Adventures of a Sea Hunter (6 page)

Japanese planners had ordered their pilots to ignore
Utah
, but despite this, two torpedo bombers skimmed along the surface of the water and launched their weapons. Ensign Tom Anderson was running on the deck to sound the alarm when the first torpedo struck the port side, “staggering the ship.” A geyser of water shot up the side and came down on him. Picking himself up, Anderson reached the alarm gong
and pulled it.
Utah
continued to list to port as the second torpedo detonated. Captain James Steele was ashore, and Lieutenant Commander Solomon S. Isquith was in command. As
Utah
started to go down, Isquith gave the order to abandon ship over the starboard side, so that the capsizing hulk would not roll over on top of them. Eleven minutes after the first torpedo hit,
Utah
sank.

Utah’s
crew had more chances to escape than the men on
Arizona
, but it was often a harrowing, near thing. Seaman 2nd Class James Oberto started to climb through a hatch as “an alarming amount of seawater came cascading in the hatch opening just above our heads. We started to climb in single file to the second deck. Compounding our situation were the tons of water pouring in on use from the open portholes on the port side. We were standing in water nearly to our knees.” Oberto made it to the deck, as did Radioman 3rd Class Clarence W Durham. But as Durham climbed out, he looked back and saw that the steel “battle bar” grates had broken free and blocked off the escape route of some of the engine room crew. “I will never forget the faces of those men trapped in the Engine Room. I knew there was no way I could lift those steel grates and I also knew at that point that my chances were very slim of getting out of there myself.” Durham made it out as
Utah
rolled. He slid down the “rough barnacle-encrusted steel hull,” ripping himself open.

One of the trapped men, Fireman 2nd Class John Vaessen, got through a battle grate just before it slammed shut, trapping his shipmate Joe Barta. As the ship capsized, Vaessen said, “Batteries began exploding. I was hit with deck plates, fire extinguishers, etc.” Climbing up into the bilge, once at the bottom of the hull and now exposed to the air, he “could hear the superstructure break and the water would rush closer.” Taking a wrench, he beat against the hull to call for help. “I got an answer then silence, then rat-a-tat-tat. I thought that was a pneumatic tool. It was strafing.” Japanese planes, firing at men in the water and across the hull of the overturned battleship, were claiming more lives. Vaessen’s rescuers did not give up and used a blowtorch to cut open the hull and pulled him out of the steel tomb. But fifty-eight of his
shipmates did not make it, including Chief Water Tender Peter Tomich, who stayed at his post to shut down the boilers and prevent an explosion. Tomich’s sacrifice so that others might live was recognized by the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor. He still lies inside
Utah
with most of the ship’s dead.

I think about those men inside the hulk as we motor towards the ship. After the battle, salvage crews tried to right the hull and refloat
Utah
, but she could not be freed. Abandoned, the ship rests on her port side, festooned with salvage cables; some of the starboard air castle and some of the forward superstructure rise out of the water. We approach the exposed rusting decks and roll out of our boat into the water. Larry Murphy leads me past open hatches to the armored top of the No. 2 turret. Although the battleship’s original guns had been removed when she was converted into a target ship in 1931, the turrets remained. In 1940, the Navy installed new 5-inch/25 caliber antiaircraft guns atop the turrets, part of a new battery that
Utah
was to test. Dan and Larry point them out to me as a reminder from our predive briefing that, ironically,
Utah
, with her new guns, was perhaps one of the best equipped ships at Pearl Harbor that morning to fight back, had she not been mistakenly hit and sunk so early in the attack.

The remainder of this summer at Pearl Harbor is spent searching, without success, for crashed Japanese aircraft and the deeply submerged remains of the Japanese midget submarine. Built to be a stealth weapon, the sub remains hidden, even after a highly publicized search by our colleague Bob Ballard in November 2000. But after he leaves, the sub is found intact (just as Murphy’s 1988 side-scan sonar image showed it) by a hardworking team from the University of Hawaii’s Undersea Research Lab. The sub’s two-man crew presumably rests inside, reminding us that like
Arizona
and
Utah
, these lost ships are more than historic monuments. They are war graves.

