Adventures of a Sea Hunter by James P. Delgado Read Free Book Online Page A

further test the effects of the bomb, the military loaded twenty-two of the target ships with fuel and ammunition as well as 220 tons of equipment: tanks, tractors and airplanes; guns, mortars and ammunition; radios, fire extinguishers and telephones; gas masks, watches and uniforms; canned food and frozen meat. They also placed sixty-nine target airplanes on the ships and moored two seaplanes in the water near them.
    The first test took place on July 1, 1946. The B-29
Dave’s Dream
dropped a 20-kiloton plutonium bomb on the target fleet, slightly to starboard of the bow of the attack transport
Gilliam.
Caught in the explosion’s incandescent fireball and battered down into the water by the shock wave,
Gilliam
, “badly ruptured, crumpled, and twisted almost beyond recognition,” sank in seventy-nine seconds. The blast swept the nearby transport
Carlisle
150 feet to one side and nearly wiped away the superstructure and masts.
Carlisle
began to burn and sank in thirty minutes. The destroyer
Anderson
, hit hard by the blast, burst into flames when her ammunition exploded. Burning fiercely,
Anderson
capsized to port and sank by the stern within seven minutes. The destroyer
Lamson
, its hull torn open, sank twelve minutes after the blast. The Japanese cruiser
Sakawa
, badly battered, caught on fire and sank the following day.
    The second test took place three weeks later. The Navy remoored the target ships around a bomb lowered 90 feet below the surface.When the underwater atomic bomb erupted at 8:34 on the morning of July 25, a huge mass of steam and water mounded up into a “spray dome” that climbed at a rate of 2,500 feet per second and formed a 975-foot thick column. Its core was a nearly hollow void of superheated steam that rose faster than the more solid 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 mushroom cloud atop the column. The upward blast crushed, capsized and sank the battleship
Arkansas
in less than a second.
    The blast also created “atomic tidal waves.” The first wave, a 94-foot wall of radioactive water, lifted and crashed into the aircraft carrier
Saratoga
with such force that it twisted the hull. The falling water also partially smashed the flight deck, and
Saratoga
sank within seven and a half hours.
Nagato
, its hull broken open, sank two days later. Beneath the water, the immense pressure of the bomb’s burst crushed three submarines that settled onto the seabed, leaking air bubbles and oil.
    On the surface, a boiling cloud of radioactive water and steam penetrated the surviving ships. Radioactive material adhered to wooden decks, paint, rust and grease. For weeks after the tests, the Navy tried to wash off the fallout with water and lye, sending crews aboard the contaminated ships to scrub off paint, rust and scale with long-handled brushes, holystones and any other “available means.” In August, worried about radiation, Admiral Blandy cancelled plans for a third test and gave orders to sink badly damaged ships. As Operation Crossroads steamed away from Bikini, it towed the battered, irradiated fleet of targets to nearby Kwajalein, and then to Pearl Harbor, Bremerton in Washington, and Hunter’s Point and Mare Island in California. There, sailors stripped the hulks of ammunition and left them to rust.
    Starting in 1948, the Navy began taking the Crossroads target ships to sea and sinking them. The explanation was that the sinkings were part of training exercises and tests of new weapons. That year, Dr. David Bradley, M.D., a radiological safety monitor at Bikini, published his journal of the tests in a book titled No
Place to Hide.
It stayed on the
New York
Times
best-seller list for ten weeks. No
Place to Hide
was a forceful book that told the “real” message of Bikini. According to Bradley, Operation Crossroads, “hastily planned