In a spectacular display of new-found atomic might, the United States dropped and detonated nuclear bombs upon and beneath a fleet of nearly 100 U.S. Navy and captured enemy World War II ships 50 years ago. During the summer of 1946, two staged explosions 2,400 miles west of Hawaii on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands blasted, twisted, charred, irradiated, and sank battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submerged submarines, attack transports, and yard craft, inaugurating a new age and a new era in naval warfare. The impact of this Operation Crossroads, as it was called—nuclear proliferation, the nuclear Navy, an island people dispossessed from their ancestral home for decades, and a contaminated atoll and radioactive fleet of sunken ships—was profound.
After the atomic bombing of Japan, politicians and strategists wanted to test the new weapon against the nation’s primary line of defense—the Navy. Advocates of air power were particularly eager to drop a B-29-delivered weapon on an anchored fleet to show that, in the words of one Army officer, “in the event of a future war, ... a Navy as we know it now will be utterly helpless on either side.” The Navy was equally keen to prove that ships could survive and were in fact not excessively vulnerable to atomic attack. Navy leadership also set out to prove that “Navy carrier aircraft could be just as useful and valuable as Air Force bombers for the delivery of atomic weapons.”
In fact, the Navy already had been a key proponent of the new technology. Naval officers attached to the Manhattan Project included Captain (later Rear Admiral) William S. Parsons, who had participated in the development of the “Little Boy” uranium bomb and had flown in the Enola Gay as the weaponeer for the Hiroshima attack. After the war, Parsons pursued plans for nuclear torpedoes and other shipborne atomic weapons.
For the tests, prominent politicians and military officials were urging that the bomb be used to destroy the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy. When asked about such an operation, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal agreed in August 1945 that tests were needed, but he added that the Navy would remain a potent force after the tests, since “control of the sea by whatever weapons are necessary is the Navy’s mission.”
On 16 October 1945, with ships to spare, Fleet Admiral Ernest King agreed to bomb captured Japanese ships, along with “a few of our own modern naval vessels . . . included in the target array” as part of a coordinated operation conducted by the Army and the Navy under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
After an assessment, the JCS proposed a joint task force to conduct the tests, three of which were slated. Upon recommendations from the Chiefs, on 10 January 1946, President Harry S. Truman created Joint Task Force One. Vice Admiral William Henry Purnell “Spike” Blandy took command the next day. Blandy had spent most of his career in ordnance and at war’s end was Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Special Weapons. In this newly created position, he was responsible for evaluating the late- war development of guided missiles and the atomic bomb. Tagged with the nickname “Buck Rogers of the Navy” by New York Times reporter Sidney Shallet, Blandy took the helm of Joint Task Force One. Among the first of his actions was to name the proposed tests. “I named the project ‘Operation Crossroads,’” he explained later, “because it was apparent that warfare, perhaps civilization itself, had been brought to a turning point in history by this revolutionary weapon.”
Blandy made clear in public statements that he expected the concept of a Navy to survive in the coming nuclear age. Testing the bomb on warships would “improve our Navy,” he said. “We want ships that are tough, even when threatened by atomic bombs; we want to keep the ships afloat, propellers turning, guns firing; we want to protect the crews so that, if fighting is necessary, they can fight well today and return home unharmed tomorrow.”
Crossroads planners were drawn to Bikini because it was under U.S. control, far away from established routes of oceanic travel, and had a small population of 167 people. Bikinians who were displaced and relocated from their ancestral home by the tests were told that their cooperation would aid world peace and that they were to be like the children of Israel, guided by the United States to a new and better home. When the natives departed, the 53d Naval Construction Battalion sprayed the atoll with the insecticide DDT and built dozens of huts and workshops, and several other buildings and amenities. In the lagoon, the Seabees laid hundreds of moorings to hold the target ships “like fish in an atomic barrel.”
