Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

by James Delgado

  USS UTAH

  On the opposite shore of Ford Island, off Battleship Row, lie the remains of USS Utah, sunk on December 7 and, like Arizona, never raised after the battle. Unlike Arizona, Utah is rarely visited, and the memorial to the ship and her dead is in a non-public area on the island’s shore.

  The remains of USS Utah, sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Photo by Gary Cummins, USS Arizona Memorial/National Park Service

  Lenihan, Larry Murphy, Jerry Livingston and Larry Nordby had made a number of dives on Utah, and in the summer of 1988, took me on my first and only dive there. Commissioned as battleship 88–31, Utah, by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, was serving as a target ship: aerial bombers practiced by dropping dummy bombs on her decks. For protection, the decks were covered by thick timbers. They were no protection on December 7.

  Japanese planners had ordered their pilots to ignore Utah, but despite this, two torpedo bombers skimmed along the surface of the water and launched their weapons. Ensign Tom Anderson was running on the deck to sound the alarm when the first torpedo struck the port side, “staggering the ship.” A geyser of water shot up the side and came down on him. Picking himself up, Anderson reached the alarm gong and pulled it. Utah continued to list to port as the second torpedo detonated. Captain James Steele was ashore, and Lieutenant Commander Solomon S. Isquith was in command. As Utah started to go down, Isquith gave the order to abandon ship over the starboard side, so that the capsizing hulk would not roll over on top of them. Eleven minutes after the first torpedo hit, Utah sank.

  Utah’s crew had more chances to escape than the men on Arizona, but it was often a harrowing, near thing. Seaman 2nd Class James Oberto started to climb through a hatch as “an alarming amount of seawater came cascading in the hatch opening just above our heads. We started to climb in single file to the second deck. Compounding our situation were the tons of water pouring in on use from the open portholes on the port side. We were standing in water nearly to our knees.” Oberto made it to the deck, as did Radioman 3rd Class Clarence W Durham. But as Durham climbed out, he looked back and saw that the steel “battle bar” grates had broken free and blocked off the escape route of some of the engine room crew. “I will never forget the faces of those men trapped in the Engine Room. I knew there was no way I could lift those steel grates and I also knew at that point that my chances were very slim of getting out of there myself.” Durham made it out as Utah rolled. He slid down the “rough barnacle-encrusted steel hull,” ripping himself open.

  One of the trapped men, Fireman 2nd Class John Vaessen, got through a battle grate just before it slammed shut, trapping his shipmate Joe Barta. As the ship capsized, Vaessen said, “Batteries began exploding. I was hit with deck plates, fire extinguishers, etc.” Climbing up into the bilge, once at the bottom of the hull and now exposed to the air, he “could hear the superstructure break and the water would rush closer.” Taking a wrench, he beat against the hull to call for help. “I got an answer then silence, then rat-a-tat-tat. I thought that was a pneumatic tool. It was strafing.” Japanese planes, firing at men in the water and across the hull of the overturned battleship, were claiming more lives. Vaessen’s rescuers did not give up and used a blowtorch to cut open the hull and pulled him out of the steel tomb. But fifty-eight of his shipmates did not make it, including Chief Water Tender Peter Tomich, who stayed at his post to shut down the boilers and prevent an explosion. Tomich’s sacrifice so that others might live was recognized by the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor. He still lies inside Utah with most of the ship’s dead.

  I think about those men inside the hulk as we motor towards the ship. After the battle, salvage crews tried to right the hull and refloat Utah, but she could not be freed. Abandoned, the ship rests on her port side, festooned with salvage cables; some of the starboard air castle and some of the forward superstructure rise out of the water. We approach the exposed rusting decks and roll out of our boat into the water. Larry Murphy leads me past open hatches to the armored top of the No. 2 turret. Although the battleship’s original guns had been removed when she was converted into a target ship in 1931, the turrets remained. In 1940, the Navy installed new 5-inch/25 caliber antiaircraft guns atop the turrets, part of a new battery that Utah was to test. Dan and Larry point them out to me as a reminder from our predive briefing that, ironically, Utah, with her new guns, was perhaps one of the best equipped ships at Pearl Harbor that morning to fight back, had she not been mistakenly hit and sunk so early in the attack.

