Producing the plutonium fuel for atomic bombs was not the only contribution Hanford made to fighting World War II.
In 1944, workers at the nuclear reservation each chipped in to buy a Flying Fortress bomber and donated it to the U.S. Army Air Corps for missions over Europe.
The B-17G, dubbed “Day’s Pay,” flew 60 missions over Europe, and is today memorialized at Richland High School.
Hanford was established as part of the Manhattan Project, which took its name from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Manhattan, N.Y., district that oversaw the production of the atomic bomb, to convert uranium 238 into plutonium.
Establishing the reservation involved taking farmland and two small towns to create an installation where the government could work on developing nuclear weapons in relative secrecy. At its height, Hanford employed 51,000 people, although only about 1 percent of them knew what they were really doing: Racing Germany to develop a weapon so powerful it could end the war quickly.
While the work Hanford was doing was vital to the war effort, Hanford employees wanted to do more.
It was Max Blanchard, a carpenter at Hanford, who came up with the idea of buying an airplane for the military. Shortly after the Normandy invasion, Blanchard got a letter from his son who was overseas praising the support ground troops got from the air corps, which had established such air superiority over Europe that German forces could not move in daylight without being bombed or strafed.
Blanchard decided that buying a plane would be a way to help the troops and his crew was sold on the idea. Soon enough, the entire staff at Hanford was on board, and the payroll department deducted a day’s pay from each employee — an average of about $5.89 or almost $104 in today’s currency — to go toward the purchase of an airplane.
Hanford workers who donated money were given buttons to wear to show their support for the drive.
The Hanford workers donation totaled $300,000 — about $5.3 million when adjusted for inflation. The money was used to purchase a Boeing B-17G bomber, the latest model of the iconic bomber.
The workers also had a contest to name the bomber. The winner was “Day’s Pay,” which was submitted multiple times.
On July 23, 1944, Hanford workers and others gathered at the reservation’s airfield to formally turn over the aircraft to the Army. Kate Belle Harris, a Hanford employee whose son was killed in a mission over Germany, christened the plane, breaking a bottle of champagne on the plane’s nose.
The plane’s nose art did not feature the typical pin-up girls or cartoon drawings, but just the plane’s name and the words “Presented to the Army Air Forces as a Result of Cash Contributions by Employees of Hanford Engineer Works.”