The Navy mounted a force of 37,000 officers and men summoned from around the world for the operation. Another 5,000 came from the Army or were civilians. The total force assembled for the operation was an impressive 41,963 men and 37 women. A fleet of 242 ships, 95 of them targets, sailed to Bikini. Crossroads press releases bragged that the target ships alone were the world’s fifth or sixth largest naval force. The target fleet included two aircraft carriers, the Saratoga (CV-3) and Independence (CVL-22); five battleships, the Arkansas (BB-33), Nevada (BB-36), New York (BB-34), Pennsylvania (BB-38), and the Japanese Nagato; four cruisers, the Salt Lake City (CA-25), Pensacola (CA-24), the Japanese Sakawa, and the German Prinz Eugen; 12 destroyers, 8 submarines, 19 attack transports, 41 landing craft, 2 yard oilers, and an advanced repair dry dock.
On board most of the ships, which were loaded to varying degrees with fuel and ordnance, Army personnel installed tons of equipment. Frozen meat stored in refrigerators was later exposed to the tests in 22 selected vessels. Swatches of cloth were mounted on plywood sheets to face the blast. The 71 target airplanes, all naval types, included two seaplanes moored in the water off Bikini.
The first test, Able, took place on 1 July 1946. The B-29 “Dave’s Dream” dropped a 20-kiloton plutonium-core weapon, with the intended detonation point to be the battleship Nevada, selected as the target because it was “the most rugged ship available.” Painted international orange and outlined with white paint, the Nevada stood out in vivid contrast to the rest of the dark-blue and haze-gray fleet. The bomb missed the Nevada by 2,130 feet, detonating 518 feet above the lagoon just 50 yards off and slightly to starboard of the bow of the attack transport Gilliam (APA-57).
Despite the miss, the bomb sank five ships and “immobilized” six others, while eight ships suffered “short- or long term serious loss of military efficiency,” when their boilers and stacks and radio and fire- control radar antennae were damaged. The fireball started 23 small fires in ships, some as far as 2,265 yards away, while paint on other ships 3,700 yards distant was scorched.
The attack transports Gilliam and Carlisle (APA-69), the closest ships to “surface zero,” sank almost immediately. The Gilliam, caught in the incandescent fireball and battered down into the water by the shock wave, was “badly ruptured, crumpled, and twisted almost beyond recognition,” and sank in 79 seconds. The blast swept the Carlisle 150 feet to one side, as the superstructure and masts were nearly wiped off her decks. The hull was twisted and broken, and she began to burn. She started listing to starboard 5 minutes and 33 seconds after the blast and sank in 30 minutes.
Two other ships close to surface zero sank quickly. The blast and the fireball tore and twisted the superstructure and collapsed the stack of the destroyer Anderson (DD-411). Flames from a fire aft of the bridge subsided for a moment, then flared again just nine seconds after the nuclear detonation, as the destroyer’s ammunition exploded in two separate blasts. Burning fiercely, the Anderson capsized to port and sank by the stem within seven minutes. The destroyer Lamson (DD-367), moored 760 yards away from the blast, sank 12 minutes after the blast with a large oil slick trailing from her ruptured hull. The fifth ship to sink after Able was the Japanese cruiser Sakawa. Badly battered and dished by the blast, she burned fiercely and sank the following day.
The second test, Baker, took place three weeks later, on 25 July, after divers and boarding crews had assessed the effects of Able. Ships were moored in new positions, centered on a bomb situated in a caisson submerged beneath the LSM-60 at the center of the array. The LSM had been refitted extensively with special rigging facilities, a laboratory, and radio and electronic equipment. Wire cable, electrical wire, and a coaxial umbilical—which transmitted the ultra-high frequency signal that detonated the bomb—linked the weapon to the ship.
When Baker erupted from the lagoon at 0834 on 25 July, a mass of steam and water mounded into a “spray dome” that climbed at a rate of 2,500 feet per second. The center of the resulting 975-foot-thick column was super-heated steam that rose faster than the heavier 300-foot-thick water sides, climbing 11,000 feet per second and acting as a chimney for the hot gases of the fireball. The gases, mixed with excavated lagoon bottom and radioactive materials, formed a cauliflower-shaped mushroom cloud atop the column. The battleship Arkansas, caught in the upward blast, was crushed, capsized, and sunk in less than one second. The sinking hulk of the battleship partially blocked the blast, leaving a huge dark spot in the stem of the mushroom as it climbed above the lagoon.
