Gentle Readers,

There is some real excitement at Refuge Farm on this bright new week! A new book has been issued from Socotra House LLC! It is one that encompasses a real and poignant sea story coupled with the awful consequences of Atomic Age technology. It came to us in a curious manner, and it has been a project immersed in old secrets and ancient death. Ed Gilfillen penned a short manuscript of a tale he lived as a young officer assigned to examine the Japanese War Machine in the aftermath of a Global War.

The awful instruments that allowed the indomitable Samurai to surrender were the Atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That astonishing new weapon had only been tested once, at the Trinity site t White Sands in New Mexico. What they called “The Gadget” worked. Then it was used against the people of two cities. Horrific is one term that might be used to describe the effects, but one of them was the end of that war.
Our recent biography of RADM Mac Showers- “Cocktails With the Admiral” contains his memories of creating the estimates of casualties that would be required to subjugate the Home Islands- Military and Civilian- and the decision to use the A-Bombs. Our fathers, and the people of Japan, were permitted to live on the sacrifice of those who perished in their use.

“Cocktails” is available at Amazon: cocktails

(“Cocktails With the Admiral” is available at Amazon in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Mac Shower’s life in the American Century is a romp through the creation of a world that appears to be on the verge of another change!)

But as peace settled over a world that had been in conflict, the actual effects and raw power of these new weapons were undetermined. The vast war machine America constructed was being redrawn. The Departments of War and the Navy were being reimagined in the context of weapons of mass destruction that could be delivered anywhere on earth by air. That meant the creation of a new service, the Air Force, which would join Army and Navy in a new Department of Defense.

Large questions hung in the balance. Was there even a need for ships or infantry in this new world? One answer was to test the new weapons in a measured manner in a place far away to ascertain what balance of force might be required in the new Atomic Age. Ed was in Japan, part of a cadre of warfare specialists scouring the wreckage of the Japanese war machine for technical devices that might be useful. In the harbor at Yokosuka rested a gigantic ship, last of the Imperial Navy’s battleships. It had been Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship in the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was viewed as an ideal candidate to join ships of Nazi Germany and America’s new “surplus” fleet as targets to determine how they would survive the fires of Hell on Earth.

Ed was called to an office on the Yokosuka waterfront and informed that a makeshift crew of non-volunteers had been assembled to man-up the Japanese ship with Americans who only wanted to go home. He would serve as their Executive Officer on a 2,100 mile voyage to a place called “Eniwetok” in the South Pacific for a series of Atomic Tests called “CROSSROADS.”

His story has been in our seabag for over forty years. It was a sensitive matter in its time. The Tests had been as horrific in peace as they had in war. Only two of the three blasts were conducted with an audience of thousands of American Sailors. The underestimation of the power of the first two A-Bombs caused the cancellation of the third. Dozens of once-proud ships were hurled skyward before plunging to the bottom of the sea. Ed, and thousands of others, were warned that the descriptions of the events were “SECRET” and not to be discussed. Then they were sent home, and the new defensive scheme that would endure to this day was created.

Ed was diagnosed with melanoma in the mid-1970s. Like hundreds- or thousands- of others, his exposure in 1946 may have killed him. Before passing in 1978, he reached out to my Uncle for two last tasks. One was telling the story of what happened to IJN Nagato, the last Japanese Battleship. The other was to find a place to display the tubes from the radio room of that ship that received the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” signals from the attackers at Pearl.

The Tubes found a home at the Antique Wireless Museum in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. We tinkered with Ed’s manuscript as a classified document which could not be distributed for twenty years, until the Clinton Administration announced the accounts could be released. From that moment, we were able to find photographic images and details on the tests and some of us had called “Yokosuka” home port. It was time to tell Ed’s story, and to ensure that his memory and experience is shared.

“Voyage to the CROSSROADS” by Vic Socotra is now available. If a rollicking sea story mingled with the horror of our Atomic Age does not send a thrill and a chill, you cannot imagine what it was like to have been one of the young men pushed near the blast of Hades. The book is available at Barnes & Nobel and Amazon is a variety of formats. We like the trade paperback version because it can be held in hand while imagining what it was like to shield eyes against a brilliant light and feel the impact of swiftly moving air from the blast.

And later, to find that the power of the Atom had rearranged a world, and the cells in your own skin.

“Voyage to the CROSSROADS.” By the Vic Socotra consortium. A story of destiny suddenly relevant in a world where the use of the fires of hell is a planning factor not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Russians are talking about moving missiles to Nicaragua this morning, to establish parity with NATO’s nuclear weapons within range of Moscow. We think this story is of immediate utility this week, sixty years after the last Missile Crisis.

– Vic Socotra
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