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Battles went on for months and were often fought hand-to-hand, with rifles, knives and flame throwers. One air battle was so lopsided in favor of the Americans that it was called a turkey shoot. Japanese suicide pilots crashed their planes into American vessels. Huge ships went to the bottom with their crews. Naval and air battles had been sudden, brief and deadly. The fighting on land, at sea and in the air had been savage. At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, an average of 5,000 were still dying each week. More than 100,000 American soldiers, sailors and Marines had already been killed in the Pacific since Japan’s attack on the U.S. (Matt McLain/The Washington Post) A shortened war, a dreadful cost This week, commemorations are scheduled across the country, with socially distanced candlelight vigils and the tolling of bells, and because of the covid-19, ceremonies and remembrances have moved online. It would be the start of a frightful era of weapons that could defy control and menace civilization.īut as “Dimples Eight Two” picked up speed that morning, its mission was born of its time: deliver a blow that the United States hoped might finally end the global butchery of World War II. Tens of thousands more would die the same way at Nagasaki a few days later, and the world would subsequently be hearing about megatons, mutual assured destruction, proliferation, nuclear winter, meltdowns and dirty bombs. It was an important enemy military site with a wartime population about 280,000, according to the historians Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts.Īlmost half of them were about to be incinerated, crushed, and irradiated by the crude atomic weapon named “Little Boy” that the Enola Gay carried. (AP)įifteen hundred miles to the north-northwest, under a waning crescent moon, lay a 400-year-old Japanese city most Americans probably had never heard of but whose name was about to be etched into the pages of history. Shumard, assistant engineer and Staff Sgt. Jacob Besser, radar countermeasures officer.
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Tibbets, 509th Composite Group commanding officer and pilot Capt. John Porter, ground maintenance officer Capt. (The airport, which gets daily casino-chartered flights and private aircraft, uses the old airfield's runways.This undated photo includes most members of 12-man crew of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima posing in the Mariana Islands in 1945 during World War II. "The people that were here had no idea what they were working on," says Sandy resident Jim Petersen, president of the Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation and director of aviation for Tooele County and Wendover Airport. Paul Tibbets, the 509th's commander - knew the truth about that mission in the months the airmen were assembling and testing components, and dropping 150 bomb prototypes over the West Desert and California's Salton Sea. Up to 17,000 trained at Wendover at its peak, dwarfing what had been a railroad stop on the edge of Utah's West Desert.įewer than 4,000 airmen were training here, though, by the time the unit that would become Wendover's most famous gathered in spring 1945 - the 509th Composite Group with a super-secret mission. Thousands of airmen learned to fly heavy bombers during World War II at Wendover Army Air Base, which was authorized by a Congress anticipating war and became a sprawling base with 668 buildings after the Dec.