In June 1945, two months after USS Laffey (DD-724) survived perhaps the most ferocious mass kamikaze attack of World War II, the destroyer got a new skipper, then-Commander Odale D. "Muddy" Waters. Earlier in the war, Waters served as officer in charge of the Navy's mine disposal school, gunnery officer on board USS Memphis (CL-13) in the Atlantic, and as a Fourth Fleet and Atlantic Fleet staff officer.
The heavily damaged Laffey was undergoing repairs at Todd Shipyard in Seattle, Washington, when Commander Waters took command. She finally left the facility on 6 September 1945, made her way to San Diego, and then to Hawaii. The following account of Waters" experiences related to Operation Crossroads is adapted from his U.S. Naval Institute oral history and was previously published in the July 1986 issue of Proceedings.
I got to Pearl Harbor in the fall of 1945. While we were there, my destroyer squadron, under the command of then-Captain E. N. "Butch" Parker, was designated as the operating squadron for the atomic tests at Bikini, Operation Crossroads.
The ships designated to be in Crossroads had priority on getting personnel and equipment and everything else. Our problem was that there were no personnel left in Pearl to get. But there were some people who wanted to be in on what promised to be a landmark event. For example, a reservist, either an officer or an enlisted man, was allowed to extend for about one year or less if he wanted to go to Operation Crossroads to see an atomic bomb exploded. We had quite a few who did that, but not as many as needed. I argued that I should be sent back to the West Coast where the pool of people to draw from was larger.
It took me about a month on the coast before I got the people I needed, but they were a strange assortment. There were a lot of chiefs and few Indians because, of course, most people staying in the Navy at that time were career people. All of the nonrated people were mostly reservists who were getting out.
It was difficult for us to keep our two engine rooms running with the eight chief machinist's mates we had. The normal wartime complement was one chief for each engine room. I got the eight together and said, "Who are the two senior guys?" When they finally figured out who were the two seniors, I said: "Well, one has the forward engine room and the other has the aft engine room. The rest of you might just as well forget those caps and buttons because you"re going to be throttlemen and work for your living." They took it very well.
We started for Pearl Harbor where we were to pick up Admiral Frank G. Farion's flagship and go on to Bikini with him. On the way to Pearl, we developed a hot bearing on a cruising turbine. We tried various methods of flushing it, but they didn't work; it kept heating up. We got permission to drop back in the formation, lock the affected shaft, and catch up again on the remaining shaft. Then we held our place in formation on one shaft. These eight chief machinist's mates took out that bearing while under way and put in a spare-a very difficult job.
Preparations for the Tests
The Bikini operation was exciting. Of course, the eight assigned destroyers became the workhorses, doing all sorts of things. This included looking for aviators and Air Force planes that went down between Eniwetok and Kwajalein. I took Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy to inspect the reef and to look at a proposed location for the "Charley" part of the test which would never be conducted. It was to have been a deep-water, non-moored test in the lee of the atoll.
That was my first brush with oceanography. The working destroyers were fitted with special additions to the midship winch and about a mile or so of piano wire. We also had some strange things called Nansen bottles that were used for sampling the water at various depths. When we weren't doing anything else, we'd cast these Nansen bottles in various locations. There were a couple of scientists on board who took plankton samples and that sort of thing. We also had a crew of monitoring scientists with Geiger counters. Usually the senior one was a Public Health Service doctor who knew what he was doing. The other "scientists" were a mixed bag of generally nice guys; many of them had gotten their jobs through political connections. Most of them wanted only to see the big bomb explode at Bikini.
The main reason this squadron of destroyers was there was to be in what was called-in the first test-the Radiological Downwind Patrol. When the bomb went off, we were stationed some 12 or 15 miles outside of the atoll and on either side of the down-wind sector. Once the mushroom cloud started blowing downwind, we ran tracks that crisscrossed back and forth under this downwind sector and took Geiger counter readings of the fallout. We were surprised by how little there was; it was practically indiscernible. But, of course, no one really knew what might happen when you blew up an atom bomb. It had only been done three times before, and only twice in anger.
Beyond the bombs themselves, the most interesting thing to observe was the growth in the size of the safety supplement to the operations order. The appendix on safety began as a slim edition, maybe a quarter-inch thick. But each day a different scientist would think of some new thing to worry about and there would be an addendum to the safety appendix. Eventually, it was bigger than the operations order. This was because there was an understandable degree of uncertainty. For example, about a month before the thing, those of us who were going to be around the site were issued a special pair of dark glasses to protect our eyes. Then, just before the actual event, we were told not to use the dark glasses, that they might not be good enough. Before the live bomb run was made, every ship was directed to go to general quarters and set maximum watertight integrity. We had to have all engines on the line ready to take off in any direction. Then we had to assemble the crew topside, which was very hard to do in a ship that was ready to make full power, and also completely battened down for battle. But, we more or less did it. Once the crew was assembled, we would keep track of the relative bearing on where the bomb was going to be detonated. Then the crew members would face away from that direction, shut their eyes, and cradle their eyes with their arm across their face just to give them additional protection.
