That isolation has a silver lining: today Wendover Field is the best-preserved bomber training base from World War II. Several bizarrely glitzy high-rise casinos have arisen on the Nevada side of town in the last couple of decades, but the sense of isolation and remoteness still dominates. Sixty-four years later, the desert-and Wendover-is as stark as ever. Route 40 with a lone light atop a tall pole, a gas station, and the promise of hamburgers in the café on the Utah side of the building and gambling and liquor on the Nevada side. The hotel spanned the Utah/Nevada border, luring travelers on two-lane U.S. The town itself, boasting a population of one hundred before the air force arrived in 1940, owed its existence to a small water tower that refilled steam locomotives of the Western Pacific Railroad, a few arsenic mines, and the State Line Hotel.
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A few stark brown hills offered the only relief from the mirage-laden salt plains that stretched out as far as the eye could see.
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The comedian Bob Hope came through on a USO tour and wise-crackingly dubbed the army air base “Leftover Field.” Hugging the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats 125 miles west of Salt Lake City, Wendover was as bleak and barren as a bleak and barren desert could be. Others didn’t quite share his enthusiasm. Paul Tibbets flew over Wendover Field in September 1944 in search of a remote, secure place where he could train the B-29 crews he handpicked to drop the atomic bomb, he looked down from thirty thousand feet and declared it “perfect.”
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The Desert Site That Was Barren, Desolate-and Just Right | HistoryNet Close