Off The Radar : Utah’s Impact on the Nuclear Arms Race

In the summer of 1945, 19-year-old Joe Badali stepped off a train into the barren expanse of sunburned desolation known as Wendover, Utah. He was an East Coast kid, raised in Connecticut, and most recently stationed with the Army Air Force in Delaware. The terrain before him was like nothing he’d ever seen—a blistering moonscape of low, rocky hills jutting up like icebergs from the vast, lifeless salt flats. 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 509th was a completely self-sufficient unit of nearly 1,800 airmen, machinists, engineers and scientists charged with carrying the atomic bomb to the enemy. Tibbets was already an accomplished pilot, having flown combat missions in Europe and North Africa. He was also a military test pilot for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the plane the AAF chose for the atomic missions.

Army brass offered Tibbets the choice of three bases for the 509th, but he never even made it to the other two; one look at Wendover and he was sold. The air base on Utah’s western border had a large airstrip, barracks, hangars and other support buildings built by conventional bomber groups starting in 1940. 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. The base covered 3.5 million desolate acres and the fledgling town of Wendover offered few distractions beyond the tiny cobblestone Stateline Hotel. It was the perfect place to keep a very big secret. 

That secret was even kept from the soldiers themselves. No one was told the full extent of their mission, and they were not to talk about it to anyone, including spouses and other military personnel. 

Like most incoming soldiers, Joe Badali’s first interview at the base was with an FBI agent, who informed Badali that the agency had investigated him so thoroughly as to have paid visits to his schools and neighbors back home. 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. That answer, imbued with teenage nonchalance, was not quite what the agent had hoped for. “He stood up,” says Badali, “leaned across the desk, pounded his fist down and said, ‘Damn it, can you or can you not keep a secret? 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. “We found out after the war that our latrine orderly was an FBI agent,” laughs Badali. “I’m sure he picked up a lot of gossip there.”

When Morris “Dick” Jeppson arrived at the base in late 1944, he quickly realized that his stay would be anything but ordinary. Jeppson was a 24-year-old electronics wiz from Carson City, Nev. The Army Air Force had sent him through its electronics school, then on to Harvard graduate school, and finally to MIT to study radar engineering. He and six other electronics specialists arrived in Wendover at the behest of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the scientific arm of the atomic program.

“We were met there [in Wendover] not by the Air Force but by Professor Brode from the University of Cal Berkeley,” says Jeppson, who passed away in 1987 at his home in Las Vegas. “He took us around in a carry-all to talk to us about this highly secret but important project. He briefed us a bit, but he didn’t tell us what the project was.”

Only later did Jeppson realize why he’d been sent to Wendover. “One or two of us surmised during our trips to Los Alamos that we were working on a uranium weapon,” he says. “But we never talked about it.”

Neither did Joe Badali, although he knew better than most what was going on. 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. “And he says, ‘This here is an atom bomb. If this bomb were to explode, there’d be a big hole in the ground where Utah used to be.’ He scared the hell out of us.”

Taking flight

The Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were enormous. Little Boy was 10 feet long, 28 inches in diameter, and weighed 9,700 pounds. Fat Man was slightly longer and 500 pounds heavier, with a bulbous, five-foot diameter housing that gave it its name. The only way to load them into the belly of the B-29s was to tow the planes over specially constructed bomb-loading pits and hydraulically hoist the bombs into place from below ground.

With such a heavy payload on board, the 15 B-29s assigned to the 509th were modified to carry out the atomic missions. To save weight, Tibbets ordered the planes stripped of their guns, turrets, ammunition and fire-control systems. Only the tail gunner’s .50-caliber machine guns were left in place. Improved engines were installed and the forward bomb bays were outfitted to carry either Little Boy or Fat Man.

Under the direction of Col. Tibbets—he’d been promoted to full colonel in January of 1945—the 15 crews took to the skies over Western Utah, designing and testing the means to drop a bomb that was still being developed and had never been detonated.

Even Tibbets did not know fully what to expect. The scientists at Los Alamos conceded that the shockwaves from the blast could destroy the plane that dropped it, even at 30,000 feet. So Tibbets trained the crews to take a sharp, diving 158-degree turn away from the target once the bomb was released, putting maximum distance between the plane and the detonation.

On June 14, 1945, Captain Robert Lewis picked up plane 44-86292 from the Martin Company assembly plant in Omaha, Nebr., and flew it to Wendover. He didn’t know it then, but Lewis was piloting the Enola Gay, the plane that would carry out the world’s first atomic bombing mission. 

