Enola Gay and Bockscar rolled out of the same Omaha assembly building. Three years later, the Strategic Air Command moved into it.
A Pirep featured story · KOFF Offutt Air Force Base, Bellevue, NE
In May 1945, Paul Tibbets walked the assembly floor of the Martin Bomber Plant at Offutt Field, Nebraska, and personally picked the B-29 he wanted. The plant had been built four years earlier on the old cavalry post south of Omaha, and by 1944 the line was rolling out fifty B-29 Superfortresses a month. The aircraft Tibbets selected was tail number 44-86292. He named it after his mother. Three months later, Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Three days after that, Bockscar — also built here, also modified here — dropped the second one on Nagasaki.
The Martin Company left in April 1946. The complex sat half-empty for two years.
Then Curtis LeMay came.
By 1948 the new Strategic Air Command had a problem. Its headquarters at Andrews Field sat within range of a Soviet bomber making a one-way run from the Arctic. Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington gave the order to move inland. Offutt had what SAC needed — the same buildings that had assembled the two atomic bombs, beside one of the few interior-continent runways long enough for a fully loaded B-29. The headquarters moved that November. LeMay set his desk down in the old plane factory and ran the global nuclear force from there.
In nine years he built the bomber arm of the Cold War. SAC grew from sixty nuclear-capable aircraft to nearly two thousand. A hardened underground command post opened in 1957 with two-foot concrete walls and a war room sized for 800 people. Then on February 3, 1961, an EC-135 took off from Offutt and started something with no parallel in aviation history. For the next twenty-nine and a half years — until July 24, 1990 — an Airborne Command Post was in the air twenty-four hours a day, every day. A SAC general was always aboard with a battle staff, ready to take over the war if Offutt fell. They called it Looking Glass because the airplane mirrored the ground command post below. The mission logged over 281,000 accident-free flying hours.
SAC ended in 1992. The mission did not. United States Strategic Command took over the same buildings, then in 2019 dedicated a new $1.3-billion facility across the street — named, like the old one, for LeMay. Tankers and reconnaissance aircraft still depart Offutt every day. And the original Martin assembly building, where Tibbets walked the line and pointed at the airplane he wanted, is still standing inside the fence.