No one was to look in the direction of the blast with the dark glasses. But I had one young ensign who had signed up especially for this and he came to me and said: "Captain, I don't want to hide my eyes. I'd like to see it. May I have your permission to use the dark glasses?" So I said: "Okay, go ahead. If you want to do it, fine."
Disappointing and Spectacular Blasts
We had a loudspeaker system all around the ship tuned in to the bombardier's frequency in the aircraft dropping the first bomb. A guy with an undertaker's voice conducted the countdown. He would say, "Ten minutes to go, live bomb run." This voice of doom droned on, "One minute to go, live bomb run." And then, "Bombs away!" But nothing happened. Everyone was getting a little restless and finally my ensign in his dark glasses out on the wing of the bridge said, "There she goes!" I said, "I didn't hear anything." And he said, "There she is, Captain." And so I looked at it, and there was a mushroom cloud coming up over the horizon and about that time there was a little "poom" and a slight concussion you could feel. This was very disappointing to everybody. It was quite anticlimactic after all the preparations we had made. Just a piddly "poom."
We immediately got under way at high speed to get under the mushroom cloud and steam back and forth with the other destroyers on our designated tracks.
We had fuse boxes on the bridges of those ships to control such devices as the radar. Square things, they were handy surfaces to set things on-like a cup of coffee. The head monitor had set his Geiger counter on one of these things. Well, the fuse boxes got a little warm, and just as we were starting under the atom cloud, the head monitor said: "Captain! Captain! Do something! Go to General Quarters! Do something! We're getting fallout!" His Geiger counter pointer had gone off the scale. Then somebody realized the fuse box had heated the Geiger counter and that the other counters were working normally. So we lost a little faith in our head monitor.
When we returned to port, there was some interest in looking at how some of the target ships had been knocked around. Then we started getting ready for the next test, Baker.
Baker was the spectacular test. We were only about eight miles away from that one and could actually see a huge plume of water come up and ships in the middle of it spinning all around. It was an awe-inspiring thing. Then we had a real job to do because as soon as it was reasonable for us to go into the lagoon, the destroyer squadron entered. Within a couple of hours after Baker's detonation, we went in and positioned our anchor in a line fairly close to the target array and started taking Geiger counter readings measuring the water's radioactivity.
A "Hot" Tin Can
We collected information and radioed it to the flagship, which kept a plot to monitor which way the currents were going. Then the laboratory ships and the ships that were necessary to do this part of the experiment, together with the support ships and the flagship, anchored behind us. When our data indicated that contaminated water was close to the big ships, they would move to a different anchorage clear of danger. Then we would shift and put ourselves between them and the hot spots. In doing all this, the destroyers got some contamination. Eventually, people started worrying more and more about our destroyers. Careful surveys of radioactivity concentrations were made, which put certain locations off limits and forbad the use of "hot" living spaces.
We returned to Pearl Harbor about the middle of August, and went into the Navy yard. Our whole squadron of ships had been built early in the war and had never had a really good Navy yard overhaul. Even in damage repair, they skipped a lot of things that needed fixing. This Navy yard overhaul, scheduled for Hunter's Point, was very important, so Pearl Harbor gave us a safety inspection and monitored us some more and said, "Well, yes, you do have a little contamination here, a few hot spots here and there, but you are avoiding them properly." Then we got under way for the West Coast.
On the coast, everyone was quite concerned about us because they had looked at the data and seen that there were hot spots, particularly in our fire and salt water flushing lines. The contamination in the water had filtered into the barnacles and the growth inside of the lines and concentrated there. When we went into Hunter's Point for overhaul, the Laffey was assigned to be the first into dry dock. But it was decided not to put us in the regular graving dock because we might permanently contaminate it. So we pulled into a floating dry dock that had been brought in for us. Our ship got about halfway out of the water in the floating dry dock and was as stable as we could expect. This was a Friday afternoon, and we were ordered to stop everything right there, to hold the ship until Monday morning when the man who was an expert in the field could get there and supervise washing her down.
It took several days of special treatment to get rid of the contamination in the barnacles and the growth on the bottom. The yard folks had to use special techniques and chemicals to clean the condensers and the fire and flushing system.
All this took a little longer, but it worked all right.