A Fleet of Ghosts

The orange paint covered the Nevada like a second skin, visible from twelve miles away. Tugs brought her through the channel on the morning of the twelfth of June, 1946, and the men on the support ships turned to watch. The battleship had survived Pearl Harbor, the Aleutians, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. Now she rode low in the water, stripped of her guns’ breechblocks, her magazines empty, her crew gone. Admiral William H.P. Blandy’s Joint Task Force One had designated her the aim point for the first atomic test. The orange paint made her visible from thirty thousand feet. The bombardier would see her; the bomb would fall toward her. Whether it hit her was another question.

Back in February, before the first survey vessel had dropped anchor in the lagoon, the atoll had belonged to its people. The sun rose over the eastern rim of coral, fell across the palm groves, set in a blaze of orange and red. Fishermen launched their canoes from the beach and paddled out through the passage, casting lines into water so clear they could see coral formations forty feet below. Women gathered coconuts and tended taro patches; children swam in the shallows. For perhaps four thousand years—through Spanish priests and German traders and Japanese administrators—the atoll had sustained human life. Now it would sustain an experiment.

The surveyors came first, driving stakes into coral sand and stringing wire across the reef. Engineers followed with distillation plants, fuel depots, communications arrays. Then came ships that had fought across the Pacific—hulls scarred by battle, bridges still carrying brass battle stars—until ninety vessels rode at anchor in concentric circles around Nevada’s position: a city of steel where Bikinians had fished and swum.

Nevada had returned to Pearl Harbor after a brief stint of occupation duty in Tokyo Bay. At thirty-two and a third years old she was deemed too old for the post-war fleet; surveyors examined hull, engines, fire-control systems while newer battleships waited to replace her. She could still steam and float and absorb punishment—that was what mattered now. Her purpose was to survive or sink, demonstrating what a battleship could endure when an atomic bomb exploded above her.

Captain Cecil C. Adell had commanded her since October 1945; he walked her decks as tugs maneuvered her into position, checking moorings and supervising a skeleton crew that would abandon ship before detonation. Once over two thousand men had served aboard; now a few dozen welded openings shut and installed cameras inside compartments where sailors had slept and eaten and written letters home.

Three hundred yards to the northwest, the Japanese battleship Nagato rode at anchor. She had been the flagship of the Combined Fleet, the vessel from which Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. On the second of December 1941, Yamamoto had transmitted the code phrase “Niitaka yama nobore” from Nagato’s bridge. Climb Mount Niitaka. The signal had launched the First Air Fleet toward Hawaii. Now the Nagato sat in American hands, her engines broken, her crew gone, her fourteen-inch guns silent.

Built at the Kure Naval Arsenal, launched in 1919, commissioned in 1920, Nagato had once been the most powerful battleship in the world. Her sixteen-inch guns outranged any American or British vessel. She had been Yamamoto’s flagship, had transmitted the orders that had started the Pacific War. During the conflict, she had fought no major actions. She had been at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, assigned to the Main Body of the First Fleet alongside Yamato and Mutsu, but had never fired her main battery in anger. She had trained in home waters for most of 1943 and 1944, transferred to Truk, then returned to Japan.

American carrier aircraft had attacked her in July 1945 as part of the campaign to destroy the Imperial Japanese Navy’s remaining capital ships. She had survived, the only Japanese battleship still afloat at war’s end. Now she belonged to the victors. American sailors had boarded her at Yokosuka, taken possession, studied her design. Her very large GHG passive sonar array had been removed and installed on the submarine USS Flying Fish for testing. American interest in magnetic amplifier technology had increased after investigations of her fire control systems. She had secrets to yield, and then she would be destroyed.

The Nagato’s presence in the lagoon carried a weight beyond her tonnage. She represented the defeated enemy, the imperial ambition brought low. The men who had fought the Japanese fleet looked at her and remembered. The men who had not fought looked at her and wondered. She was a relic, a museum piece, a corpse. She was also a reminder that the war had been won, and that the weapon about to be tested had ended it.

The aircraft carrier USS Saratoga entered the lagoon on the fifteenth of June. A Lexington-class carrier, she had been originally designed as a battlecruiser, converted during construction to comply with the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. She had served throughout the Pacific War, one of only three pre-war carriers to survive the conflict. Enterprise and Ranger were the others. The Saratoga had fought at Guadalcanal, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshall Islands. She had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in January 1942, hit again at Iwo Jima in February 1945. Her battle stars numbered eight.

