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The men also encountered below-zero temperatures that had the mother-nature force of breaking pipes and causing bone-chilling misery for them. The number of ideal weather days provided unlimited flying time although the flats still received its share of snow in late fall and the winter. The Department of War looked at the Wendover Air Field as an ideal training base for B-17 and B-24 training because of the thousands of uninhabited square miles spreading over the Bonneville Salt Flats and the isolation of being miles from a population center such as Salt Lake City to the east of Elko, Nev., to the west.
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Wilkey said 19 of 21 bomber groups shipped off to Europe. During 1943, the base saw its busiest construction and training year with 13 bombardment groups practicing on the Wendover range. In March 1942, Wilkey said Wendover became an independent air base from Fort Douglas where the B-17 and B-24 bomber groups trained. government believed war against Japan was becoming more imminent. Several years before the surprise attack on Oahu, the U.S. 7, 1941, the small railroad town of Wendover on the Western Pacific line became a sub post of Fort Douglas, an Army post overlooking Salt Lake City, to supplement the bombing training, said Landon Wilkey, curator of the Historic Wendover Airfield, 120 miles west of the Utah capital along the Utah-Nevada border. 2.īefore Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. The official Instrument of Surrender, though, wasn’t signed between the United States and Japan until Sept. After World War II’s climatic yet quick-ending outcome, both pilots and their crews emerged as America’s newest heroes for bringing the Japanese government to its knees. Charles Sweeney, each born to middle-class families, had been hailed as hometown heroes during the war. Much of the success of the two war-ending bombing missions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted from top-secret training accomplished at the Wendover (Utah) Air Field during a six-month span beginning in December 1944.Ĭol.
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14, fighting in the Pacific came to a grinding halt except for some pockets of resistance, mostly on the smaller islands dotted across the western part of the ocean. 6, 1945, to the emperor’s surrender the following week on Aug. This became a challenge … and you’d be surprised at the pride these boys took in being able to qualify.Nine days in August changed the course of World War II.įrom dropping the first atomic bomb on Japan 75 years ago on Aug. I wouldn’t settle for anything less than a quarter of a mile of accuracy, and I wouldn’t stand for anything less than 20 seconds off on time. Tibbets, 509th Composite Group commander, and orchestrator of the operational aspect of the original nuclear enterprise, the Manhattan Project, in an interview in 1966. “What I tried to do, initially, was to train individuals – then weld the individuals into a good, cohesive team to fly this B-29 better that anybody else was flying … that particular day,” said Lt. 17, 1944, was created for the sole purpose of delivering the world’s first nuclear weapon.īecause of the secret nature of their mission, the group trained at Wendover, Utah, and Tinian Island, in the Pacific, ever-perfecting the performance of the crew and their B-29 Superfortress bombers. The 509th Composite Group, born in secrecy Dec. The Enola Gay lurched as the the 10,000 pounds Mk I bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” dropped out of the bomb bay