Untitled Document

21 January 2007

Voyage to Bikini

The Americans were nervous for the first few weeks. They had been at war, and now they were in the harbor of their enemy. They manned their guns at an advanced state of alert, though the most threatening thing they saw was Japanese civilians peering at them with curiosity, and bathing nude in the ocean.

It was very strange, and quite fatiguing, maintaining constant alert when there was no threat.

Certainly it was prudent. The camps around the Tokyo bay had been liberated, and emaciated POWs repatriated. The pictures show emaciated kids with solicitous nurses in the bunks of ships that would take them home.

There was nothing ashore, the distribution system for goods and services disrupted. The Japanese were embracing defeat, but had not yet found the way to entice their conquerors. Many sailors preferred to remain on their ships to going out the gate at Yokosuka and astonishing prospect for those of us who came later, and loved the alleys and bars of the Honsho-ku, the nightclub district that catered to the baser instincts of the Fleet.

That would come. The Japanese were industrious, and hunger is a powerful motivation. There were misunderstandings and cultural conflict, but it must be said that the Japanese did their best.

In fact, one might say that they did better. Stephen Mercado's book The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army's Elite Intelligence School makes a case that Japanese military intelligence evaluated the end-game of the war, and took steps to ameliorate the unthinkable.

Lt Gen Arisue, chief of military intelligence, prepared a two-pronged strategy. He sent personnel to the hills and prepared caches of arms in case the occupation did not go well. A Prince of the Royal Line of Jimmu Tennu was put into concealment to ensure succession could be maintained if the Emperor was harmed.

Information on the next enemy, the Soviets, was compiled, along with sensitive information on the peoples that had recently been under the hand of the Empire.

Beginning with the capitulation at Manila, relationships were established with MacArthur's staff to secure the most favorable conditions for the occupation. Japanese officials would continue to administer the day-to-day elements of order, while the General would play the leading role.

Gen Arisue was at Atsugi to welcome Gen MacArthur's advance party, and worked with key staff to lay the groundwork for the strong bilateral intelligence relationship that has continued to this day. Three days after the surrender ceremony, on September 5th, 1945, Arisue agreed to cooperate in communication intelligence operations directed against Russian targets.

He also made arrangements to an intelligence liaison group with the Americans, setting up shop in a building next to MacArthur's headquarters, established in the once and future Dai Ichi Insurance Company Building in Tokyo.

I had the opportunity to visit MacArthur's office there, a quarter century later, when the Americans and their Shogun were gone. They had called the place “GHQ,” or General Headquarters of the Occupation. There they would draft a new constitution and code of justice for the conquered Japanese.

When I visited, the management of the insurance company was very cooperative. The young Japanese woman who escorted me on the tour said, enigmatically, that the Company only used the office once a year.

I wondered then, and wonder now, what ceremony might be observed there. Certainly it is private. A celebration for General Arisue, perhaps?

We have forgotten the lamentation and misery that went with the conquest. If the sailors in Yokosuka were bored and the shore had no allure for them, millions of Japanese were homeless. The Tokyo subway tunnels were the night-lodgings for hundreds of thousands. Communists agitated on the streets, and Yakuza gangs grabbed for control of food and basic consumer goods.

The Empire was left with its army overseas, mostly in Manchuria, and millions of them were left to their own devices to return home. Many were rounded up for forced labor in the midst of the Chinese civil war, and some took years to get out, and of course many did not, vanishing into the Revolutionary landscape. A new Japanese cruiser, the Sakawa, had its guns removed and wooden sleeping pallets installed to serve as a shuttle to the Philippines to bring back orphaned soldiers.

Magic Carpet was the name of the operation to take the warriors back to America. Order must be maintained, and so system of points was established to determine the priority for who would be the first to go. Under the formula, credits were awarded for months in service, months served overseas, for combat duty, awards, war wounds, special service and even parenthood. The total number of points established priority for discharge from the service, and "point counting" became the primary occupation for most every American overseas.

By the end of 1945, the Army had already released more than half of its eight million men. As the Navy surveyed the Armada in Yokosuka and spread across the vast Pacific, it began the operation that would reduce it from over three million to less than 500,000 by 1947.

Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman led the first wave home. His Task Force 11 departed Tokyo Bay in September 1945 with the battleships New Mexico, Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina and two carriers in the van. Stopping at Okinawa, his ships embarked 10th Army troops.

There were far more ships in the inventory than sailors to man them, and with the dramatic demobilization it was going to be a problem. The Special Weapons that had ended the war were still in production, popping off the highly secret assembly facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There would have been several available for use in the invasion of the home islands, and the effects of their use remained a mystery.

The detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been in operational haste, and no definitive measurements had been acquired to understand the nature of this powerful new effect. Planning began to bring together an excess of property, and scientific examination. Perhaps the new weapons could be tested against surplus property; solving two problems with a single solution.

That question was far above the pay grade of LCDR Ed Gillfillen when he first saw the battleship Nagato. It was late September and the harbor had flushed out with Magic Carpet taking the Fleet home. He was cold and wet, riding down to Yoko in an open Mike boat down from the seaplane anchorage in Yokohama, It was all gray: water, clouds and ships, He shivered under the cover of soaked canvas, and marveled at the battleship they passed, the one with the great pagoda mast forward on the low, lean hull.

He thought he might like to get a look at her, up close sometime.

He have remembered to be careful what to wish for, and remember the Navy adage never to volunteer for anything.

Nagato was a lost child at Buoy One in the inner harbor. Periodically visited by souvenir hunters, it was determined that a skeleton crew should be placed aboard, pending determination of her ultimate disposition. Fifty men were sent aboard in late September.

Her status was ambiguous. She was stricken from the Naval list, but not considered a prize ship under maritime law. She was a ghost, and here miles of compartments and cables and controls beyond the battle-lanterns of the looting parties were unknown territory. Some of the officers of the last Japanese crew might be available to help understand this leviathan, but her machinery was a riddle with neither questions nor answers.

A levy was taken on the ships around the waterfront to find some sailors to man her. The most experienced were already “pointed out,” headed home. Those remaining were the less experienced, and the general feeling of malaise, being left behind after the circus had left town was profound. There was nothing outside the gate except misery, and there was nothing except gray steel to call home.

One hundred and eighty sailors were found to go aboard Nagato, and bring her back to a certain state of being. They were from all the ratings. There were ship-fitters and electricians, communicators and deck apes and some engineers.

They arrived in an existential place of cold mystery and darkness. Initially, a team of fifty men came aboard in late September, and lived on a living ship alongside when not working. There was a powerful stench, and it was said that some bodies were down below, deep in the ship, and a compartment had to be welded shut.

With a few Japanese translators, the Engine Room was teased to get a boiler and a generator on line. With light, the self-sufficient among the crew began to explore. There was food left aboard, down in the dark store-rooms, and the grain alcohol that the officers never found.

The pervasive communications system that supported integrated combat operations was rigged to provide point-to-point communications from bridge to engine room, but the wily sailors also rigged their own links on phones tagged-out as inoperative. They could track their officers, and predict their movements to ensure that no one was ever surprised.

The loudspeaker system was re-rigged to provide music through all the spaces. Since the battleship had accommodated a crew of 1,300 in her day, there was plenty of room for the Americans to spread out and get comfortable.

Twenty-five year old Quartermaster's mate George Cully came aboard in January of 1946. He was "elected" or "volunteered", for the assignment, which was to inventory navigation equipment. The souvenir hunters had left nothing.

He recalled later that several hundred derelicts from the streets of Tokyo and Yokusuka were delivered daily to clean up the all the spaces and clear the mess left from the bomb damage done by our Navy. He said that they were grateful for the modest pay, and begged to take the garbage away at the end of the day.

The sailors worked when they felt like it, and did not when they didn't.

That is the situation that Ed Gillfellin walked into when he discovered, with some bemusement, that he was to be the Executive Officer of the Nagato. His orders were to assist Captain Whipple in getting the battleship to the Marianas islands.

Radioman Fred Herschler has an account of the work-ups for the deployment, and the misadventures at sea. He was one of two radio operators who was aboard for the sea trials in the Sagami Wan, in the chill month of March 1946, and the move from the inner harbor to anchor safely outside the breakwater.
He does not mention the great adventure in which the anchor chain nearly pulled itself out of the chain-locker by the roots, or that they almost drove the ship over the breakwater. That was a matter for the XO.

Final meetings between Captain Whipple and several ex-Japanese naval commanders were conducted. With luck, the trip to the northern Marianas would take ten days. Many of the former Japanese had made the trip not long ago. The last consultations complete, the visitors were deposited on the shuttle launch back toward darkening Yoko. In the early hours of the 18th, the engineers raised steam and Captain Whipple directed that the hook be pulled from the depths Nagato just after first light.

Then she made weigh, and set a course south for Enewetak in company with the light cruiser Sakawa.