On the lagoon surface, the shock wave and the erupting force of the column created a series of waves that swept across the surface at 45 knots, smashing into the moored ships. The first wave, 94 feet high, slammed into the Saratoga seven seconds after detonation. Badly battered, with the stack knocked down, starboard torpedo blister crushed, and with every watertight compartment sprung, the Saratoga sank within seven-and-a-half hours, slowly settling by the stern.
The Japanese battleship Nagato, moored 400 feet off the Arkansas’s port beam, was swept sideways 400 yards by the blast. Taking on water from holes punched in the bottom of the hull, the battleship slowly listed and capsized 48 hours after Baker. Three submarines, the Apogon (SS- 308), the Pilotfish (SS-386), and the Skipjack (SS-184), moored beneath the lagoon surface, were partially crushed and sank. The concrete ship YO~160 was cracked and went down, as did the concrete dry dock ARDC-13.
For those ships left afloat, the boiling mass of radioactive water and steam from the blast had penetrated every compartment and contaminated them. Radioactive material adhered to the ships’ wooden decks, paint, tar, canvas, cordage, rust, and grease. Washing the ships down with water, foamite, and lye and having crews scrub off paint, rust, and scale with long-handled brushes, holystones, and any other “available means” failed to remove the contamination.
After Baker, contamination on a scale larger than anticipated, inadequate equipment, inexperienced personnel, and difficult working conditions overwhelmed the monitoring effort. As teams worked to determine which ships were “Geiger sweet” or “Geiger sour,” the Crossroads-set limit for exposure, 0.1 Roentgens per day, the same standard for the Manhattan Project, was met within minutes, a half hour, or a few hours. Work was curtailed on board the target ships, but to make matters worse, increasing radioactive contamination of the support ships anchored in the lagoon introduced the need for monitors on the non- target vessels. The radioactive water of the lagoon was accumulating radioactive material in the evaporators and salt water lines of the support vessels moored and working in the lagoon, while contaminated marine growth irradiated their hulls to create readings in some cases as high as 0.204 Roentgens a day, twice the set limit. Bunks next to the contaminated hulls were abandoned, and nervous men limited the time they spent sitting on toilets that flushed with radioactive salt water.
Worried about his crews, Admiral Blandy ordered the task force to withdraw from Bikini on 10 August and move the surviving target ships to Kwajalein. In the aftermath of Baker, the third and final test, Charlie, was canceled by President Truman.
Except for the sunken vessels left at Bikini, the remainder of the surviving targets were towed to Kwajalein, Pearl Harbor, Bremerton, Hunters Point, and Mare Island. Most of the ships were left alone after ammunition was removed from them. Decontamination efforts continued on some ships, primarily for training, and by June 1947 the final order came to begin scuttling the irradiated fleet.
Between 1948 and 1951, but mostly in 1948, the Crossroads target ships were taken to sea and sunk in waters thousands of feet deep, scuttled or pounded in attacks as part of training exercises and tests of new but conventional weapons. On 9 June 1948, The New York Times announced that 23 of the ships at Kwajalein already had been sunk by gunfire, nine in early May “to forestall their sinking in shoal water and blocking the anchorage.” Over the next five weeks, another 14 were sunk “to sharpen the Pacific Fleet’s teeth in experiments involving the Navy’s nonatomic weapons in event of an immediate emergency.” Fifty target ships were sent to the bottom, 36 of them off Kwajalein, the others off the California and Washington coasts or in the Pacific south of Hawaii. Only nine ships out of 95 escaped scuttling or sinking.
The message of Bikini was clear. A fleet that had physically survived the effects of two blasts was nonetheless forever lost to radioactive contamination. Blast effect, while impressive, paled next to the effects of radiation contamination. The final report of Joint Task Force One noted that “from a military viewpoint, the atomic bomb’s ability to kill human beings or to impair, through injury, their ability to make war is of paramount importance. Thus the overall result of a bomb’s explosion upon the crew ... is of greater interest.”