Working at Pearl Harbor, which is steeped with the emotionally charged memories of that day of infamy, had a deep impact on me, an archeologist who hitherto had dealt with a more distant past. The tragedy of the attack and the sunken ships and the memorials reminded me
that humanity is at core of what I do—archeology is far more than a scientific reappraisal or a recovery of relics. Lost ships, historic sites and sacred places like memorials are mirrors in which we examine ourselves. Human weakness, human arrogance, heroism, sacrifice and perseverance dominate the story of the Pearl Harbor attack. Diving on
Arizona
and
Utah
, which had sunk in a handful of minutes as their crews were propelled from peace to war, and from the here and now to eternity, was a potent reminder of the human cost when nations collide.

We’ve been flying for hours over an empty ocean, far out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, the plane’s slow turn signals that we are approaching our destination. Leaning over to look out the small windows in the crowded cabin, we all scan the horizon. The dark sea is giving way to the greenish-tinged hues of shallow water. In the midst of these sparkling waters, the white sand of islands appears. A chain of islands, like pearls on a string, mark the top of a volcano’s rim, now submerged. The shallows of the atoll merge into darker water inside the ring, the drowned maw of the volcano, that now forms a deep lagoon.

This atoll, with its beautiful islands, beaches and a lagoon teeming with marine life, is a place with a famous name. It is Bikini, the setting for many American atomic tests between 1946 and 1958, including those of the first nuclear weapons. In July 1946, less than a year after Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 4,500 miles west of San Francisco, was the setting for Operation Crossroads, a massive military effort to assess the effects of the atomic bomb on warships. The atoll’s 167-person native population was evacuated. The fallout from those first blasts miraculously fell into the sea and did little to contaminate Bikini.

My eyes are not drawn to the beauty of this tropical paradise, however. Abruptly, the rim of the atoll is interrupted by a dark blue hole. Nearly a mile across, it is the site of a vanished islet. It is also the site where in March 1954, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever was detonated on the surface of the earth by the United States. In an instant, an atomic bomb capable of incinerating an entire city vaporized the islet and cracked the reef. The pulverized coral and sand ejected by the 15-megaton blast traveled high up into the atmosphere, raining down as atomic fallout over thousands of square miles of ocean, nearby islands and ships at sea. Conducted in the name of science, the blast, code-named Castle Bravo, was a Cold War test of America’s new hydrogen bomb. It killed and sickened Pacific islanders, the crew of a Japanese fishing ironically named
Lucky Dragon
and left behind a horrific legacy.

Bikini is now a deadly place, its abandoned shores littered with rusting machinery and cables, its islands covered by thick concrete bunkers and regimented rows of decaying houses and replanted palm trees intended for the returning Bikinians, who are known as the “nuclear nomads” of the Pacific. Craters from nuclear blasts pock the bottom of Bikini’s lagoon. Inside the shallow dish of one of those craters rests the sunken fleet of Operation Crossroads. Like the debris on the islands and along the shores of the atoll, the sunken ships of Bikini are an archeological legacy of the beginning of the nuclear age. Our National Park Service team, about to land on the atoll, will be the first to survey this ghost fleet now that the radioactivity has diminished to a safe level. Looking down at the crater made by Castle Bravo, we all silently cross ourselves and wonder just what we will find and what other legacies may lurk in the water and the ships.

Operation Crossroads was the result of months of inter-service rivalry and a postwar scramble to assess the military potentials and perils of the atomic bomb. The
New York Herald Tribune
, in a post-Hiroshima editorial, commented: “The victory or defeat of armies, the fate of nations,
the rise and fall of empires are all alike, in any long perspective only the ripples on the surface of history; but the unpredictable unlocking of the inconceivable energy of the atom would stir history itself to its deepest depths.” Editorials suggesting that the advent of the atom bomb had forever changed warfare alarmed military officers, who did not like reading that “it should make an end of marching, rolling, and even flying armies, and turn most of our battleships into potential scrap.” The atomic tests at Bikini would test the truth of that argument.

