USS Independence
Books
- Two Bombs at Bikini Operation Crossroads and the Birth of the Nuclear Age · Liszt Think
In July 1946, the U.S. Navy assembled ninety target ships and forty-two thousand men at Bikini Atoll to test atomic weapons against a fleet. What followed was a collision of military ambition and invisible peril.
- 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…