The Able portion of the Crossroads atomic test is described in these issues of the Time magazines of July/August of 1946. Although the Superfortress named; Dave’s Dream carried the bomb, the week before it was supposed to be the Enola Gay. That was changed "just in case" something went wrong, if it did the iconic Enola Gay could have been lost to history. See: ARMY & NAVY: Test for Mankind - TIME and the results described the following week: ARMY & NAVY: Fair Sample, Fair Warning - TIME here is an article on the second test (underwater detonation), Baker; ARMY & NAVY: Helen of Bikini - TIME A few weeks later it was announced that the planned Charlie test would be canceled as a budgetary savings move. When you figure in the costs of the hundreds if not thousands of men who had to be paid, fed, housed, and cared for, the maintenance of all the ships and aircraft, the same of all the instruments, it came to many millions of dollars each time.
To bad they nuked the Saratoga, Nagato, Nevada, Prinz Eugen and all. But then again, at leas they are still around to dive on, instead of taken apart in the scrapyard.
I just finished watching a documentary called Radio Bikini about the Crossroads tests. And it was very sad, not only for the native people of Bikini Atoll who were moved out and have never been able to return, but also due to the lack of "what we knew about radiation" and the great number of innocent Americans who died as a result of the tests. I did find out one thing which I had never heard, and if I hadn't seen it in the flix I wouldn't know it to this day. While they named the three atomic bombs that preceeded the Crossroads Tests, "The Gadget" (Alamagordo), "Little Boy" (Hiroshima), and "Fat Man" (Nagsaki), the two plutonium bombs that had been in "stockpile" since 1945, and were used at Bikini were always listed as "un-named". When they were getting ready to put the unused bomb that had been sitting on Tinian Island when Nagasaki was bombed, They were putting on the finishing "touches" which included putting in the initiator, and spray painting a "sealant" around all the junction lines from the two halves of the shell. Just as they finished doing that, before the bomb was placed on the trailer and taken to the "pit" for lifting into Dave's Dream (B-29), someone used a stencil and painted on the name "Gilda". So now we know that the bomb which was air-dropped in the "Able" part had a name; "Gilda" ! They never showed any of the preparation for the "Baker" underwater detonation at the Crossroads, so that bomb may or may not have had a name. It might be recorded somewhere, but it wasn't on that documentary.
Yes that was the first atomic tests by the US in 1946, and it was done mostly to figure out whether or not ships could survive an atomic attack. There had never been any tests over or underwater, or near or under ships.
I think it was point less at least they should have save the USS Arkansas and wasted 2 carriers. not to mention displacing people.
I wouldn't agree that it was pointless, but it might have been wasteful especially considering the people who were irradiated as well as those displaced Bikini Islanders. If you are interested; here are some good links to the "fate" of the ships used in the Operation Crossroads two tests, most of the ships actually survived the blasts, one air burst and one underwater explosion. See: Disposition of Target Vessels at Operation Crossroads And: Operation Crossroads, Nuclear Tests at Bikini Here is a Popular Mechanics article on the Crossroads tests, before they took place: Popular Mechanics - Google Books There were 103 ships in the Able test, most survived. Here is a good run-down on test Able the air dropped bomb. Baker was the underwater detonation, and the old USS Nevada (BB- 36) survived both tests as well, and she was "ground-zero" for the air dropped bomb. That is neither here nor there, most of the ships survived the tests really. See that list I first put up. A great many were towed away, and later sunk as target ships. See: Operation Crossroads: Bikini Atoll: Naval Art form the Atomic Bomb Test
I hope they leaned they learned their lesson it turns out 2 people died and the observers life expectancy went down 3 months mybe even more.
The USS Saratoga was pretty close to ground zero. Her entire bottom was blown out by the force of the Baker shot. It was not a waste i guess. It was sad to nuke the old war horses, but besides being a museum, Saratoga's flight decks could not handle the stress of the more modern aircraft comming out. I think someone said you can actually see the wreck from the air if you fly over it.
Why bother saving the USS Arkansas? She was the oldest serving battleship still with the Navy, and there were two, more recent battleships present at the tests, USS Nevada, and USS Pennsylvania. As for the carriers, the USS Saratoga was the oldest surviving US carrier and had seen better days, after taking several kamikaze and bomb hits on February 21, 1945, she was repaired and served as a training carrier for new pilots. The USS Independence was also only a minor loss to the US Navy, because of the abundance of "fast carriers" and the expected cut backs following the end of the war.
No, it was a big chunk of obsolete weaponry not worth saving as a museum or floating display. Do you realize the cost of maintaining one of those behemoths? They don't just sit there for nothing, or if they are ignored they slowy degrade into junk without constant upkeep. Personally, I think there should be at least one of each dreadnought and super-dreadnought style battleship preserved, but not all of them. The USS Olympia, the last of the pre-dreadnought ships of Spanish-American war fame, sits and is slowly going to hell because it cannot be maintained. Just last year the USS Intrepid had to be dragged out of her berth, and retro fitted, with public donations since it isn't a national monument, and the price tag was staggering. The same with the USS Missouri, recently she was dry-docked and her hull cleaned after decades of neglect and non-funding, and that was a multi-million if not billion dollar expense. "History" isn't preserved for nothing, or at least not at some cost to the taxpayers. You cannot just keep it around "'cause it would be cool to do it".
Don't forget another historical first: the actual Bikini. Why someone named it after some atoll no one had ever heard of is curious....Was it because Bikini was "hot"?
Sort of, at the time a "new" two piece suit for the female form was hitting the run-ways, it was a more abreviated version of the two piece bathing suit for the gals. More skin, i.e., smaller tops, smaller bottoms. It just happened to come out at nearly the same time as the "Bikini" tests. And don't forget that the Bikini Islanders were (incorrectly) thought of as the "topless" females of the Pacific "Islands of Paradise" in the western mind. Plus, nothing sells like "something" un-familar.
Now that's getting into how the war influenced fashion and culture. I think that's why I enjoy a lot about the 50's....
