Wendover hangar, U. receive grants

WENDOVER, Utah — The historic Wendover Airport has received a $450,000 grant through the Save America's Treasures program to restore the hangar where the Enola Gay, the airplane that delivered an atomic bomb to Hiroshima, Japan, was housed. Shops and offices in the complex also will be refurbished.

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and the National Park Service jointly awarded a total of $10.52 million in grants Monday for 40 different projects in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

Besides the Wendover Airport grant, Utah also received $500,000 for the anthropology collections at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. That means Utah received more than 9 percent of the total funding available in the program for 2008.

"Projects funded by Save America's Treasures represent some of the most cherished icons of American history and culture," said first lady Laura Bush, honorary chairwoman of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

"President Bush and I want to ensure that our historic properties, artifacts and communities throughout the nation continue to be preserved and enjoyed by future generations," she said.

Located just off I-80 at the edge of the famous Bonneville Salt Flats where Utah and Nevada meet, the Wendover airfield will use the money to re-roof the metal hangar and the north and south operations offices and shops, and provide siding and windows for the buildings.

The Enola Gay hangar (originally called Building 18-41) was used during World War II for development of a project code named "Silverplate" to prepare for the deployment of atomic weapons. The bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki effectively ended the war with Japan. This B-29 hangar was the only one to house modified B-29 aircraft used for training and for dropping atomic bombs in 1945.

The U.S. military chose the Wendover Airfield because of its remote location and wide-open terrain. It sits in one of the largest, flattest chunks of nowhere in the nation, surrounded by millions of acres of salt and saltbush. At one time in the early 1940s, it was probably the world's largest bombing and gunnery range.

The mission to drop Little Boy, the atomic bomb detonated above Hiroshima more than 63 years ago, and Fat Man, the bomb that devastated Nagasaki three days later, was fine-tuned at this Wendover Army Air Corps base.

The air base was essentially abandoned after World War II and all of its buildings became dilapidated over the decades that followed. Today, more than 550 of the original 668 buildings at the site no longer stand.