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the
are
ded
mine which decontamination methods were successful. Some of the support ships, those not directly involved in the tests, were contaminated from radioactive lagoon water ingested into their salt water lines and evaporators (which are used for distilling water on board ship).
Meanwhile, according to the New York Herald Tribune, the prospects for the third atomic bomb test which the JSP had recommended to the JCS in December 1945 were growing dimmer. The Tribune reported that the Manhattan Project opposed the third deep water test because it would keep atomic scientists from other important work at Los Alamos. The cost of a third test was prohibitive since the Navy’s funds had decreased, and the third test would cost
nearly as much as the first two combined. Tec n sonnel to support the test were not available. tgSts. international climate was not favorable for W st-
On 8 September, President Truman inderinl jnforrna' poned the third test, ostensibly because sufficien tion was now available for scientific analysis - ^ ^ Blandy gave his impressions of the tests va ue ^ gep. implications for the future in a speech in Boston tember 1946:
“. . . I believe that if there is atomic war ^gr6 future, naval war will not be exempt from it- ■ those who believe that in future conflicts, gre
As I Recall .
.. Crossroads:
used for sampling the water any- depths. When we weren t 0 „ 1
thing else, we’d castthes®.ne were»
' 5- ine v,ntoek
—thing' plankton samples and that
the senior one was a Public - s
vice doctor who knew
R3<
bomb, ft had only
an atom
twic6
In June 1945, then-Commander Waters assumed command of the USS Laf- fey (DD-724) and remained in that assignment until October 1946, when he went on with a career that culminated in his selection as Oceanographer of the Navy in the latter half of the 1960s. The following account of his experiences during Operation Crossroads was taken from the as-yet unpublished transcript of an interview on 27 May 1981 with Dr. John T. Mason,
Jr., who was then director of oral history at the Naval Institute. Admiral Waters passed away in May 1986.
I got to Pearl Harbor in the fall of 1945. While we were there, my destroyer squadron, under the command of then-Captain E. N. (Butch) Parker, was designated as the operating squadron for the atomic tests at Bikini, Operation Crossroads.
The ships designated to be in Crossroads had priority on getting personnel and equipment and everything else.
Our problem was that there were no personnel left in Pearl to get. But there were some people who wanted to be in on what promised to be a landmark event. For example, a reservist, either an officer or an enlisted man, was allowed to extend for about one year or less if he wanted to go to Operation Crossroads to see an atomic bomb exploded. We had quite a few who did that, but not as many as needed. I argued that I should be sent back to the West Coast where the pool of people to draw from was larger.
It took me about a month on the coast before I got the people I needed, but they were a strange assortment. There were a lot of chiefs and few indians because, of course, most people
72
staying in the Navy at that time were career people. All of the nonrated people were mostly reservists who were getting out.
It was difficult for us to keep our two engine rooms running with the eight chief machinist’s mates we had. The normal wartime complement was one chief for each engine room. I got the eight together and said, “Who are the two senior guys?” When they finally figured out who were the two seniors, I said, “Well, one has the forward engine room and the other has the aft engine room. The rest of you might just as well forget those caps and buttons because you’re going to be throt- tlemen and work for your living.”
They took it very well.
We started for Pearl Harbor where we were to pick up Admiral Frank G. Farion’s flagship and go on to Bikini with him. On the way to Pearl, we developed a hot bearing on a cruising turbine. We tried various methods of flushing it, but they didn’t work; it kept heating up. We got permission to drop back in the formation, lock the affected shaft, and catch up again on the remaining shaft. Then we held our place in formation on one shaft. These eight chief machinist’s mates took out that bearing while under way and put in a spare—a very difficult job.
The Bikini operation was exciting.