Gillfillen was less than sanguine about the trip, since he had to deal with the Deck Division. He had only two petty officers he could trust, and that confidence was a conditional thing. One of them had been missing in the days before they sailed, not knowing that the steaming date had been advanced, and could only be fond with the assistance of the Japanese police.

Joining with the cruiser, Gillillen found that the ships had difficulty maintaining formation, since Nagato had only two of her four massive propellers in operation.

Best speed of advance she could make was ten knots, which did not coincide with the ability of Sakawa to keep station. The cruiser was burning fuel at an alarming rate, being run with such inefficiency. With two screws windmilling and so little speed, the ship wandered on her course, zig-zagging into the more temperate winds to the south with the cruiser frantically attempting to maintain station.

Years later, I always it found magical to steam out of Yokosuka in the winter. In days, the winds turned from brisk to warm and balmy, and the gray Japanese winter was transformed into sparkling blue water and pleasant winds.

During the first half of the voyage, things went fairly smoothly, though Gillfillen knew there were mounting problems. There was no way to know how much fuel oil was actually aboard the battleship, since all the tanks were cross connected and some held nothing but seawater.

Sakawa's fuel consumption became a crisis, and Nagato's fresh water evaporators couldn't supply enough fresh water for the boilers and the comfort of the crew. By the eighth day out of port, the ship had taken on 150 tons of seawater in the forward compartments; to balance and keep the persistent waves from pounding into the improvised repairs to the battle damage forward, Captain Whipple ordered the flooding of the stern. The battleship therefore took on an additional two hundred and sixty tons of water, and the boilers struggled to move the dead weight forward.

On the 10th day of the transit, Sakawa was essentially dead in the water and falling astern. Whipple brought Nagato around to take her under tow, and Gillfelin worked frantically with the deck division to get an eight-inch hawser slung to the cruiser to take it under tow.

The struggle to do so was one that made him proud of his haphazard crew, but after the tow began, Nagato blew out her last operating boiler, running it on salt water, and both ships went DIW, dead in the water, connected to one another, drifting abeam into the insistent sea.

Radioman Herschler was ordered by Captain Whipple to contact Enewetak, some 200 miles distant, and request assistance. They advised they would dispatch two Navy tugs to rescue the ships.

It took two days for the first to arrive, and the battleship and the cruiser drifted helplessly. The seas calmed, and once the tugs arrived, the much lighter Sakawa was soon over the horizon.

With all the seawater she had taken aboard to stabilize her, Nagato was so heavy that that first tug could not move her.

Joined by a heavier tug the next day, Whipple attempted to take on fuel oil as the two ships jostled alongside. By this time, the battleship was listing at seven degrees to port, and without power could not operate her bilge pumps, much less generate light of provide water or hot food for the crew. Rats appeared on deck, forced up from their lairs below.

Eventually, Gillfillen managed to get a boiler back on the line with the small amount of oil that had been transferred, and limited lighting was available. The tow worked well enough that Nagato arrived in the channel at Enewetak just as flash message traffic arrived in the radio shack that a tsunami was hitting the Hawaiian Islands, and that it might be headed across the Pacific toward them.

Gillfillen was torn. He could not put the crew below decks because of the heat, but permitting them on the weather decks could be disastrous of a great wave struck them.

In the end, it came to nothing in the Marianas, though thousands of Hawaiians were left homeless. The next morning, Natago dropped the hook in the lagoon at Enewetak, eighteen days out of Yoko.

It took three weeks of voyage repairs at the atoll before Nagato was ready to steam under her own power. With the excess saltwater pumped off, Whipple was able to get her up to thirteen knots speed of advance for the last dash to Bikini. She steamed alone, and arrived at her assigned anchorage in the fleet of over ninety mighty ships under her own power.

The flower of the Nazi Fleet was there, the Prinz Eugen, and two aircraft carriers, and a half-dozen battleships. Any other time this would have been a mighty fleet indeed. Now, it was just surplus steel, and a target.

A remarkable Skipper, assisted by an indomitable XO and an improvised crew of the Greatest Generation got the last Imperial battleship to the place she would die in good order.

Once there, the only place to go on Bikini was an improvised all-hands club called the Crossed Spikes Club. The beer was warm, and the venue open to the elements. There was a ping-pong table, which was the best social recreation available to the 42,000 personnel who were getting ready for the atomic tests.

On the whole, Gillfillen preferred to snorkel, and he spent as much time over the next few weeks snorkeling with a moray eel near a likely coral head near the ship as he did ashore.

There wasn't much to do at Bikini, except to wait.