Many who served on Saratoga witness her death by A-bomb
Fleet of Navy planes drones requiem for famed sister ship of Lexington
By W. H. Shippen Jr., Star staff correspondent
ABOARD USS APPALACHIAN, in Bikini Lagoon – When the stubborn old aircraft carrier Saratoga went down to meet Davy Jones, she left behind one whale of an argument kicked up by the world’s first underwater atomic bomb. The debate is now roaring across the fleet as fast as the speed of sound and with plenty of noise.
Nothing P. T. Barnum in his heyday or Hollywood at its wildest ever dreamed up could equal the spectacle which had as its aftermath the nosedive of the faithful old battleship Arkansas and the fatal wounding of the Saratoga, last of the twin “fighting sisters.”
Through the long tropical afternoon and well into this evening, those not arguing, beating typewriters or talking into microphones watched the “Sara” settle and pulled for her in her last agony. The air over her and the water about her too hot for close approach by observation planes or emergency salvage crews, the gallant old flattop fought her last battle alone although there are hundreds of men in this fleet who helped sail her through all kinds of brawls.
Around 3 p.m. the “Sara” started under by the stern, and as she slanted toward her last mission, we could see her worn flight deck glinting in the sun. She went down slowly with the grave reluctance befitting a fighting lady. Her flight deck astern was awash for a time and then disappeared beneath the water. Her bow slowly tilted toward us and came temporarily to rest as the stern reached bottom some 30 fathoms down.
Then air pressure began to blow holes in her bow and water spouts gushed upward as the 990-foot-long carrier breathed her last.
A fleet of Navy planes droned a requiem above and men stood at attention throughout the observation fleet, some with eyes not too dry, as the “Sara” passed from view – a fighting lady from a long and honorable line of Saratoga, whose twin sister, the Lexington, met her death in more tragic circumstances under a storm of Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes in the Coral Sea.
Things happened so fast and frequently this morning that we all wanted to be several places at once with more than two eyes and ears and a half dozen pencils. We would have liked to be in the air, but those boys were farther from the blast than our own nine and a half miles; or on the bridge, or down in the wardroom hanging over television screens relaying motion pictures from Bikini beach.
Horizon flawless
We wanted to be on the flagship with King Juda, watching his beloved island under a cloud of thunder, or even where we were. From our ship the flawless horizon studded with familiar target vessels and lined with the bright beaches, palms and observation towers on the atoll presented a worthy setting for the cosmic show.
At me detonation blast, sailors who have seen and heard about everything broke into exclamations of admiration, pain and pleasure. Profane, perhaps, but none the less expressive. So much happened in the first seconds that I can’t be too sure of what I saw. But this is how it seemed to an observer who tried later to check his facts:
First a white hemisphere containing a fiery core pushed up from the sea. It expanded like a bubble and dispersed with the speed of sound, which flew off into the air in some sort of shock wave, I presume.
Then up spouted a dark and turbulent mushroom. From its head three or four air waves like expanding doughnuts flashed off into the sky, perhaps carrying away debris, gas or condensing water from the expansion point.
Next the tortured lagoon threw up a dazzling white column of water that seemed to boil and effervesce. Over and over in it tossed a dark object like a chunk torn from one of the guinea pig ships. This column rose a mile or more and seemed at least half a mile wide across its base. It probably contained several million tons of water, vaporized, bubbling or moving in great globules.
The column was capped to about a minute by a dark purple plume of gas and vapor that rose at least another mile as the water began to cascade down from the white spout.
As the water descended, a mighty wave was born at its base. It grew as something in a nightmare, forming a frothy white circle around the dwindling column. I think this was the momentary 100-foot tidal wave predicted by oceanographers.
The whole thing seemed to tower up and rush at us and I think I would be justified in saying it caused at least a moment of fear to all who watched from the surface at close range. But the wave swiftly dissipated itself, taking the form of whitecaps rolling at us down an open channel entrance.
Waves which hit Bikini beach, according to men on the television screens, were no more than seven to 10 feet and failed to inundate the atoll. It seems likely our recreation center over there, the “Wednesday Evening Marching and Chowder Society,” is undamaged, although the waves floated off a number of beached landing craft.
In a matter of five minutes, a mist was forming where the high wave had been. It spread and started to obscure the outer fringes of the target fleet not blotted out by the central explosion. The gas plume began to drift away, and in several minutes the mist started lifting its thick veil from the manless fleet.
For at least an hour and a half the poisonous mist or haze was visible as the steady trades shoved it downwind and finally erased it from our view. Weathermen surely hit both bomb test dates on the button.
Watched death throes
Meanwhile, the Appalachian and other observation ships were moving toward the lagoon, protected by the reef from the contaminating water and by constant wind from the poison aloft. By 10 a.m., from a range of four miles, we were watching the Saratoga in her death throes, and the Arkansas had gone down in 30 fathoms behind the atomic curtain.
Several of us had gone aboard the Arkansas at anchor in the lagoon a fortnight ago, where we were received by her skipper, Capt. Wade De Weese. Oldest battleship in the fleet, she had received only slight damage from the air blast, though her compartmentation was far less sturdy than that of modern battleships.
On the Appalachian this morning the shock wave, transmitted through the water, hit the ship a few seconds after the explosion. Most below decks veterans described it as like the sensation produced by a fairly near miss by an air bomb.
Topside, we got almost none of this shock, but our eardrums took quite a wallop about a minute after the explosion. I was so absorbed with the spectacle I had completely forgotten this highly audible reaction until it rolled across the ocean, lifting me a couple of feet out of my favorite deck chair. It was quite some bang, much stronger than the sound of distant thunder which followed the air test.
As pro and con discussion goes on here as to the effectiveness of atomic weapons against a floating, dispersed military city of steel, some are inclined to lose sight of Adm. Blandy’s oft-repeated theme: The tests were calculated to produce maximum data rather than maximum damage.
We are how proceeding into the lagoon as far as the Geiger counter-monitors will permit, to find out among other things what weird looking object Is draped over a floating drydock. Maybe it’s a missing LST.
