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Originally Posted by Jolly Amaranto
I visited Tinian in 1967. It was still pretty much a backwater with the old B29 runways all but grown over with thick vegetation. Did manage to find the bomb loading pits.
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I think they've been restored now. A colleague's been there and they recovered tons of spare parts from the two bombs that were just dumped into the surf at the end of the runway. Allegedly the leftovers were supposed to be dumped a few miles offshore but some young enlisted guy probably figured "hey, sooner this is done, sooner I go home..."
I guess they're also restoring, or at least have preserved, much of the stuff at Wendover Field in UT. That's where they did all of the testing with the B-29s and inert Fat Mans. I've never been there but I plan to.
Rambling side note on the era's relevant history:
As part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park the DOE and the NPS have restored much of the WW2 era stuff here in LA, or at least that which survived our huge 2001 forest fire. Most of it's inside the fenceline but they're working on ways to get the public in to see it. Oak Ridge and Hanford are also part of the park and are doing similar restorations of public and non-public areas.
Gun Site, where they tested the internals for Little Boy (which was basically a naval artillery barrel), is still waiting for restoration.
V Site, had/has a mockup of the B-29 bomb bay where they did numerous checks to make sure Fat Man would interface properly with the aircraft. Another building that was preserved was used to assemble Fat Man. Both have been restored.
Pajarito Site is where the famous criticality experiment that killed Louis Slotin is located. Interestingly enough it's where we did criticality experiments up until about ten years ago when DOE moved the fissile material to a facility in Nevada. It's part of the park too.
Not part of the park, but the quanset hut where they built many of the Fat Man and Trinity internals still stands at Trap Door (TD) site, the current location of the detonator design, testing and manufacturing facilities. I worked there for 10 years and never got into it as it's sealed due to being filled with asbestos and plague/hantavirus infested mice. It was built to be "temporary" - yeah, people were working in it until the early '90s.
Not in original buildings but I think we still have some of the candy kettles used to cast the explosives for FM. Actual commercial-style candy cookers were used!
What's so cool is that these sites are collocated with our operating facilities now. Gun Site is about 100 yds from the lab's radiography facilities. V Site is where we still do explosives assembly and testing. Kinda humbling to cruise past these places every day...
There are already other places in areas open to the public so if you're a history geek or just in the area (Hanford WA, Oak Ridge TN, LA NM) drop by. I think nearly all of the publicly accessible areas are free as well.
https://www.nps.gov/mapr/index.htm