Launched in 1925, commissioned in 1927, Saratoga had been the centerpiece of the unsuccessful American effort to relieve Wake Island after Pearl Harbor. She had trained a generation of naval aviators. Her flight deck stretched eight hundred feet, her hull displacing thirty-three thousand tons. She could carry seventy-eight aircraft. Now her hangar bays held instruments instead of planes, her flight deck dotted with cameras and pressure gauges. The scientists wanted to know what an atomic blast would do to a carrier’s aircraft, her fuel systems, her magazines. The Navy wanted to know whether carriers could survive atomic attack.

The tugs maneuvered her into position at the northern edge of the target array, where the underwater blast would test her hull. She would not be the aim point for the first test. She would face the second. Her crew had numbered over two thousand men. Now she sat empty, her compartments sealed, her hatches dogged. The Saratoga would tell them whether the age of carriers had ended or whether it had just begun.

The light carrier USS Independence arrived later that week. A smaller vessel, she had been converted from a Cleveland-class cruiser, displacing eleven thousand tons. Launched in 1942, commissioned in 1943, she had served at Tarawa, the Philippines, Okinawa. She had been the first carrier to launch night fighters, the first to employ radar-equipped aircraft in combat. Her battle stars numbered eight, matching Saratoga’s. Now she joined the target fleet, another sacrificial animal in the atomic arena.

The Independence represented the ascendancy of naval air power. The carriers had won the Pacific War, their aircraft sinking enemy battleships and enemy carriers alike. Now the question was whether carriers could survive the atomic age. The Air Force claimed that strategic bombing made surface ships obsolete. The Navy disagreed. The tests at Bikini would settle the argument, or they would not. The Independence would provide data, and the data would be interpreted, and the interpretations would be argued.

The assembly of the target fleet required an immense logistical operation. Some 42, 000 personnel were deployed to Bikini Atoll as part of Admiral Blandy’s Joint Task Force One to conduct the test. The support ships anchored outside the lagoon, their crews rotating through the atoll on three-week shifts. The target ships required skeleton crews for positioning, then evacuation. The instruments required installation, calibration, protection. The cameras required placement on islands and ships and aircraft. The schedule called for the first test on the first of July, the second on the twenty-fifth. Everything had to be ready.

The support fleet included attack transports, destroyer tenders, repair ships, oilers, hospital ships. The USS Appalachian served as flagship for the technical command. The USS Albemarle handled aviation support. The USS Fulton maintained the submarines. The USS Curtiss stored the bombs. The logistics of feeding, housing, and managing forty-two thousand men in a remote atoll required planning that had begun months earlier.

The target fleet itself comprised ninety vessels. The battleships Nevada, Arkansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. The carriers Saratoga and Independence. The cruisers Pensacola, Salt Lake City, Chester, and Salem. The destroyers Lamson, Hughes, and Mustin. The submarines Apogon, Pilotfish, and Skipjack. The attack transports Niagara and Fillmore. The landing ships LST-133 and LST-545. The Japanese vessels Nagato and Sakawa. The German cruiser Prinz Eugen. Each ship had a history. Each ship had a purpose now.

The Prinz Eugen had served in the German Navy, surviving the war only to be taken as a prize. She had sailed with the Bismarck, had fought the Hood and the Prince of Wales. Now she sat in the lagoon, her German crew gone, her American caretakers preparing her for the tests. She carried the weight of the European war, the Atlantic campaign, the battleship actions that had defined the early years. She was a relic of an enemy already defeated, a vessel whose survival meant nothing to the American public. But she was a warship, and she would provide data.

The Japanese light cruiser Sakawa joined Nagato in the target array. She had surrendered at Yokosuka, had been pressed into service as a repatriation vessel, had then been designated for the tests. Her presence alongside Nagato reinforced the symbolism. The Imperial Japanese Navy, once the third-largest fleet in the world, reduced to two hulks awaiting atomic destruction. The men who had fought that fleet watched the ships with mixed emotions. Victory had been complete. The enemy had been destroyed. Now the enemy’s ships would be destroyed again.

The target ships anchored in a pattern designed to test the effects of atomic blast at various distances. The Nevada sat at the center, painted orange, marked with a geometric symbol to guide the bombardier. The other ships surrounded her in concentric circles, each vessel positioned to receive different levels of blast, heat, and radiation. The scientists had calculated the expected damage. The Navy had prepared damage control teams to board the ships after the tests, to fight fires, to patch holes, to prove that ships could survive.