Of course, the eight assigned destroyers became the work horses, doing all sorts of things. This included looking for aviators and Air Force planes that went down between Eniwetok and Kwaja- lein. I took Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy to inspect the reef and to look at a proposed location for the “Charley” part of the test, which
, p was N
would never be conducted. ored
have been a deep water, n°n test, in the lee of the atoll- oCeafl' That was my first brush vvtre
ography. The working destroy ^ midfitted with special additions ^ 0f
ship winch and about a mi ® strange piano wire. We also had so w,ere things called nansen bottles ^oiis
& - -ater at
’t doing *
ties in various locations couple of scientists on bu“‘"rt 0f plankton samples and that so' orjng We also had a crew of mom ^soaiiy entists with Geiger counters- ^ set • . „ Pnhhe Vea
doing. The other “scientists mixed bag of generally nlC® . :0bs many of them had gotten t ^oSt of through political connection5• them wanted only to see t e explode at Bikini. j,„n of
be 10
-the
atoll and on either side ot cl°
wind sector. Once the mus fan started blowing downwind, ^ fort tracks that crisscrossed bac . took under this downwind seCt°rhe fall011 Geiger counter readings ot there We were surprised by h°w cefI1ibl6' was; it was practically indi**^ But, of course, no one rea y w what might happen when^yo^^ (joe1 three times before, and only anger.
Proceeding
Plod' 6S W'-^ cross oceans and continents and ex- ther£ at0m'c warheads over cities, and that therefore jn(j £ wd* be no need for navies. Such weapons may belief f16001116 a reality, but I do not subscribe to the fargtdat they will eliminate all other kinds of war- mav ,ae sb'PS, weapons, and tactics of sea fighting lead C an^C radically> and we shonlrl always take the sea fln SUC^ cbanges. But I can visualize traffic on the fj„L,.0r a long time yet, even in war, and therefore sating on the sea.
cal I]ess some P^n which is at the same time practi- for re lable, and acceptable to all nations, is devised °ut awing the atomic bomb, there will be atomic
warfare, and I believe it will include naval warfare. But as a result of Operation Crossroads, the United States will at least be better prepared for such warfare than any other nation on earth.”
Captain Daly graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968, received a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and attended the German Command and General Staff College, Hamburg, Germany. He has served in a number of ships, including the USS Rowan (DD-782), Wiltsie (DD-716), and Roark (FF-1053). He was commanding officer of the USS Esteem (MSO-438) and Fahrion (FFG- 22). He is currently serving with the Strategic Concepts Group (Op-603) on the Staff of the Chief of Naval Operations.
■Iub 1986
73
fixing. This Navy yard overi ^ ,
ve us
lmporiam, su rta.. ---------------- - , us
safety inspection and mom ^ do some more and said well, yes- a fe\,v
have a little contamination e ’ are hot spots here and there, bu y g0t avoiding them properly. Then
scheduled for Hunter s Point, ^ a important, so Pearl Harbor gaa
quits
was
On the coast, everyone
had
that
right there, to hold the ship day morning when the man — t^ere an expert in the field could g^ and supervise washing her ^-ji
lt took several days of sP^-nation ‘n ment to get rid of the conta jj,e the barnacles and the growt ^ spe"
bottom. The yard folks had clean
cial techniques and cherrnca ^ pljsh'Ilr the condensers and the fire a system. but it
All this took a little long > worked all right.
WaS
iroW
Beyond the bombs themselves, the most interesting thing to observe was the growth in the size of the safety supplement to the operations order. The appendix on safety began as a $lim edition, maybe a quarter of an inch thick.
But each day a different scientist would think of some new thing to worry about and there would be an addendum to the safety appendix. Eventually, it was bigger than the operations order.
This was because there was an understandable degree of uncertainty. For example, about a month before the thing, those of us who were going to be around the site were issued a special pair of dark glasses to protect our eyes. Then, just before the actual event, we were told not to use the dark glasses, that they might not be good enough.
Before the live bomb run was made, every ship was directed to go to general quarters and set maximum watertight integrity. We had to have all engines on the line ready to take off in any direction. Then we had to assemble the crew topside, which was very hard to do in a ship that was ready to make full power and also completely battened down for battle. But, we more of less did it. Once the crew was assembled, we would keep track of the relative bearing on where the bomb was going to be detonated. Then the crew members would face away from that direction, shut their eyes, and cradle their eyes with their arm across their face just to give them additional protection.
