15 January 2007

Crossroads



I am perched on the balcony, looking quizzically at the sky. The jet stream is toying with Washington, crossing up and across from the Gulf. Meanwhile, there is something fierce and awful happening out west, arctic sub-zero in Colorado and freezing rain from Texas to Illinois, but there is nothing here but uncertain drizzle.

Could it affect my commute to work tomorrow? I rolled that over on my tongue. It is not just the weather, and it is not just a metaphor. It is another crossroads on the road to somewhere.

Not today, not yet. One more day before it all starts again. Let it be. Just get up and show up. That is 98% of success, right?

There was so much to do in the precious time that I had away from steady work, and I squandered it most enjoyably. I accomplished precisely nothing, and this morning, in a last dash to get organized, found more projects.

I could be (un) profitably occupied for years working through the mound of things. Even now the scanner is humming, converting the unpublished recollections of the last Executive Officer of the Imperial Japanese battleship Nagato, which had served as the Flagship of Admiral Yamamoto's fleet off Hawaii.

The XO's  name was Edward Smith Gilfillen, and his story is another of those astonishing World War Two epics, absent the combat, but overwhelmingly strange.

He starts his recollection with a particularly vivid dream of the palms in Ceylon, and the gentle breeze from the sea, but he is awakened by a flashlight, and a sailor saying “Sir, we have saltwater blowing on the starboard generator.”

I have been there with him, in the total and complete darkness of an interior compartment on a ship of war. So tired, and so disoriented that I had actually made it home. Waking to the claxon was such a wrench that I felt torn between worlds, reluctant to be in the one of gray steel.

Gilfillen and a small but merry band of sailors were entrusted with taking the battleship from Yokosuka to the atomic testing ground at Bikini Island, there to anchor it and subject it to the power of the atom, and see what might happen to the works of man.

His recollection runs to a hundred and ten pages, regrettably incomplete. He died before he finished it, and the manuscript was completed by a codicil from his widow, which has been lost in the shifting of files since it came into my possession almost thirty years ago.

It was with me in Japan, and Korea, and reading it then helped calibrate some of the things I saw, and caused some of the things I was ordered to do.

The whole thing takes the breath away. Imagine the proposal at the meeting when it first came up! “It's a Two-fer, really. We test the bombs and we test the effects. There is plenty of stuff we don't need, and really ought to be disposed of anyway.”

“Brilliant!”

The result was Operation CROSSROADS, the code-name for the atomic tests against dozens of ships anchored in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It was June, 1946, ten months after the bombs stopping falling in anger.

Now it was curiosity. The series was intended to study the effects of blasts in the atmosphere, at low altitude, and the other two in waters, at shallow and deep depths. The bombs each had a yield twenty-one kilotons, about the size of the “Fat Man” implosion weapon dropped on Nagasaki.

The air-burst was named Test ABLE. The shallow water detonation was named Test BAKER. It turned out to be so impressive that the third test was cancelled.

CROSSROADS was intended to study the effects of nuclear weapons on warships, equipment, and material. The survivability of warships nuclear environment was a sensitive issue, at least as sensitive as during the war between the Department of the Navy, and Air Corps maverick Billy Mitchell two decades earlier, who had declared that the airplane and precision bombing rendered navies obsolete.

You can imagine that raised the Admiral's hackles. There were those who were campaigning for an independent Air Force, since any future conflict could clearly be conducted without the need for navies or armies. That made this series absolutely essential for reasons graver than that of mere national security. It was about the survival of the Departments of War and the Navy, both cabinet-level posts at the time.

The politics were concealed within the real problem of documenting the characteristics of this new and terrifying future. Explosion phenomena and radiation contamination were still only vaguely understood.

Dr. R. A. Sawyer from the Los Alamos Laboratory was sent to oversee the radiation monitoring program, and explain the concept of radiation and its danger to the personnel involved. To document what they might be, hundreds of goats, pigs, mice and rats were placed on twenty-two of the target ships for test Able. The sheep were sheared, and rubbed with suntan lotion.

They were harnessed in various configurations and placed in positions where crewmembers would normally be standing or working to measure the effect of gamma radiation.

In contrast to all later atmospheric nuclear tests, a large media contingent was present for the two Crossroads detonations, including combat artists. Aboard USS Appalachian (AGC-1) were accredited reporters from more than a hundred media organizations. They came from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, the good China, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom.

Ground zero for Test ABLE was the proud old USS Nevada (BB- 36), which had valiantly got underway from Battleship Row during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She was painted bright orange to assist the B-29 bomber crew in identifying their aim point.

She was surrounded by eighty-eight other ships, including the battleships Pennsylvania, Arkansas, New York as well as the mighty Nagato. Joining the battlewagons were the aircraft carriers Independence and Saratoga and a host of smaller ships and submarines. If such a test were conducted today, it would be the equivalent of destroying a full third of the entire deployable Navy.

The ships were all filled with fuel and ammunition, and they were manned by goats and pigs.

The support fleet evacuated Bikini Atoll and steamed to positions over 10 miles away, which was deemed a safe distance. Left behind was the target fleet, full of darkened ships awaiting their fate.

The Air Force made a slight error on the bombing run, and did not get the weapon where it was supposed to go. Major Harold H. Wood of the B-29 "Dave's Dream” put it a quarter mile from Nevada, almost directly over the attack transport USS Gillian . It was flattened by the blast and sank in under a minute.

Most of the fleet survived the test, which seemed extraordinary. Ed Gilfillen returned to Nagato the next day. The ship's long boat was blown to bits, he reported, and the decks were scorched, but otherwise there was little damage except a quarter-inch of rust scale. He said the “ship had shaken itself like a wet dog,” and all the scale had come down. He said it was mildly radioactive, but not enough to worry about.

He and his crew lived aboard as salvage operations and firefighting was conducted on twenty-three of the target ships. Later, it was determined that the water pumped from the lagoon to put out the fires led to more extensive contamination than that caused by the explosion.

Ed enjoyed his snorkeling, since there was not much else to do, and he returned to that, just he had done before.

Test Baker was in the shallow water of the lagoon, in the middle of the ghost fleet. It caused ten million tons of water to enter the atmosphere in a column 2,200 feet in diameter and 6,000 feet high. 

It drenched Nagato with radioactive spray, and Ed wrote that they were not permitted go back aboard, which suggests that he was not a member of the boarding party.

Even so, he reported that she seemed all right afterward. Evidently the shock burst start seams, and she sank lower in the water each day.

No one saw her go, he wrote, but one morning she just wasn't there.

The Scientists had their conclusions. The air burst had not done much to the structure of the ships. The sub-surface detonation really tore them up. Plus, it was pretty messy. The officers who were in charge of the experiments were a little shaken by the results, and the deep water test was cancelled.

I don't know if Ed did any snorkeling after BAKER, but I suspect he did. That may be why his manuscript is unfinished, I don't know. But you will be hearing more about this.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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