The animals arrived on transport vessels. Pigs and goats and rats and mice, tethered in cages on the target ships’ decks, placed in compartments below, positioned to test the effects of radiation on living tissue. The scientists had selected the animals with care, choosing species whose physiology resembled human physiology. The pigs wore uniforms to test whether clothing provided protection. The goats stood in cages on the carrier flight decks. The rats huddled in containers below the waterline. The animals could not understand what was coming. They were innocent, and they would suffer.

Reporters from the major newspapers, the wire services, the radio networks gathered on observation ships anchored outside the lagoon. They had been covering the atomic age since Hiroshima, and they would cover these tests with the same intensity. The public wanted to know what the bomb could do. The military wanted to control the story. The reporters wanted access. The result would be a negotiated compromise, with briefings and pool reports and censored photographs.

Senators and representatives arrived on separate transports. Members of the armed services committees, witnesses to the atomic age’s next chapter. They had authorized the funds for the tests, and they wanted to see what they had paid for. The military wanted their support, wanted them to understand the challenges, wanted them to return to Washington with favorable impressions. The congressmen watched the preparations, asked questions, took notes. They would write reports. They would influence policy.

The lagoon itself transformed under the pressure of the operation. The clear water that had sustained the Bikinians now served as an anchorage for warships. The coral reefs that had provided fish now provided moorings. The beaches that had seen family gatherings now saw surveyors’ stakes and military police. The atoll had been a home. Now it was a laboratory.

The scientists from the Los Alamos laboratory and the National Bureau of Standards installed their instruments. They placed pressure gauges on hulls and decks, radiation detectors in compartments and on masts, cameras on islands and support ships. They wanted to measure everything. The blast pressure at various distances, the thermal radiation, the initial nuclear radiation, the residual radiation. They wanted data that would inform weapons design, civil defense, naval construction. They wanted to understand the atomic age.

The radiological safety officers prepared for their role. Dr. Stafford Warren, the chief of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project, led the effort. He had surveyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had seen what radiation could do to human bodies. He understood that the tests would produce contamination, that the target ships would become radioactive, that the water and the lagoon and the air would carry fission products. His job was to protect the forty-two thousand men under his care. The Navy’s job was to conduct the tests on schedule. The two purposes would conflict.

The schedule drove everything. The first test, codenamed Able, would occur on the first of July. The B-29 bomber would drop the bomb from thirty thousand feet, and the bomb would explode five hundred feet above the Nevada. The target ships would receive the blast, and the damage assessment teams would board them, and the scientists would collect their data. The second test, codenamed Baker, would occur on the twenty-fifth of July. The bomb would be suspended beneath a landing craft, ninety feet below the surface, and the underwater explosion would test the ships’ hulls. The third test, codenamed Charlie, would occur later, if the first two provided sufficient data.

The preparations continued through June. The target ships received their final modifications. The instruments were calibrated and protected. The support ships practiced their evacuation procedures. The aircraft practiced their bombing runs. The photographers tested their cameras. The radiological safety officers trained their monitors. The schedule allowed no delays.

The Nevada sat at the center of the array, her orange paint visible from every ship in the lagoon. Built at the Fore River Shipyard in Massachusetts, launched in 1914, commissioned in 1916, she had served in World War I, escorting convoys across the Atlantic. Modernized in the 1920s, receiving new boilers, new turbines, new guns, she had been at Pearl Harbor on the seventh of December 1941, hit by a torpedo and two bombs, settled into the mud, raised and repaired. She had bombarded German positions at Normandy in June 1944. She had bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945. She had earned seven battle stars.

Now she waited. The men who had served aboard her had gone to other ships, other stations, other lives. The skeleton crew that had brought her to Bikini had departed. She sat empty, her compartments silent, her decks bare. The cameras watched her. The instruments waited for her. The bomb would fall toward her.

Nagato sat three hundred yards away, her gray hull blending with the lagoon’s surface. She had been the most powerful battleship in the world when she entered service. She had been Yamamoto’s flagship, had transmitted the orders that had started the Pacific War. She had survived the conflict while her sisterships had perished. Now she faced destruction at the hands of the weapon that had ended the war.

Saratoga rode at anchor to the north, her flight deck stretching toward the horizon. She had served as a test platform for naval aviation, had developed the tactics that had won the Pacific War. Torpedoed twice, hit by kamikazes, repaired and returned to service, she had trained the aviators who had sunk the Japanese fleet. Now she would test whether carriers could survive the atomic age.

