s centerpiece - the 14,000-square-foot former officers’ club that now serves as the base museum.
This is such a historic place and it’s literally falling apart.” “I’m going to find out all I can about this base.
“Holy smokes, who even knows this is out here?” he told himself. Then he discovered the old bomb pits, where soldiers used hydraulics to load the 5-ton test bombs into the bellies of the planes before they flew out to decimate mock villages built out on the horizon. “The wooden supports were starting to fall away from the structure.” “Every window was broken, the roof was either totally blown off or patched and leaking,” he said.
When Petersen first visited the hangar in 2000, he saw history in ruins. In 2009, the building known as the Enola Gay Hangar was added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of the nation’s most endangered historic places. 6, 1945, the aircraft dropped on Hiroshima the device code-named “Little Boy,” a 10,000-pound uranium-235 bomb whose explosive force killed or severely injured 140,000 people on the ground below.įor years, the isolated old airfield - set on the parched salt flats of western Utah, 360 miles north of Las Vegas - fell into disrepair, its barracks, hospital, control tower, nurses quarters and hangars all crumbling. The hangar where Petersen stands once served the Enola Gay - the plane known as the first aircraft to unleash an atomic bomb in warfare - and its crew.Īt 8:15 a.m. It was also the training site of the 509th Composite Group, the B-29 unit that dropped atomic bombs on Japan to end the war. “But this hangar has the most compelling history of all, because it played a vital role in the Manhattan Project.”ĭuring World War II, Wendover’s airfield served as a domestic base for the elite B-17 and B-24 bomber crews. “This entire base has national significance,” he says proudly.