“My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war,” Tibbets wrote in his book, “The Flight of the Enola Gay.” Tibbets, now a retired Air Force general and aviation executive, was a 29-year-old veteran of World War II’s air battles over Europe when he was summoned to an Army Air Corps conclave in Colorado and told he would be commanding a force assembled to deliver the most powerful explosive devices yet known to man. Just the old State Line Hotel-a saloon with a tiny dance place, a few slot machines and a craps table. “In Wendover there was nothing, not even a real town. “I came from the sort of places where there were water and grass and trees,” she said last week.
“I nearly died when I first saw it,” said Nita Wadsworth, then a 28-year-old bride whose civilian husband had been called in to work on the project. Not many shared Tibbets’ enthusiasm for Wendover. It was here, just outside the lonely desert town that straddles the Utah-Nevada state line, that Tibbets’ men undertook a project so secret that most of them did not know what it was all about until it was over-assembly of the only atomic bombs ever used in war, and training of the crew that dropped the first on Hiroshima 50 years ago today. Surrounding the field were miles and miles of salt flats.” Except for the nearby village, with a population of little more than 100, that part of Utah was virtually uninhabited. “I liked what I saw,” he wrote years later. When he got to Wendover, he knew he had found it. Tibbets was looking for the perfect airfield for the job-"an isolated location, the farther from civilization the better.”