  The remainder of this summer at Pearl Harbor is spent searching, without success, for crashed Japanese aircraft and the deeply submerged remains of the Japanese midget submarine. Built to be a stealth weapon, the sub remains hidden, even after a highly publicized search by our colleague Bob Ballard in November 2000. But after he leaves, the sub is found intact (just as Murphy’s 1988 side-scan sonar image showed it) by a hardworking team from the University of Hawaii’s Undersea Research Lab. The sub’s two-man crew presumably rests inside, reminding us that like Arizona and Utah, these lost ships are more than historic monuments. They are war graves.

  Working at Pearl Harbor, which is steeped with the emotionally charged memories of that day of infamy, had a deep impact on me, an archeologist who hitherto had dealt with a more distant past. The tragedy of the attack and the sunken ships and the memorials reminded me that humanity is at core of what I do — archeology is far more than a scientific reappraisal or a recovery of relics. Lost ships, historic sites and sacred places like memorials are mirrors in which we examine ourselves. Human weakness, human arrogance, heroism, sacrifice and perseverance dominate the story of the Pearl Harbor attack. Diving on Arizona and Utah, which had sunk in a handful of minutes as their crews were propelled from peace to war, and from the here and now to eternity, was a potent reminder of the human cost when nations collide.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SUNK BY THE ATOMIC BOMB

  AT BIKINI ATOLL

  We’ve been flying for hours over an empty ocean, far out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, the plane’s slow turn signals that we are approaching our destination. Leaning over to look out the small windows in the crowded cabin, we all scan the horizon. The dark sea is giving way to the greenish-tinged hues of shallow water. In the midst of these sparkling waters, the white sand of islands appears. A chain of islands, like pearls on a string, mark the top of a volcano’s rim, now submerged. The shallows of the atoll merge into darker water inside the ring, the drowned maw of the volcano, that now forms a deep lagoon.

  This atoll, with its beautiful islands, beaches and a lagoon teeming with marine life, is a place with a famous name. It is Bikini, the setting for many American atomic tests between 1946 and 1958, including those of the first nuclear weapons. In July 1946, less than a year after Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 4,500 miles west of San Francisco, was the setting for Operation Crossroads, a massive military effort to assess the effects of the atomic bomb on warships. The atoll’s 167-person native population was evacuated. The fallout from those first blasts miraculously fell into the sea and did little to contaminate Bikini.

  My eyes are not drawn to the beauty of this tropical paradise, however. Abruptly, the rim of the atoll is interrupted by a dark blue hole. Nearly a mile across, it is the site of a vanished islet. It is also the site where in March 1954, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever was detonated on the surface of the earth by the United States. In an instant, an atomic bomb capable of incinerating an entire city vaporized the islet and cracked the reef. The pulverized coral and sand ejected by the 15-megaton blast traveled high up into the atmosphere, raining down as atomic fallout over thousands of square miles of ocean, nearby islands and ships at sea. Conducted in the name of science, the blast, code-named Castle Bravo, was a Cold War test of America’s new hydrogen bomb. It killed and sickened Pacific islanders, the crew of a Japanese fishing ironically named Lucky Dragon and left behind a horrific legacy.

  B
ikini is now a deadly place, its abandoned shores littered with rusting machinery and cables, its islands covered by thick concrete bunkers and regimented rows of decaying houses and replanted palm trees intended for the returning Bikinians, who are known as the “nuclear nomads” of the Pacific. Craters from nuclear blasts pock the bottom of Bikini’s lagoon. Inside the shallow dish of one of those craters rests the sunken fleet of Operation Crossroads. Like the debris on the islands and along the shores of the atoll, the sunken ships of Bikini are an archeological legacy of the beginning of the nuclear age. Our National Park Service team, about to land on the atoll, will be the first to survey this ghost fleet now that the radioactivity has diminished to a safe level. Looking down at the crater made by Castle Bravo, we all silently cross ourselves and wonder just what we will find and what other legacies may lurk in the water and the ships.

