Historic Wendover Airfield recreates bomb loading pit used during World War II

WENDOVER — Visitors to the Historic Wendover Airfield can now see how crews loaded some of the first atomic weapons during World War II, thanks to a newly reconstructed loading cradle installed at the site's historic bomb pit.

The project recreates an important piece of engineering developed in Wendover during the Manhattan Project.

At the time, crews faced a major problem with how to load massive bombs into aircraft sitting just a few feet above the ground.

"Turns out that the bombs were so big, there was no way to roll them under the plane and get them in," Jim Petersen, president of the Historic Wendover Airfield, said. "They weighed 5 tons. So, they had to have a way to get those things into the plane."

The solution was a specially designed pit dug into the desert ground.

Bombs would be positioned in the pit on a hydraulic lift and then raised into the aircraft from below.

"They pushed the plane back over and push that bomb back up into the plane," Petersen said.

During World War II, Wendover served as the primary training base for the 509th Composite Group, the Army Air Forces unit responsible for delivering the first atomic weapons.

While scientists in Los Alamos developed the bombs themselves, engineers at Wendover helped solve the logistical challenges of preparing them for combat missions.

The crew of the Enola Gay, the plane to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan, trained at the Wendover Airfield.

"This is one of the significant parts of the Manhattan Project," Petersen said.

For decades, the pit remained at the airfield, but the original equipment used to lift the bombs was long gone.

"There was nothing down there. In fact, when we first started restoring the airfield many years ago, there was probably two and a half feet of mud in it. We have an Eagle Scout project to help us clean it out," Petersen said.

Once cleaned out, visitors on a tour of the historic base could see the hole in the ground, but not how the system worked.

That changed with help from SME Steel, a West Jordan-based company that rebuilt the bomb-loading cradle using modern technology and historical research.

"It had to be right," Chuck Baer, vice president of field operations for SME Steel, said. "The more we got into this and started looking at the history of it, we got pretty geeked out getting pretty deep into the research."

Engineers used scanning technology to capture the exact dimensions of the historic pit before designing the reconstruction.

"All of the dimensions, everything that built were off a 3D scan," Baer said.

The restored cradle now allows visitors to better understand how the loading system worked, something Petersen said cannot be seen anywhere else in the country.

"This is the only place in the United States that you can see what the technology here was," Petersen said.

The installation was completed just hours before the first tour groups arrived, marking the first time in decades that visitors could visualize how the historic bomb-loading system functioned.

"My grandfather was in World War II, so yeah, to me it meant a lot," Baer said.

The project is part of a broader effort to restore the Historic Wendover Airfield, which Petersen said remains one of the most intact Army Air Forces bases from World War II.

"This is a unique place in the history of the World War II effort," Petersen said.

Restoration work at the airfield is ongoing.

Crews are also working to restore a gunnery range, a surgical unit in a medical area, a training memorial and a bomb truck that would have transported the weapons to the loading pit.

Petersen said preserving the airfield is about ensuring future generations can see an important piece of American history.

"We have had people come out whose relatives or grandfather worked here, and they're just speechless," Petersen said. "This place is so special."

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