Wendover Air Base (abandoned) Copyright © 1996, Don Baccus (dhogaza@pacifier.com)
Copyright © 1997, Don Baccus
All photographs copyright © 1997, Don Baccus
In August, 1995 I was on my way to the Goshutes Raptor Project, and decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by photographing abandoned Wendover Field, where the B-29 unit which was to carry out the mission was based for training. The text is based on some notes I made at the time.
In September, 1944, Colonel Paul Tibbets and his 509th Composite Group
arrived at Wendover Field, on the western edge of the Great Salt Desert.
Located near the small town of Wendover, which straddles the Nevada and
Utah borders, the site was isolated and surrounded with plenty of vacant
federal land, which would prove useful for their mission. Colonel Tibbet's
group had been chosen to become the first unit of the Army Air Corps to
train to drop the atomic bomb, then under development, and this remote
site was chosen to ease security arrangements.
Unknown to them, the
Goshute Mountains,
lying to the southwest of the
airbase, is host each fall to the largest concentration of migrating raptors
in the western United States. Today, the airbase lies abandoned and nearly
forgotten, while in the Goshutes field biologists work every year mid-August
until the end of October, counting and banding hawks, eagles, and falcons.
On the Nevada side, Wendover has changed greatly. Incorporated as West Wendover, Nevada a few years ago, it has become a border casino town. Wendover, Utah, though seamlessly adjacent to its lowlife neighbor, looks as though it has changed little. For years, the best breakfast in town could be had at the Salt Flats Grill cafe, filled with faded color prints of past heros of speed tests on nearby Bonneville Salt Flats. The casinos, offering keno as well as toast with omlettes, apparently offered convenient and overwhelming competition for visitors intent on gambling as efficiently as possible. The cafe, like most of Wendover, Utah, is no longer open for business.
Those of us who work banding hawks each fall in the Goshutes call West
Wendover, with its greedy slots and broken-down cocktail waitresses, "Bendover".
Its cherished welcoming landmark, Wendover Will, "the world's largest
mechanized man", is known as "Bendover Bill". I should point
out that at least West Wendover, perhaps out of respect for its more conservative
Utahn counterpart, has no legalized prostitution. Things could be worse - we could
be stuck in Wells.
The airbase itself was donated to Wendover, Utah in the 1970s, and walking around the old structures is like entering another era. Old jitneys are stored next to a building which I've been told once served as the Officer's Club. Barrack buildings sit empty, windows broken out, roofs sagging, paintless. The B-29 hanger, where the Enola Gay and other bombers of the unit were serviced between training flights, is unmarked. Sheetmetal siding is marred with holes and rust. There is nothing to mark the past significance of this place, and most visitors to Wendover are unaware of its historical significance.
Nor would they care.
In 1995, a great controversy arose over the Smithsonian's planned exhibit
featuring the Enola Gay. Conservatives and some veterans were upset that
the planned exhibit would explore whether or not the bombing of Hiroshima
was truly necessary. Despite evidence that the bombing was controversial
among contemporary leaders - Generals Marshall and Eisenhower opposed it
- and the fact that estimated causualty figures for the planned invasion
of Japan were orders of magnitudes less than the figures popularized after
the war, opponents of the exhibit labelled its creators as "revisionists".
One veteran's response to this situation was to begin raising money for the restoration of Wendover Field, with the goal of prying the Enola Gay loose from the grasp of the nasty liberal historians of the Smithsonian. Fundraisers have included an airshow advertised as including old warbirds. I showed up, but only two old planes did. This is pretty indicative of the success of this man's campaign, and pretty indicative of the poor state of Wendover, Utah as well. The old hanger sits, as rusted and broken-windowed as it was before he showed up. The residents of this pathetic casino town are apathetic. About half are estimated to be illegal aliens, and their great concern is to avoid the INS while making enough money to support family members back home in Mexico. The town is so dependent on this labor that the INS, as a result of a court settlement after some busts a decade or more ago, makes no effort to uncover illegals. West Wendover has perhaps the most rational attitude towards illegal aliens of any town in the country. No illegals? No casinos. No casinos? West Wendover would become a poor ghost town like its Utahn counterpart, for there would be no reason for its existence. A quick look across the border to the Utah side provides all the confirmation one needs.