The Enola Gay left Wendover for the Pacific island of Tinian on June 27, 1945. Technically, it was still not the Enola Gay. The plane would not get its familiar moniker until August 5, the eve of the first drop on Hiroshima. Tibbets had decided he would pilot the mission himself and chose 44-86292 for the task. The plane was normally piloted by Captain Lewis and his crew. 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. Lewis was reportedly quite upset to walk out onto the airstrip and see his airplane decorated with new nose art.

At 2:45 a.m. the next morning—August 6, 1945—the newly christened Enola Gay took to the South Pacific skies with 12 crew members and one Little Boy uranium bomb. Dick Jeppson, the electronics wiz from Carson City, was positioned in the forward pressurized compartment. Just days before, Navy Captain William “Deak” Parsons, a weapons officer, had voiced his concern that a crash during takeoff might detonate the bomb. So Little Boy had to be armed in the air—a job that fell to Parsons and Jeppson.

“Just after the plane took off,” recalls Jeppson, “he [Parsons] had me join him in the back of the bomb bay to connect some special wiring that had been left disconnected. 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. Once armed, the Enola Gay climbed above 30,000 feet and set a course for the Japanese mainland.

At 8:15 a.m., Tibbets and crew released Little Boy, 31,600 feet over Hiroshima, and immediately went into the hard right diving turn they’d practiced so many times in Wendover. Dick Jeppson didn’t have a window in the forward compartment, but he didn’t need one. 

“The plane experienced a shockwave from the primary detonation,” Jeppson recalls. “There was a second shockwave a few seconds afterward. From my training, I realized that that was reflected shockwave from the ground, which proved that the bomb had, in fact, detonated at somewhere near the desired elevation above
the ground.”

Three days later, Major Charles Sweeney of the 509th piloted the B-29 Bockscar to Nagasaki, dropping the Fat Man bomb. Not long after the Japanese surrender, Tibbets returned to Wendover, where young Joe Badali and other members of the 216th Base Unit lined up to shake hands with the colonel. Badali remembers it well. 

“He shook our hands and said, ‘Now when you meet someone, you can tell them, shake the hand, that shook the hand, that shook Japan.’ ”

The action in Wendover these days is on the Nevada side of the state line, where sprawling neon casinos and hotels blink seductively at travelers on Interstate 80. On the Utah side, the old airfield control tower stands watch over an assembly of buildings in various states of renovation including the cavernous, arched hangar at the east end of the airstrip—which once housed the gleaming Enola Gay, fresh off the assembly line.

On the other side of the country, the plane itself has been painstakingly restored and is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum near Washington D.C.

The Wendover Airfield is slowly being restored by the Historic Wendover Airfield Society, which
has preserved many of the barracks, hangars and support buildings where the crews lived in secrecy and trained for the atomic mission. The field’s restored service club is the main museum site and inside, on display is a replica of Little Boy—the bomb that changed the course of mankind, and once stirred Utah’s west desert into a frenzy of activity in a massive effort to end the war. 

Utah at War 

Utah developed into an important base for the U.S. Military at the onset of WWII. Its location was ideal for military planners, who after Pearl Harbor were justified in worry about Japanese attacks on the Western Coast. 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. Utah with its existing installations and highway and rail access became a prime location.

• Fort Douglas, which was built to house federal troops sent to Utah during the Civil War, was re-purposed as a processing center for U.S. Army recruits.

• The Ogden Arsenal, a weapon storage facility was built in 1921. It would become a manufacturing and shipping center during WWII. 

• Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base was established in 1940 but its beginnings were in 1934 as a mail supply relay. In 1940, the United States was supplying allies with weapons and support and quietly building up its own military power. Hill was a prime location to supply West Coast installations. 

• Wendover was chosen over Hill Field for the B-29 training missions to deploy the world’s first atomic weapons for its remote location to maintain secrecy.

Source: Launius, Roger D., “World War II in Utah,” Utah History Encyclopedia (University of Utah Press, 1994) 

The Darker Side of War in Utah

On Feb. 9, 1941, in the aftermath of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans.

Many of those Japanese-Americans were sent to Topaz, Utah, near the desert Topaz Mountain, where they finished building the barracks they were to live in, set up the barbed wire fence and built out the rest of the camp. 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. The Topaz Museum opened in 2017 with interpretive exhibits detailing life in Topaz. President Roosevelt announced in 1944 that the camps would close in 1945. The Topaz camp didn’t close until October 31, 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. It is open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Learn more and plan your visit at wendoverairfield.org.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the November 2006 issue of Salt Lake magazine.