The tests were appealing for more than technical reasons. They would demonstrate to the world, particularly the Soviet Union, the power and wealth of the United States. In April 1946, Admiral William H. Blandy, commander of the joint Army-Navy task force conducting the tests, told the nation in a live radio broadcast that the upcoming tests would “help us to be what the world expects our great, non-aggressive and peace-loving country to be — the leader of those nations which seek nothing but a just and lasting peace.” More bluntly, commentator Raymond Gram Swing stated that Operation Crossroads, “the first of the atomic era war games … is a notice served on the world that we have the power and intend to be heeded.”

The decision to use the atomic bomb test to destroy ships of the once-feared Imperial Japanese Navy would also emphasize America as the principal victor in the war. One newspaper account, accompanied by an Associated Press photograph of twenty-four battered-looking destroyers and submarines, crowed: “Trapped Remnants of Jap Fleet Face Destruction in United States Navy Atom-Bomb Tests.” The use of Japanese warships as atomic targets was a “symbolic killing” with the same weapon that had forced Japan’s capitulation. The battleship
Nagato
particularly fulfilled that role. The onetime flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the scene of operational planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Nagato
had been “captured” as a bombed-out derelict on Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The capture, an event staged by military press officers, symbolized “the complete and final surrender of the Imperial Japanese Navy.” Sinking the same battleship with an atomic bomb would ritually “destroy” the Imperial Japanese Navy in a more
dramatic manner than prosaic scrapping or scuttling at sea. The battleship’s intended fate was so important that, at Bikini, American support vessels were moored alongside
Nagato
since “there was some danger that the captured Japanese ships … might actually sink… if they were left unattended.”

At the same time, military planners wanted to show that the United States Navy would survive in the coming nuclear age. According to Admiral Blandy, testing the bomb on warships would improve the Navy: “We want ships that are tough, even when threatened by atomic bombs; we want to keep the ships afloat, propellers turning, guns firing; we want to protect the crews so that, if fighting is necessary, they can fight well today and return home unharmed tomorrow.”

To further test the effects of the bomb, the military loaded twenty-two of the target ships with fuel and ammunition as well as 220 tons of equipment: tanks, tractors and airplanes; guns, mortars and ammunition; radios, fire extinguishers and telephones; gas masks, watches and uniforms; canned food and frozen meat. They also placed sixty-nine target airplanes on the ships and moored two seaplanes in the water near them.

The first test took place on July 1, 1946. The B-29
Dave’s Dream
dropped a 20-kiloton plutonium bomb on the target fleet, slightly to starboard of the bow of the attack transport
Gilliam.
Caught in the explosion’s incandescent fireball and battered down into the water by the shock wave,
Gilliam
, “badly ruptured, crumpled, and twisted almost beyond recognition,” sank in seventy-nine seconds. The blast swept the nearby transport
Carlisle
150 feet to one side and nearly wiped away the superstructure and masts.
Carlisle
began to burn and sank in thirty minutes. The destroyer
Anderson
, hit hard by the blast, burst into flames when her ammunition exploded. Burning fiercely,
Anderson
capsized to port and sank by the stern within seven minutes. The destroyer
Lamson
, its hull torn open, sank twelve minutes after the blast. The Japanese cruiser
Sakawa
, badly battered, caught on fire and sank the following day.

The second test took place three weeks later. The Navy remoored the target ships around a bomb lowered 90 feet below the surface.
When the underwater atomic bomb erupted at 8:34 on the morning of July 25, a huge mass of steam and water mounded up into a “spray dome” that climbed at a rate of 2,500 feet per second and formed a 975-foot thick column. Its core was a nearly hollow void of superheated steam that rose faster than the more solid 300-foot thick water sides, climbing 11,000 feet per second and acting as a chimney for the hot gases of the fireball. The gases, mixed with excavated lagoon bottom and radioactive materials, formed a mushroom cloud atop the column. The upward blast crushed, capsized and sank the battleship
Arkansas
in less than a second.