Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  I pulled Emory aside, and we talked a bit. Both of us were tense about this. As important a step as this was to understanding Kauhako Crater, it wasn’t worth risking these men’s lives. But they were in the business, as we were, of assessing risks, so we just put it straight—“Fellas, if you don’t think this is reasonable, we don’t want you to feel pressured to do it.”

  The pilot thanked us for the concern but said he felt they could handle it and was game for a try. We spent the next few hours rigging small rubber boats with harnesses to hold a load of sonar and robotic gear. We would have the chopper lower two of these thirteen-foot boats, one at a time, into the crater, and MDSU would unhook them from below. We surveyors would climb down the side of the crater each day to join the equipment; two rangers and Navy personnel were sent down to rig a safety line we could hold on to on the slippery descent.

  Watching on different descents and lifts, from the water and from the rim, I witnessed flying I didn’t think was possible. The helicopters took up the entire area over the water and literally had to wend their way back out. Due to equipment problems, they had to bring over more helicopters with spare parts until we eventually had four sitting at the remote Kalaupapa airstrip.

  Somehow, the equipment all made it down, and we spent three days sending the robots down to explore Kauhako Crater. The first discovery occurred within moments of starting the robot’s descent. After twenty feet, the water went from about six inches visibility to unlimited. As far as the lights could shine, the robot could see, which often meant across the entire crater. The materials lying on ledges, primarily leaves and other vegetation, looked like they fell in yesterday. The significance of that was the water was probably anaerobic in addition to being crystal-clear. There appeared to be tufa growths down the walls and the dropoff was precipitous, but craggy with plenty of places to catch up cultural material. The only reason we stopped at 540 feet is that we ran out of cable!

  In short, we had the makings of an extraordinary archeological site on our hands. Our mission was complete, now we just needed to get everything out and everyone home safe. This is when the Kauhako expedition turned into a nightmare for Emory and me. The removal of the equipment on the fifth and last day of operation was a hand-wringing nail-biter. Getting the stuff out was considerably harder than putting it in.

  At this point, of course, the Marines had ultimate authority to simply declare it was too dangerous and halt the operation. The problem was we knew damn well these guys, along with their skill and common sense and normal good judgment, had pride. Each time one of the birds dropped down into that crater, Emory and I stood there at the rim muttering to ourselves the same obscenities intertwined with prayers again and again. “Come on, come on, come on . . . can’t see the fuckers, Lenihan, I can’t see ’em, damn, damn, get the hell out of there!”

  On the last attempt after five failures to get the second rubber boat up, I joined MDSU in the water. Much of the problem was attaching the hook to the boat under the winds of the dual props. If the rotors touched one of the trees in the crater (sometimes less than ten feet away), the chopper would disintegrate, killing everyone on board and probably everybody on the ledge at the bottom of the crater. It was tense.

  In the water with three MDSU divers, all of us wearing just mask, fins, and snorkel, we waited for the last attempt. The CH46 was like a huge flying ant, making an unworldly sound in the crater, blowing everything around like a mini-tornado and causing three-foot waves in water that had probably never seen more than a one-inch ripple in geologic time. To add to the excitement, it began raining. MDSU had strung a heavy line across the lake, and we held onto it as tightly as we could while sitting on the cargo netting in the boat. As soon as the hook came into range, one Navy diver would grab it, and we would all try to hold the boat steady enough for him to get the hook through the ring. Somehow, a second later, we were all blown out of the boat, and I came up next to the hook. I held the damn thing up and swam for all I was worth toward the boat and the big Hawaiian Navy diver who would have the strength to clamp it to the ring. I thought I would go under when the hook suddenly got lighter and my arm stronger. Both of the other MDSU divers had found me and were holding my arm up with the hook. Thank God for the tradition of muscles among those guys; it came in real handy that day.

