Category Archives: ManhattanProject

Atomic Snapshots: Atomic Bomb Loading Pits

Wendover Airfield Loading Pits
Wendover Airfield Loading Pits
Wendover Airfield Loading Pits

Out on a far section of Wendover Airfield, you’ll find what remains of the loading pits for the Silverplate B-29 Superfortress bombers. The size of the atomic bombs were such that they couldn’t be loaded in a traditional manner into the bombers because of their height. As such, the training bombs at Wendover (called pumpkin bombs which were the same dimensions and weight) were lowered into the pits. The bombers were then maneuvered over the pit, and the bomb was raised on a hydraulic jack into the bomber.

The full access tour at Historic Wendover Airbase (usually offered twice each year) takes visitors out to the bomb pits to see what remains. These same pits were replicated on Tinian for deployment during World War II and the culmination of the Manhattan Project.

Below is a video (no sound, courtesy the Atomic Heritage Foundation) showing the atomic bomb loading pits on Tinian along with the loading of Little Boy into Enola Gay and Fat Man into Bockscar.

Loading Little Boy and Fat Man into the Silverplate B-29s from the loading pits on Tinian. Courtesy of the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

Atomic Snapshots: Eads Hall

In Eads Hall at Washington University in St. Louis, you’ll find a grouping of plaques and information in the first floor hallway. The building housed the Department of Physics where Arthur Compton demonstrated the particle concept of electromagnetic radiation, proving Einstein’s proposal that light was both a wave and particle. The Compton Effect garnered him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927.

Arthur Compton went on to direct the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, a vital link in the Manhattan Project, which supported the development, construction, and operation of the reactors at Hanford and enrichment activities at Oak Ridge.

The grouping consists of an informational plaque, an historic marker, a photograph, the sketched experiment of the scattering of X-rays, and a description of his Nobel Prize winning experiment.

KEM 1945 Christmas Card

A 1945 Christmas card from political cartoonist Kimon Evan Marengo (Kem). This card comments on the dropping of atomic bombs, showing Harry S. Truman as the Statue of Liberty, holding both money and the bomb. Joseph Stalin, Clement Attleee, Charles De Gaulle, and Chaing Kai-shek all hold out hands of friendship, but they are really reaching out for the atom bomb in Truman’s hand. (Source.)