The men training at this desert field in 1944 were under a sign that said so. Most of them did not know they were practicing to end the war with a single airplane.
A Pirep featured story · KENV Wendover, Wendover, UT
Land at Wendover and you are on one of the best-kept secrets of the Second World War. The field opened in 1940 for the most ordinary reason — empty desert makes a good bombing range — and twenty-one heavy bomb groups passed through. Then in late 1944 Colonel Paul Tibbets arrived with the 509th Composite Group: fifteen B-29s modified under the code name Silverplate, eighteen hundred men, and a mission almost none of them were allowed to understand.
The base went to maximum security. Signs went up reading "What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, stays here." A trainee hitchhiking into town was quizzed by a friendly driver about the base; he kept his mouth shut, and the driver turned out to be an FBI agent placed there to test exactly that. The crews practiced dropping bulbous dummy bombs they called "pumpkins" — odd shapes that handled like nothing else, because they were stand-ins for Little Boy and Fat Man. The Enola Gay flew in on June 12, 1945, finished training, and left for Tinian. Six weeks later it dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The dry desert that made Wendover secret also made it permanent. While most WWII training fields were bulldozed or swallowed by their cities, Wendover just sat in the salt-flat air, barely decaying. The Enola Gay's own B-29 hangar still stands, restored, at the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum. You can taxi past the same hardstands where the most consequential bomb load in history was practiced, in a place built specifically so that no one would notice.