Wendover enola gay

WENDOVER, Utah — The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, but thousands of those pictures may be taken away.

“And he says, ‘This here is an atom bomb. Yes or no?’ I said, ‘Yes sir!’ ”

All told, roughly 400 FBI agents kept an eye on the men stationed in Wendover, camouflaged as workers, military personnel and civilians. That was one step of arming.” The second step, Jeppson explains, was to remove three test plugs that were inserted in the skin of the bomb and replace them with “live” plugs that would allow the firing signal to detonate the bomb.

The Enola Gay left Wendover for the Pacific island of Tinian on June 27, 1945. Topaz Museum, 55 W. Main St., Delta, topazmuseum.org

Visit a Different Wendover

The Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Wendover, Utah, just over the border from the casinos and hotels in Wendover, Nev., is one of the most authentically preserved WWII Army Air Force bases in the United States.

More than 11,000 people were processed through Topaz—the population peaked at about 8,300.

In 2007 the Topaz site was listed as a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service. It was the perfect place to keep a very big secret. 

That secret was even kept from the soldiers themselves. His unit, the 216th Special Base Unit, assembled dummy test bombs of the uranium bomb called Little Boy, and the plutonium version known as Fat Man.

During a briefing in the bomb assembly building, Sgt. Joe Cerace stood next to a Fat Man and deftly explained the weapon’s unconventional nature. 

“I can still see this little sergeant there patting the bomb,” says Badali. The Topaz Museum opened in 2017 with interpretive exhibits detailing life in Topaz.

Joe turned to Steven Gregg, a fellow soldier transferred from Delaware, and said, “They took us from heaven and sent us to hell.”

Hell, as it turned out, was an ideal place to test the men and machinery that would execute one of the 20th Century’s defining moments: the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. During a frenzied 10-month period beginning in late 1944, Utah’s remote West Desert was on the leading edge of the atomic arms race, as crews put the finishing touches on the world’s first nuclear weapon and the plane that would carry it into battle.

Can you keep a secret?

In the fall of 1944, the Army Air Force (AAF) put 29-year-old Lt.

Col. Paul Tibbets in command of the newly formed 509th Composite Group. The agent then asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

“I said, ‘I think so,’” recalls Badali, during an interview from his home in Ogden in 2005. In 1940, the United States was supplying allies with weapons and support and quietly building up its own military power.

It also had easy air access to California’s Salton Sea, where test bombs could be dropped.

But the airfield’s primary asset was its isolation. For this mission, Lewis would move to the co-pilot’s seat.

Just hours before takeoff, Tibbets summoned a crew to paint his mother’s name, Enola Gay, on the side of the cockpit. He was an East Coast kid, raised in Connecticut, and most recently stationed with the Army Air Force in Delaware.

In 1941 Army Air Corps Gen. Henry H. Arnold set about diversifying military resources far into the nation’s interior and away from the reach of the Japanese Navy. Fat Man was slightly longer and 500 pounds heavier, with a bulbous, five-foot diameter housing that gave it its name. Its location was ideal for military planners, who after Pearl Harbor were justified in worry about Japanese attacks on the Western Coast.

The scientists at Los Alamos conceded that the shockwaves from the blast could destroy the plane that dropped it, even at 30,000 feet.