Ironically, Operation Crossroads’ results were in the end largely “inconclusive” for each branch of the services locked in rivalry at the beginning of the tests. The Air Force, citing that “only nine of the target ships escaped sinking, damage, or unacceptable radioactive contamination,” found proof of “what it had argued all along; ships were intolerably vulnerable in the atomic age.” The Navy responded that the seeming knockout to its ships, gleefully reported by the Air Force, was the result of unmanned and undefended ships anchored in a tight formation. The Navy argued that “modern” ships, “properly dispersed, executing evasive maneuvers and utilizing their own defenses, would be far less vulnerable . . . than, for instance, fixed air bases.” It was also noted that “Dave’s Dream” had missed the Nevada by “two miles.”
The Navy found the ideal proponent for its post-Cross- roads survival in New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin, a Navy veteran. As terrible as the damage seemed in the aftermath of Able, said Baldwin, “the results at Bikini . . . must be qualified.” He stressed the tight spacing of the ships to measure blast effect and their crewless state. In order to survive, “ships must seek safety in dispersion, with redesigned superstructures to better protect radar and radio antennae, and means must be found to reduce the accumulation of radioactive material on the ships.”
A more pessimistic view expressed at the same time by an unnamed officer noted the harsh reality that “crews doomed to slow death from exposure to lethal radioactivity are nevertheless able the first few days after exposure to continue normal duties. The seamen of tomorrow must be prepared to accept radioactivity as part of the hazards of their living and be ready to work and fight and save their ship even though they know they are doomed to slow death.”
Crossroads also reinforced plans to bring the bomb to sea. It allowed time for the Navy to develop a nuclear capability as it eased public and political pressure to merge as a secondary partner with the Air Force or Army, or even cease to exist altogether. The Navy adopted the new technology. The air-dropped, 15-foot-long, half-ton “Thor” bomb was developed after World War II and first tested in 1951. The Navy took it to sea in 1956, and nuclear-tipped missiles gradually replaced guns on ships. Nuclear depth bombs, torpedoes, and various other types of weaponry soon joined the Navy tactical nuclear arsenal.
Even advocates of the big-gun battleships adopted the bomb. In 1956 the Navy introduced the Mark 23 Atomic Projectile. These 5-foot-long, 1,900-pound, 16-inch shells were created for the Iowa (BB-61)-class battleships as “atomic support” for Marines landing on the beach. These weapons remained in service until President George Bush ordered them ashore in 1992 as part of a reduction in nuclear arms. A prescient comment by Hanson Baldwin after the Able test augured the development of the ultimate nuclear-age weapon. Submarines, he wrote, “atomic-driven and equipped with atomic warhead missiles that could, perhaps, be fired while the craft was submerged, appear to have tremendous potentialities.”
Fifty years after Operation Crossroads, the sunken target fleet is now accessible to divers. A reassessment of the ships was undertaken by the National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resources Unit and the Navy, under the auspices of MDSU-1 and EOD-1, Detachment 63, in 1989 and 1990. The wrecks of the Saratoga, Arkansas, Nagato, Pilotfish, Apogon, Gilliam, Carlisle, YO-160, and LCT-1113 were relocated, dived upon, and extensively documented. Since then, divers have rediscovered the wrecks of the Anderson, Lamson, and Sakawa. An ABC-TV documentary and articles in National Geographic, Natural History, the Naval Institute Proceedings, and other journals reintroduced the forgotten fleet to the world and once again reminded many of the plight of the Bikinians, who, five decades later, have yet to return to their contaminated islands permanently.
Dr. David Bradley, a Crossroads radiation monitor, visited the displaced Bikinians in 1946 and wrote in his 1948 book, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948) that they “are not the first, nor will they be the last, to be left homeless and impoverished by the inexorable Bomb. They have no choice in the matter, and little understanding of it. But in this perhaps they are not so different from us all.” The latter has particular relevance for a number of Crossroads veterans, as well as other atomic veterans and surviving family members of now-deceased veterans, as they seek answers to new revelations about the dangers of nuclear explosions.
