ARMY & NAVY: Helen of Bikini

ARMY & NAVY

Something of the terror and wonder seemed to have gone from man’s attitude toward the atomic bomb. Bomb No. 4 had been exploded at Bikini before a world-wide radio audience and 40,000 pairs of frightened eyes. Bomb No. 5, set off last week, was the tool of seasoned weaponeers, and the world watched less in fear than in curiosity at the damage it would do.

Manhattan Project engineers had named No. 5 “Helen of Bikini.” As the concrete caisson to house Helen was lowered from the weapons ship Albemarle to LSM 60, Senator Carl Hatch got in a plug for his home state by chalking on its side “Made in New Mexico.” Through a specially designed opening in the tank-deck of the landing ship, the caisson was lowered several fathoms into the limpid waters of Bikini lagoon. Then all except a few specialists headed out to open water.

Dr. Marshall Holloway stayed all night aboard the LSM with two assistants to set the controls so that Helen could be detonated by radio signals. At dawn Holloway’s team (and three other men who had been overlooked aboard a target ship) were taken off. Bikini was deserted save for its guinea-pig ships with their white mice—and Helen.

In a guarded room aboard the Mount McKinley (flagship of Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy) Holloway faced a panel of numbered buttons. Each had to be pressed at a certain moment. Electronics did the rest. At the precise instant planned, Helen blew her top.

End of “The Ark.” Ten miles away aboard the press ship Appalachian, watchers saw the huge area of Bikini lagoon rise with lightning-like speed and in boiling violence. LSM 60 vanished in the twinkling of an eye. The 26,100-ton battleship Arkansas (the oldest surviving P.S. dreadnaught, dating from 1910), was next nearest the detonation point. She flopped over on her port side and was immediately swallowed up.

The proud carrier Saratoga, 800 yards away, remained in sight for about two seconds. The geyser of water almost touched her starboard side. Then spray blotted her from view. The geyser spurted up to 5,000 feet and there gave birth to the familiar mushroom-shaped cloud which rose 4,000 feet more.

Within a minute, the air shock wave hit the Appalachian with the concussion of a 16-in. gun fired close at hand. The ship had already felt the underwater blast, like the push of a nearby depth charge.

Slow Death for Sara. At first it seemed that Bomb No. 5 had done little fatal damage. The Arkansas and the LSM 60 were the only ships missed at first. Others had developed lists. Then men saw from afar that the Saratoga was in grave trouble.

The funnel built into the forward part of her island had been blown across the deck. Like other vessels in the inner ring, she had been swung around so that her bow faced the detonation point. But the force which had done this had finished the Sara. The only vessel in the target array with a triple-skinned hull, she had nevertheless been ripped open below the waterline. Slowly she settled, listing ever more sharply; seven hours later the 33,000-ton carrier sank.

Half a dozen other vessels were sunk, or beached to avert sinking; a third capital ship, the durable Jap Nagato, wallowed and sank. Nobody yet knew how many submarines were crushed. For a single bomb it was a dreadful toll.

Warning & Lesson. For days, damage assessors could not board the ships that stayed afloat because of radioactivity in the water. It was another warning of what navies in the atomic age would have to face in insidious, invisible death if their ships escaped the bomb’s first blast. The other chief lesson of Test Baker was that even so stout a hull as the Saratoga’s was like matchwood if a bomb burst within half a mile. Transports and destroyers with much thinner skins, but twice as far away from the bomb, suffered hardly at all.

The only protection against the bomb was distance. And no man could be sure of maintaining a safe distance.