Independence waited nearby, her smaller hull dwarfed by Saratoga’s bulk. She had fought at Tarawa, Kwajalein, Palau, the Philippines, Okinawa. She had launched the first night fighter operations in naval history. She had earned eight battle stars in two years of combat. Now she would earn her final designation as a target.

The fleet of ghosts assembled. Ninety vessels, each with a history, each with a purpose now. They represented the navies of four nations: the United States, Japan, Germany, and through captured vessels, Italy. They represented the battles of the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean. They represented the old order of warfare, the age of battleships and big guns, now giving way to the age of atomic weapons and strategic air power. They were sacrifices to the new era.

This assembly was not merely a technical exercise but a deliberate theater of memory and power. The ghosts of the recent war had been marshaled for a new, atomic conflict. The Nevada, survivor of Pearl Harbor, would face the bomb that had been built in response to the attack she had endured. The Nagato, flagship of the fleet that had launched that attack, would face the weapon that had ended the war she had helped start. The Saratoga and Independence, carriers that had projected American power across the Pacific, would test whether that power could survive in the atomic age.

The men who watched them understood some of this. They saw the ships as targets, as data sources, as obstacles to be overcome. They saw the tests as necessary, as scientific, as military. They did not see the symbolism as clearly as posterity would. They were preparing for the atomic age, and the atomic age required preparation. The ships had to be tested. The animals had to be exposed. The instruments had to record. The schedule had to be met.

The lagoon filled with vessels, the sky filled with aircraft, the islands filled with equipment. The quiet atoll that had sustained the Bikinians became a naval base, a weapons laboratory, a stage for the atomic age’s next act. The transformation was complete. The atoll would never be the same.

The ships rode at anchor through the long Pacific days, the sun beating down on their decks, the salt air corroding their fittings. The nights brought relief, the stars emerging, the water still. The skeleton crews made their rounds, checking moorings, recording readings, maintaining the instruments. The support ships stood by, their crews waiting, their schedules demanding. The reporters wrote their preliminary stories, describing the scene, preparing for the event. The congressmen observed, asked questions, formed impressions.

The countdown continued. Days until Able. Days until Baker. Days until the atomic age would be tested against the fleet.

Nevada’s orange paint faded slightly in the sun. Barnacles collected on Nagato’s hull. Dust gathered on Saratoga’s flight deck. Instruments filled Independence’s compartments. The animals shifted in their cages. The scientists checked their gauges. The officers reviewed their plans. The schedule held.

The fleet of ghosts waited for the bomb.

The tugs had brought them here, and the tugs would take some of them away. Others would sink during the tests. Others would sink afterward, too radioactive to salvage. Others would be towed to other locations, used for further tests, eventually sunk or scrapped. The survivors would carry their contamination into other waters, their hulls holding the residue of the atomic age.

The lagoon had seen fishing canoes, family gatherings, the quiet rhythms of island life. Now it saw warships, military police, the organized urgency of a weapons test. The transformation was stark. The atoll that had sustained a people now sustained an operation designed to test weapons of mass destruction. The Bikinians had left. The ships had arrived. The atomic age had come to Bikini.

Nevada sat at the center, her orange paint marking her as the aim point. The bomb would fall toward her, would explode above her, would test her hull and her superstructure. She had survived Pearl Harbor, had survived the war, had survived thirty years of service. Whether she would survive Able was the question the test would answer.

Nagato sat nearby, her gray hull silent. She had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now she awaited attack herself. The irony was not lost on the American officers. They had fought her, had defeated her, had captured her. Now they would destroy her with the weapon that had ended the war she had helped start.

Saratoga and Independence waited at their positions. They had carried aircraft, had launched attacks, had supported the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. Now they would receive attack, would test their hulls against the atomic blast. The carriers had proven their worth in the war. Whether they would prove their worth in the atomic age remained to be seen.

The fleet of ghosts assembled, ninety ships riding at anchor in the sun-ringed lagoon. They represented the past, the recent war, the old order. They faced the future, the atomic age, the new weapon. They were sacrifices to the unknown, data points in an experiment whose consequences no one fully understood.

The lagoon is now occupied by a silent fleet of ninety ships, a premonition of dereliction that stands in stark juxtaposition to the unfolding human crisis on Rongerik.