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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A $75,393 grant has been approved to create a documentary and plan restoration of training grounds at the Wendover Airfield, where crews trained to drop the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II.
The grant by the nonprofit group Preserve America will be matched by Tooele County, which owns the site.
The Air Corps base along the Utah-Nevada border was instrumental in perfecting the missions to drop the two bombs, called Little Boy and Fat Man.
The aircraft Enola Gay, which was used to drop Little Boy on Hiroshima, killing at least 140,000 people, was hangered at the 1.8 million-acre airfield.
"The story of the training in Utah is just not well-known," said Jim Peterson, founder of Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation and manager of the airfield. Peterson started the foundation in 2002 after visiting the airfield and making it his crusade to preserve the historic place. Currently, the airfield has a small museum and working terminal.
Peterson has ambitious plans, hoping for a living history attraction like Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia. The foundation estimates it would cost $80 million to restore the 1940s training base.
Tooele County officials hope it will become a tourist hot spot.
"We get a lot of tourists through there, obviously to the Nevada side, but there's another story besides the casinos," said Nicole Cline, Tooele County planning and economic development division adviser, who wrote the grant proposal.
"There's a critical part of the nation's history sitting there and so few people know what that is or what role that played," she said.
The documentary that the grant will help finance includes interviews with veterans who trained at the base and a detailed background. The master plan for restoring the airfield includes bringing back some of the old planes to their original Wendover hangars.
"It's a matter of funding," Peterson said. "As we get the funding, we can bring more vintage aircraft in."
As for the Enola Gay, which now resides in the Smithsonian's Steven F. Uder-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in Virginia, "We'll obviously never get that plane back," he said. "But our hope is to at least find a B-29."
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