No one was to look in the direction of the blast with the dark glasses. But I had one young ensign who had signed up especially for this and he came to me and said, “Captain, I don’t want to hide my eyes. Fd like to see it. May 1 have your permission to use the dark glasses?” So I said, “Okay, go ahead.
If you want to do it, fine.”
We had a loudspeaker system all around the ship tuned in to the bombardier’s frequency in the dropping aircraft. A guy with an undertaker’s voice conducted the countdown. He would say, “Ten minutes to go, live bomb run.” This voice of doom droned on: “One minute to go, live bomb run.”
And then, “Bombs away!” But nothing happened. Everyone was getting a little restless and finally my ensign in his dark glasses out on the wing of the bridge said, “There she goes!” I said,
“I didn’t hear anything.” And he said, “There she is, Captain.” And so I looked at it and there was a mushroom cloud coming up over the horizon and about that time there was a little “poom” and a slight concussion you could feel. That was it. This was very disappointing to everybody. It was quite anticlimatic after all the preparations we had made. Just a piddly “poom.”
We immediately got under way at high speed to get under the mushroom cloud and steam back and forth with the other destroyers on our designated tracks.
We had fuse boxes on the bridges of those ships to control such devices as the radar. Square things, they were handy surfaces to set things on—like a cup of coffee. The head monitor had set his Geiger counter on one of these things. Well, the fuse boxes got a little warm and, just as we were starting under the atom cloud, the head monitor said, “Captain! Captain! Do something! Go to General Quarters! Do something! We’re getting fallout!” His Geiger counter pointer had gone off the scale. Then somebody realized the fuse box had heated the Geiger counter, and that the other counters were working normally. So we lost a little faith in our head monitor.
When we returned to port, there was some interest in looking at how some of the target ships had been knocked around. Then we started getting ready for the next test, Baker.
Baker was the spectacular test. We were only about eight miles away from that one and could actually see a huge plume of water come up and ships in the middle of it spinning all around. It was an awe-inspiring thing. Then we had a real job to do because as soon as it was reasonable for us to go into the lagoon, the destroyer squadron entered. Within a couple of hours after Baker’s detonation, we went in and positioned our anchor in a line fairly close to the target array and started taking Geiger counter readings measuring the water’s radioactivity.
We collected information and radioed it to the flagship which kept a plot to monitor which way the currents were going. Then the laboratory ships and the ships that were necessary to do this part of the experiment, together with the support ships and the flagship, anchored behind us. When our data indicated that contaminated water was close to the big ships, they would move to a different anchorage clear of danger. Then we would shift and put ourselves between them and the hot spots. In doing all this, the destroyers got some contamination. Eventually, people started worrying more and more about our destroyers. Careful surveys of radioactivity concentrations were
• off
made, which put certain liv-
lirnits and forbad the use of
^turned to Pearl Harbor ahj the middle of August, and wen ,r0I) of the Navy yard. Our whole squ war ships had been built early w jjaVy and had never had a really g° repajr. yard overhaul. Even in damag they skipped a lot of things t a
Tu:, M„,™ v.ir<l overhaul, ^
under way for the West Coast.
concerned about us because uwi> looked at the data and had se flUr there were hot spots, particu * The fire and salt water flushing 1 contamination in the water ia^ jnside into the barnacles and the gr°^ of the lines and concentrate . (f0r When we went into Hunter s. (0 be
overhaul, the Laffey was aSS1® aSde- the first into dry dock. But 1^ gadded not to put us in t*ie re^ernia- ing dock because we might P Uned nently contaminate it. So we bee” into a floating dry dock that about brought in for us. Our ship g ^oatin2 halfway out of the water m c0uld dry dock and was as stable as g(li expect. This was a Friday oneveryt^
and we were ordered to st p . ^j0n ...j cht> untu
who
j apP‘e
For a catalog containing summaries *f0r
mately 160 bound volumes of ora (£) pirtfi Naval Institute collection, send S ■ ^nnaP° of Oral History, U. S. Naval Insti Maryland 21402.