In spring 1946, I was attending the Navy Electronics School at Ward Island, just outside of Corpus Christi, Texas. A call came for volunteers to participate in an exercise called “Operation Crossroads.” This turned out to be the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. A goodly number of us volunteered.
We were transported to Bikini and assigned to various ships in need of electronics technicians. I was assigned to the USS Reclaimer ARS 42. (ARS means Auxiliary Repair and Salvage.) This and other ships of the type were the work fleet. The Reclaimer was the ship that towed the red-lead-painted USS Nevada into place and anchored it. The Nevada acted as the target for the air drop bomb.
Our job was to install additional radios and circuits for use by the senior officers who would come aboard during rehearsals and actual test days, and to make sure this equipment was in working order. We checked it out every morning. The admiral in charge of the work fleet had his own personal circuit.
On one of the rehearsal days, when my job was over, I was back on the fantail, relaxing. A seaman came rushing up and said that the admiral’s circuit was not working. “They can hear him, but he can’t hear them!”
“I checked it out this morning and it worked just fine,” I said.
“Well, it is not working now. You better get up there.” So I went up to the bridge. It was dead silent. Not a word being spoken. There was the admiral, with a very unhappy look on his face. He held a microphone in his hand with the cord plugged into the radio set. He had a pair of earphones on his head with the unplugged cord hanging down, pointed at his feet. I went up to the admiral, picked up the earphone cord, plugged it into the radio set and turned and walked out. I never heard another word about it.
The Reclaimer also had the task of being the tour ship to take high ranking officers from several countries into the lagoon for a first look at the damage done to the target fleet. When the Baker Test was performed (the second of two, famous from pictures of the huge cylinder of water erupting from the lagoon), we were tacking back and forth just outside the entrance to the lagoon. The bomb was suspended underwater from a small ship in the center of an array of ships ground zero. We were approximately 7 miles from ground zero.
Radioman Tom Payne and I were standing at the rail just outside of the bridge. A photographer asked us to separate a bit because he wanted to get a picture of the blast with two sailors watching it, one on each side of the picture. I don’t know if he got the picture or not. We never saw him again and we were too busy watching. I sure would have liked to have seen that picture or have a copy.
The countdown was broadcast so all could hear. “FIVE — FOUR — THREE — TWO — ONE — FIRE!”
The cylinder of water was not a gradual buildup — just WHOOSH and there it was! I’m sure I was standing there with my mouth open. Tom started swearing. In a few seconds, we felt a blast of air that plastered our clothes to our bodies. We just stood there fascinated. When the water in the lagoon calmed down enough, the Reclaimer entered and began its tour of the damage. Just a look-see; the detailed assessment would be done by experts after the radioactivity had dissipated enough.
The battleship Arkansas and several smaller ships were gone — sunk — by the time we were allowed to enter, but we were more interested in the bigger ones. The aircraft carriers Saratoga and Independence and the battleship New York were sinking. The Independence was on fire. It had ordnance mounted on the decks and every so often, something would detonate. We kept our distance. The Saratoga was gone the same day. Others sank some days later.
But not all sank, and an effort was made to remove radioactivity from the survivors with water. I remember relaying orders to hose down ships for four hours. They also put some personnel on board with scrub brushes to clean up the decks. We were pretty naive about radioactivity.
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