  I don’t know if I was helping at this point or simply had the hook in a death grip (they nicely assured me later I had helped), but we got the hook to the diver in the boat. He hooked it to the ring and threw himself out. Off the rubber boat went like magic, then several yards forward to clear the bend, then out to a sky that had suddenly turned blue. Three MDSU warriors and I swam to the side and lay there in a heap for at least twenty minutes without moving.

  “Hey, Lenihan.” It was Emory, who had come down the crater from where he had been praying in obscenities on the rim. “Want to try that again? Don’t think I got the best picture.” Real comedian, that Emory.

  Our job at Kauhako was done, and we would soon be off for new places, but we all made our way to the airstrip to bid our adieus to the Marine chopper crews. We felt a real closeness with these guys after spending the better part of two days grinding our teeth with concerns over their safety. They had really put out for us, and we were grateful.

  The crew would not accept any sort of gratuity, which was not a surprise to me: We in NPS were under the same sort of restrictions. The imaginative Emory did, however, write a check eventually to the base exchange or club or some such, which sold beer. He specified on the bottom of the check “Not to be used for any purpose but the consumption of alcoholic beverages.” Legal enough, I suppose, but I would have loved to have seen that check being cleared through the Finance Department at National Geographic.

  As it turned out, the men of the lead helicopter probably never had the opportunity to enjoy the libations supplied by Emory’s check. The entire crew was killed less than two weeks later when their helicopter crashed in a routine flight out of Kaneohe. The news made all of us who had worked with these men absolutely sick. You don’t have to know people a long time under the conditions we worked with these fellows to form opinions. We had really taken a liking to this exceptional group of men. Knowing how bad we felt when we heard about this accident when we had nothing to do with it just reinforces how difficult it would have been to deal with if they had bought it doing a marginal task at our request.

  At this writing, I have learned that the native vegetation we were so concerned about harming turned out to be exotic. I’d love to pursue our archeological assessment. But I must say, even twelve years later, the excitement and triumph I feel over conquering that crater that couldn’t be dived is tinged with a bit of sadness.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BIKINI: OPERATION CROSSROADS

  Larry Murphy, who grew up during the 1950s, remembers being an avid young philatelist—until one day, during the heyday of thermonuclear testing, he suddenly lost interest in his hobby. What was the point maintaining a long-term project like a stamp collection, when each day found him huddled under his desk at school, bracing for nuclear annihilation?

  With the end of the Cold War, we are no longer forced to take comfort in dubious deterrents such as Mutually Assured Destruction (affectionately known as MAD). Yet Earth’s surface remains scarred from years of playing with nuclear fire—scars etched in the landscape of Siberia and our own Nevada test site. More recently, names like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Rocky Flats resonate in a dark corner of our psyche. Instead of convincing ourselves we might survive atomic holocaust, we’re now charged with figuring out how to live with the residue of nuclear trial and error. If any place on the globe symbolizes both these challenges, it is the area in the Western Pacific that comprises the atolls of Bikini and Kwajalein.

  In 1989, SCRU was asked by the Department of Energy and the Bikini Council to undertake the first systematic underwater recording of sites where the United States conducted a series of nuclear tests that forever c
hanged our world. Larry Murphy, Jerry Livingston, Larry Nordby, Jim Delgado, and I composed the NPS team. We were accompanied by Department of Energy personnel, an ABC television crew, and members of the Navy MDSU 1 detachment that had worked with us at Pearl Harbor. It was two months after a briefcase-toting student faced off with a tank in Tianamen Square and two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  The first ship we surveyed was the Prinz Eugen, a heavily armed German cruiser that had been made an example of during the heady days of nuclear tests immediately following the end of World War II. Once a member of the commerce-raiding fleet built by the Germans to enforce their vision of a Third Reich, the Prinz Eugen had become a household name on May 24, 1941, when she joined the Bismarck in making a break from the protected waters of Norway and engaging the HMS Hood in the North Atlantic. Fourteen hundred British sailors went down with the Hood, but the Bismarck paid dearly—she was tracked down and sunk by torpedo planes and warships three days later with more than twenty-two hundred sailors dying. The Prinz Eugen slipped off to the Azores, where it escaped the wrath of the British Navy and managed to survive through numerous scrapes until war’s end, when it was handed over to the British at Copenhagen.

