If you drive due west from Salt Lake City, past the Great Salt Lake and out across the West Desert, you’ll arrive in an hour or two — depending on how heavy your right foot happens to be — at a dusty outpost town called Wendover. Well, technically you’ll find two Wendovers out that way, because the town straddles the Utah-Nevada border. On the Nevada side, a handful of casinos and other, ahem, adult businesses lend West Wendover a certain glitz and affluence. Wendover, Utah, on the other hand, is much quieter, darker, and sadder, a fading remnant of more important days.
It’s hard to imagine now as you roll past the dilapidated mobile homes and ’60s-vintage discount motels that comprise the modern town, but 60-odd years ago, Wendover, Utah, was a bustling hive of activity, an Army Air Force training facility for B-17 and B-24 bomber crews preparing to fight in Europe and the Pacific. For much of World War II, the flatlands around Wendover were in fact the AAF’s only bombing and gunnery range. More infamously, this was where the crew of a B-29 called the Enola Gay learned to deploy a new superweapon — the atomic bomb — in the waning days of the war.
The Air Force closed the base in 1965. The old 8000-foot runway is now used for civil aviation — mostly charter flights bringing in gamblers for the casinos on the other side of the border — but the rest of the facility, including the massive hanger that once sheltered the Enola Gay, is just rotting away out there in the desert, a nearly forgotten ghost of a bygone moment in history.
I’ve personally visited the place a couple of times and been amazed at how much is still there: barracks, bunkers, the military chapel and hospital, even a swimming pool. The Wikipedia entry about the base notes that “Wendover is one of the most intact World War II training airfields” and suggests the isolation that made it perfect for its original purpose has also helped to preserve it (basically, there’s never been any incentive for a developer to bulldoze everything, and the dry climate has slowed the decay of the wood and metal buildings). In the eyes of a history and aviation buff such as myself, it’s a precious resource that deserves better than oblivion.
I was therefore greatly pleased to read this morning that a program called Save America’s Treasures has awarded $450,000 in grant money to restore the big Enola Gay hanger and some of the surrounding shops and offices. The hanger is only a part of the Wendover Air Field story, of course, but it is the centerpiece of the field, the largest structure there and, symbolically at least, the most significant because of its connection to the landmark atomic-bomb missions. I look forward to seeing the completed restoration in a few years. (I actually think it’d be neater than hell if the entire base could be restored and populated with period re-enacters to create a World War II-era “living history” attraction similar to Colonial Williamsburg. That’s probably an extremely long shot, though…)
Sadly, not everyone walking around out there shares my enthusiasm for historic sites, as I learned later in the day. I was in the kitchenware section at Target, examining my dish-rack options, when I caught the cell-phone conversation of a passing shopper:
“Did you hear they’re going to blow 400K to restore some old hanger? Oh, I guess it was where that Enola Gray was kept during the war. But a hanger, man? It just drives me crazy…”
I can’t tell you how close I came to chasing the twerp down and telling him how crazy it makes me that yuppie jackasses like himself, with their pressed corduroys and cashmere sweaters, don’t give a shit about anything that came before our slick, Apple-designed, wireless world of consumer wonders, short attention spans, and appalling ignorance. And when he goggled at me, wondering what the hell I was talking about, I’d inform him that if he’d paid more attention in history class instead of chattering away with his frat-bro buddies in the back row, he’d know that the airplane’s name was the Enola Gay, not Gray, the stupid ass. And then I’d ask him what he does for a living, because something about his dress and overall manner told me he was probably a mortgage broker or a financial adviser, or maybe a car dealer, and that his preference for any site older than about ten years would be to bulldoze it and put up a block of cookie-cutter drywall-and-stucco condos, because really who cares if it looks just like everything else currently being built in the state and isn’t well-enough constructed to last two decades, so long as you make your short-term profits so you can take the perfectly manicured and coiffed wife to Hawaii for a week?
That jerk really harshed my mood, man. I never will understand why so many people simply don’t care about the past. History is important, whether folks realize it or not. Ripples from events that occurred a century or more ago are still spreading, still affecting what’s going today; I’m convinced that a lot of the troubles our nation is in right now are due, in part, to a lack of historical knowledge. Understanding how we got to a particular place is the first step in getting out of that place.
Besides, old stuff is simply cool.
If you, like me, are concerned with saving our national heritage and want to know more about the Wendover project, check out the Utah Heritage Foundation’s news item on the subject (it includes a few photos). You can find some information about the Save America’s Treasures program here. And of course, there’s the official Historic Wendover Airfield web site.