Of course, this is Great Basin country, and the old culture of the rural
West hasn't died out entirely. For instance, a couple of years ago a man
in his twenties walked into a local bar and offered to pay $25 to
anyone there who'd engage him in a gunfight. Apparently no one was
interested, and he got increasingly vociferous as a result. Finally, someone
got annoyed, went out to their truck, grabbed a gun, walked back in and unceremoniously
blasted the sucker.
The rash young man who got his wish - though not quite in the manner he'd hoped - turned out to be the son of an Ely County Commissioner. These are the folks who members of the "County Movement" insist could manage our public lands better than the BLM. Yeah, right.
West Wendover has a display on the significance of Wendover Field in
its "Welcome Center", but most visitors don't bother to stop
in. Among the artifacts on display is a mimeographed manual for B-29 navigators
that I'd love to get my hands on. Manuals have the effect of making the
outrageous seem commonplace. Flying from Tinian across the Pacific to Japan
and back with a few bombs in the bay of an aircraft known among other things
for its annoying tendency to crash on take-off? Hey, we've got a manual
for the mission, no big deal, right? The cover features a line-drawing
of a beaming young navigator, wearing leather jacket and "Mae West" life
preserver, with a B-29 in the background. The technology which created
the Bomb was unable to provide cheap copies of manuals with real photographs
- the photocopier had not yet been invented, and "Xerox" had
not entered our vocabulary. Outside, the flagpole has a bronze plaque dedicated
to the memory of Hiroshima. The chosen words are strange, seeming to thank
the Japanese for having sacrificed themselves so the world would know the
power of this new weapon, warning us of the dangers of nuclear war in this
new era. City officials from Hiroshima attended the unveiling of this plaque,
and I wonder what they thought of the words. Did they say "You're
Welcome!" after being thanked for this sacrifice?
I think this airbase should be preserved in an arrested state of decay.
Though we've lived with the Bomb for over a half-century, most Americans
seem almost unaware of the existence of our nuclear stockpile. After all,
we've only used the weapon twice, against an enemy far distant in geography,
culture
and time.A walk around this place is sobering. The old jitneys contrast
with our modern, computer-controlled, fuel-injected, low-polluting cars
capable of travelling 60,000 miles on a set of spark plugs. The computer
I'm typing this on has far more computing capacity than existed in the
entire world at the time, yet the physicists of Los Alamos invented not
one, but two, entirely unrelated fission bombs, one of which depended on
an element - plutonium - that doesn't even exist in nature. Modern weapons
are as sophisticated in comparison to these first designs as my Acura is
to those old jitneys.
I do find this broken-down field far more to my liking than the casinos
of West Wendover. I can lose myself in dreams of the past, in thoughts
about those young men who had absolutely no idea of what they were training
for, of their isolation in this baked landscape, living in barracks with
no air-conditioning. Occasionally the past is brought back to life in more
startling fashion, as the Air Force still uses the runway here during bombing
exercises on the range to the south. On any day, an F-16 might be parked near the fence,
its pilot waiting for fuel, or perhaps a ride to a nearby casino. When the
509th trained here, crews careened into Salt Lake City on weekends for fun; now,
Mormons from Salt Lake - with limited experience careening anywhere - come to
Wendover for fun. They have so much fun that this small town has three
pawnshops to help them raise funds to feed the slots.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the field was busy
during a huge exercise held by the Air Force. In our camp at 9,000 feet
in the Goshutes, we could see mysterious lights floating in the sky, hear
airplanes flying and bombs exploding miles away on the desert floor. On that
night, I understood why so many people are convinced they've seen UFOs in
the desert.
Enough of this wandering and photographing, on the Mountain the cook is already preparing ingredients for dinner, while trappers vainly hope for something other than beans and rice, and observers hope for an evening buteo flight to replace the boredom of the mid-afternoon lull. Time for me to leave this vile little casino town, to climb back up the hill to a place where hawks pass by in the thousands, as ignorant of Wendover as the town is of them.