The Sun-Ringed Lagoon…Pacific, a scattered chain of twenty-nine atolls and five islands that together comprise one of the most remote inhabited places on earth. Bikini Atoll lies near the northern end of this chain, roughly 2, 400 miles southwest of Honolulu and 1, 800 miles east of Manila. Its twenty-three isle…
A Fleet of Ghosts…tations 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 t…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…preparation was under way. The 167 Bikinians were being moved to Rongerik, a relocation that would begin a permanent exile. February 1946. Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. The landing craft grounded on the coral sand with a grinding hiss. The Seabees had come to take the church apart. King J…
A Fleet of Ghosts…inawa. 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 wou…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…age point. Radiological safety officers prepared equipment. Navy established its command structure. Admiral William H.P. Blandy oversaw the Joint Task Force One, some forty-two thousand men assembled for the greatest experiment in naval history. The specialised job of radiological safety was handled…
The Last Sunrise on a Populated Sea…had managed the removal of the Bikinians to Rongerik, the assembly of the target fleet, the coordination of forty-two thousand personnel of Joint Task Force One. He had approved the plan to drop a plutonium implosion device from a B-29 and detonate it five hundred feet above the Nevada. The device w…
A Fleet of Ghosts…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…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…sembled for the greatest experiment in naval history. The specialised job of radiological safety was handled by the Manhattan Project, with Stafford Warren as Chief of the Radiological Safety Section. On Rongerik, 167 people tried to survive. Cultural dislocation compounded physical hardship. B…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended Ruin…ht still provide valuable data about structural failure. The tension between these purposes shaped every aspect of the preparation. Colonel Stafford Warren, the chief of the Radiological Safety Section, had arrived at Bikini with concerns that the Navy did not fully share. Warren had served as…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…oaching. Fleet was ready. World was watching. On Bikini, preparations continued. Target ships rode at their moorings, waiting for the bomb. USS Nevada, painted orange for visibility, held the aiming point. Japanese battleship Nagato, captured prize of the Pacific War, waited nearby. German…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended RuinThe paint smelled of chemicals and distance. A boatswain’s mate knelt on the teak deck of the USS Nevada with a five-gallon bucket and a wide brush, working the bright orange pigment into the gray wood. The color was not meant to be beautiful.…
The Battleship Nevada’s Marking Day…nd opened her sea cocks just enough to let the water find its level. She rode low in the lagoon, a hull waiting to be holed. The battleship USS Nevada, the only battleship to get underway at the Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, had been designated as the aim point for Able and was painted o…
A Fleet of Ghosts…ece, 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 duri…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended Ruin…s away. She was no longer a warship. She was a target. The selection of vessels told its own story about what the Navy wanted to prove. The USS Saratoga, a venerable aircraft carrier launched in 1925, represented American naval might in its pre-war form. She had served throughout the Pacific…
The Fathom-Five Shot and the Unwashable Mist…inated could not be cleaned, and the men who had tried to clean them had been exposed to radiation that no one had measured accurately. The USS Saratoga was towed out of the lagoon on 25 August 1946, a month after the Baker shot. She had been at Bikini since the beginning of the operation, o…
A Fleet of Ghosts…e 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…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…orange for visibility, held the aiming point. Japanese battleship Nagato, captured prize of the Pacific War, waited nearby. German cruiser Prinz Eugen, taken from the defeated Kriegsmarine, floated in the lagoon. Aircraft carrier Saratoga, veteran of a hundred Pacific operations, stood rea…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended Ruin…o the victors, her crew replaced by American sailors who had painted her gray and stripped her of anything useful. The German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen had also been assigned to the target fleet, a prize of war that had survived the collapse of Nazi Germany. American engineers had studied h…
The Sun-Ringed Lagoon…d a fleet survive a nuclear attack? Would the weapon work against ships as it had against cities? The planned series of tests was codenamed Operation Crossroads. They would be the first nuclear weapon tests since Trinity on July 16, 1945, and the first detonations since Nagasaki. The Navy had a part…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…Logistics of feeding 167 people on a remote atoll were complicated. Supply runs had to be scheduled around test preparations. Priorities of Operation Crossroads came first. Juda watched his people grow thinner. Children did not run and play as they had on Bikini. Old men sat in shade and conserved s…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended Ruin…ratory. Admiral William H.P. Blandy had arrived on the first of June to take personal command. The operation had been planned and codenamed Operation Crossroads, and the scale of the undertaking dwarfed anything previously attempted in naval history. Approximately 42, 000 personnel were deployed to…
A Fleet of Ghosts…led, 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…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended Ruin…riking at Japanese positions from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima. Now she waited in the lagoon, her flight deck empty, her hangar bays silent. The USS Independence, a light carrier commissioned in 1943, represented the new warfare: fast, flexible, built for the Pacific’s vast distances. She had fought…
The Battleship Nevada’s Marking Day…emonstration of accuracy—had inverted itself. The miss had become the message. The other ships in the target fleet fared worse. The cruiser USS Independence, anchored closer to the detonation point than the Nevada, took the blast on her beam and suffered catastrophic damage. The flight deck buck…
A Fleet of Ghosts…side 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 P…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…t ships rode at their moorings, waiting for the bomb. USS Nevada, painted orange for visibility, held the aiming point. Japanese battleship Nagato, captured prize of the Pacific War, waited nearby. German cruiser Prinz Eugen, taken from the defeated Kriegsmarine, floated in the lagoon.…
Admiral Blandy’s Fleet of Intended Ruin…a and the Independence would provide the answer. But the fleet also held vessels that carried the weight of defeat. The Japanese battleship Nagato rode at anchor, her tall pagoda mast rising above the lagoon like a monument to a fallen empire. She had been the flagship of the Japanese…
The Sun-Ringed Lagoon…truction. The world was moving in, and they were being pushed aside. The date for their departure was set for early March. They would go to Rongerik, an uninhabited atoll about 125 miles to the east. Rongerik was smaller than Bikini, with less land and a lagoon that did not offer the sam…
A Fleet of Ghosts…ccupied by a silent fleet of ninety ships, a premonition of dereliction that stands in stark juxtaposition to the unfolding human crisis on Rongerik.
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…rop-off fell away into the Pacific deep. On the beach, a different kind of preparation was under way. The 167 Bikinians were being moved to Rongerik, a relocation that would begin a permanent exile. February 1946. Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. The landing craft grounded on the coral sa…
The Sun-Ringed Lagoon…hed the water. Their consent was a formality, a courtesy extended to a population too small to resist. After a time, the chief, a man named Juda, spoke. If the United States government needed their islands, they would go. In their understanding, this was an act of trust. The American…
The Unwilling Pioneers of Rongerik…l, Marshall Islands. The landing craft grounded on the coral sand with a grinding hiss. The Seabees had come to take the church apart. King Juda stood watching as men with hammers and crowbars climbed the steps of the structure his people had built with their own hands, the planks br…
The Bureaucrat’s Secret Log…ement of 167 people from their atoll was acknowledged, but framed as a temporary arrangement made with their consent. The narrative of King Juda’s agreement, extracted in the months before the tests, was presented without the context of pressure, without the promises that had been ma…