  A half century later, the huge propellers of the Prinz Eugen jut pathetically from the waters of Kwajalein Atoll lagoon. The turrets holding its eight-inch-diameter guns have fallen from their barbettes to the lagoon bottom, several feet below the deck of the inverted ship. Wire and cable entrails from the guns extend back into the vacant barbettes like rubber and steel umbilical cords. My team members and I include it as part of our exploration of the Bikini graveyard—the fleet of ships sacrificed to U.S. nuclear tests in 1946.

  The Prinz Eugen, part of the detritus of atomic bomb tests conducted at Bikini under the rubric Operation Crossroads, was towed to Kwajalein laden with radiation and punch-drunk from two atomic haymakers. But the bombs didn’t sink this ship—in the case of the Eugen, it was a slight leak and mishandling by its post-test caretakers that did her in.

  We were on an unscheduled layover for our short hop to Bikini from Kwajalein. This delay , we came to learn was the rule, not the exception. We could reach Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, 5,000 ception. We could reach Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, 5,000 miles from Santa Fe, in two days. But we never did make it the 200 miles, to or from Bikini, without a two-or three-day delay.

  While stranded, however, we could easily access the Eugen, as much a part of the Bikini story as any of the ships still at the test site. She just happened to sink somewhere else. We scraped together air tanks and other gear from the “Kwaj” Scuba Club because our own equipment was still crated for the trip to Bikini.

  As Larry Nordby started sketching, I began to poke around under the ship. Ships like the Arizona and Prinz Eugen evoke for me black-and-white “memories” of World War II, probably a product of Movietone News and Victory at Sea propaganda films with which we war babies were inundated.

  It took all my concentration to orient to the topsy-turvy world of the overturned ship. Keeping bearings was especially difficult on a steeply sloping sea bottom. I lightly sculled my fins to keep sediment from rising as I moved through the tangle of steel and cables. My light flashed on a tubular contraption that seemed attached to the deck above but almost completely buried in the silt with the weight of the ship. Tubular? My mind reached for something—then it occurred to me: a “Christmas tree.”

  I rolled on my back on the sand bottom of the lagoon and crawled underneath the wreck to see the world correctly from the point of view of someone on deck. Then I was sure, this was indeed a Christmas tree; a peculiar structure designed by Operation Crossroads engineers to hold blast gauges and other instruments to measure the force of atomic explosions. The Eugen, turned over to the United States by the British as a war prize, had been fitted with this special hardware by American scientists before being chained in place as a sacrificial lamb in the Bikini test array.

  I waved my light at Larry Nordby to get his attention in the aqueous gloom under the shadow of the ship. He recognized the tower for what it was and noted its location on his slate. I then motioned one of the media crew to follow me back under the ship with his camera. The strobe blinded me temporarily , so I lay there listening to my bubbles working their way along the inclined hull while my retinas recovered from the insult. The Prinz Eugen was not the only upside-down warship we would dive during that project. At Bikini, the Japanese battleship Nagato and the U.S. battleship Arkansas both lay keel to the sun.

  The decision to work in Bikini was not something anyone on the team took lightly. Indeed, several members opted not to go. They weren’t sure they could trust assurances from the Department of Energy that participating in the survey of ships once deemed “too hot to dive” was in the best interest of themselves or their future offspring. I didn’t question their decision; the government has far from a spotless record in that regard.

  My own decision was based on having made a career of assessing risks to doing research. At the time SCRU was asked to assess Bikini, we had conducted some of the deepest and most dangerous diving operations ever undertaken in underwater archeology. I felt the stakes were high enough in this operation that it was worth sweating out solutions to a few manageable risks. The issue of living with low-level radiation and working in places “polluted” from nuclear fallout had importance beyond historic preservation.

  The first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945 at the Trinity Site in New Mexico, about a three-hour drive from my home. Hiroshima followed a few months later and Nagasaki shortly thereafter. Bikini played host to numbers four and five, all part of Operation Crossroads, a gargantuan experiment to test the effects of the Bomb on ships.

  The first of the Crossroads bombs, “Able,” was an air blast at an altitude of five hundred feet; the second, dubbed “Baker,” was an underwater detonation of a nuclear device suspended from a landing craft anchored in the lagoon. These were all atomic bombs, magnitudes smaller in effect than the fusion devices that would replace them. Years later at Bikini, thermonuclear devices (hydrogen bombs) replaced the fission bombs. Names like “Mike” and “Bravo” belied the otherworldliness of the power unleashed in those later explosions.

  I read closely the assessment of radiological doses at Bikini prepared by Lawrence Livermore Labs. The down-to-earth, intelligent demeanor of Bill Robison, the man from the lab who had run most of the radiological studies at Bikini, helped immensely in my understanding the charts and numbers. He patiently answered the same questions posed in many different ways. It was critical that I understood the rationale for it being safe to dive at Bikini from a layman’s perspective, not only because I had to decide if my team would take on the job but because I would be the one to write recommendations for future use of the site by visiting divers.

  Bill and I spoke for hours regarding different types of radiation, from gamma rays to tiny particles called alpha-emitters that could in microscopic amounts cause serious damage to humans if ingested— say through a regulator mouthpiece. Although Bill’s articulate discussion of the properties of radiation threats inspired confidence, I was a firm believer in the old Soviet dictum “Trust . . . then verify.” I took all of the information Bill had given me to a friend at Los Alamos who worked in the field of radiological health.

  Jim Sprinkle carefully reviewed the data and spent an evening discussing it with me up on “the hill.” Something handy about living in Santa Fe, is the proximity of the heart of the Manhattan Project when you’re planning to dive in potentially radioactive environments. I wanted a second opinion from Jim as a friend, not an “official” opinion from Los Alamos.

  After weighing carefully the evidence from the studies and the advice of these two men, I decided to commit to the Bikini project. I reserved judgment on any position paper regarding wider use by sport divers until we could see the area first hand and conduct additional spot checks of radiation levels. Thus, in August 1989, I found myself lyin
g beneath the Prinz Eugen at Kwajalein studying Christmas trees. As fascinating as we found the Eugen, we were happy to receive a radio transmission that we would be able to depart for Bikini next day. We terminated our diving and headed back to Kwaj.

  After the long buildup and so many delays, I was extremely excited to get my first glance of Bikini Island. In 1989 Holmes and Narver Company represented the Department of Energy in the Pacific. Their field station on Bikini was small and well-managed. In fact, the whole island was small and well-managed. Trees grew in straight rows on Bikini and the houses had no people in them, the occupants having been displaced because of the tests. It weighs heavily to see land in Micronesia not lived on, not used; it’s illogical. So much water, so little land.

  The delay in obtaining transport to Bikini underscored another concern I had discussed with our team members before leaving Santa Fe. A major problem in risk management is allowing one dramatic issue to override more mundane concerns. Radiation worries could dull our edge regarding the more traditional problems of deep diving in remote areas. Bikini is two hundred miles from the nearest recompression chamber at Kwaj—not necessarily troublesome in Hometown, USA. A medical evacuation to Kwajalein, however, could take days, depending on the vagaries of boats and planes that might be available to us. We planned to make long dives on air as deep as 180 feet—twice each day for two weeks. As Jimmy Stewart had pointed out to me so forcefully regarding our work at Isle Royale, the U.S. Navy decompression tables weren’t devised for that kind of use without accepting some incidence of bends. I wasn’t about to accept anything of the sort.