  OPERATION CROSSROADS

  Operation Crossroads was the result of months of inter-service rivalry and a postwar scramble to assess the military potentials and perils of the atomic bomb. The New York Herald Tribune, in a post-Hiroshima editorial, commented: “The victory or defeat of armies, the fate of nations, the rise and fall of empires are all alike, in any long perspective only the ripples on the surface of history; but the unpredictable unlocking of the inconceivable energy of the atom would stir history itself to its deepest depths.” Editorials suggesting that the advent of the atom bomb had forever changed warfare alarmed military officers, who did not like reading that “it should make an end of marching, rolling, and even flying armies, and turn most of our battleships into potential scrap.” The atomic tests at Bikini would test the truth of that argument.

  The tests were appealing for more than technical reasons. They would demonstrate to the world, particularly the Soviet Union, the power and wealth of the United States. In April 1946, Admiral William H. Blandy, commander of the joint Army-Navy task force conducting the tests, told the nation in a live radio broadcast that the upcoming tests would “help us to be what the world expects our great, non-aggressive and peace-loving country to be — the leader of those nations which seek nothing but a just and lasting peace.” More bluntly, commentator Raymond Gram Swing stated that Operation Crossroads, “the first of the atomic era war games … is a notice served on the world that we have the power and intend to be heeded.”

  The decision to use the atomic bomb test to destroy ships of the once-feared Imperial Japanese Navy would also emphasize America as the principal victor in the war. One newspaper account, accompanied by an Associated Press photograph of twenty-four battered-looking destroyers and submarines, crowed: “Trapped Remnants of Jap Fleet Face Destruction in United States Navy Atom-Bomb Tests.” The use of Japanese warships as atomic targets was a “symbolic killing” with the same weapon that had forced Japan’s capitulation. The battleship Nagato particularly fulfilled that role. The onetime flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the scene of operational planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nagato had been “captured” as a bombed-out derelict on Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The capture, an event staged by military press officers, symbolized “the complete and final surrender of the Imperial Japanese Navy.” Sinking the same battleship with an atomic bomb would ritually “destroy” the Imperial Japanese Navy in a more dramatic manner than prosaic scrapping or scuttling at sea. The battleship’s intended fate was so important that, at Bikini, American support vessels were moored alongside Nagato since “there was some danger that the captured Japanese ships … might actually sink… if they were left unattended.”

  At the same time, military planners wanted to show that the United States Navy would survive in the coming nuclear age. According to Admiral Blandy, testing the bomb on warships would improve the Navy: “We want ships that are tough, even when threatened by atomic bombs; we want to keep the ships afloat, propellers turning, guns firing; we want to protect the crews so that, if fighting is necessary, they can fight well today and return home unharmed tomorrow.”

  To further test the effects of the bomb, the military loaded twenty-two of the target ships with fuel and ammunition as well as 220 tons of equipment: tanks, tractors and airplanes; guns, mortars and ammunition; radios, fire extinguishers and telephones; gas masks, watches and uniforms; canned food and frozen meat. They also placed sixty-nine target airplanes on the ships and moored two seaplanes in the water near them.

  The first test took place on July 1, 1946. The B-29 Dave’s Dream dropped a 20-kiloton plutonium bomb on the target fleet, slightly to starboard of the bow of the attack transport Gilliam. Caught in the explosion’s incandescent fireball and battered down into the water by the shock wave, Gilliam, “badly ruptured, crumpled, and twisted almost beyond recognition,” sank in seventy-nine seconds. The blast swept the nearby transport Carlisle 150 feet to one side and nearly wiped away the superstructure and masts. Carlisle began to burn and sank in thirty minutes. The destroyer Anderson, hit hard by the blast, burst into flames when her ammunition exploded. Burning fiercely, Anderson capsized to port and sank by the stern within seven minutes. The destroyer Lamson, its hull torn open, sank twelve minutes after the blast. The Japanese cruiser Sakawa, badly battered, caught on fire and sank the following day.

  The second test took place three weeks later. The Navy remoored the target ships around a bomb lowered 90 feet below the surface. When the underwater atomic bomb erupted at 8:34 on the morning of July 25, a huge mass of steam and water mounded up into a “spray dome” that climbed at a rate of 2,500 feet per second and formed a 975-foot thick column. Its core was a nearly hollow void of superheated steam that rose faster than the more solid 300-foot thick water sides, climbing 11,000 feet per second and acting as a chimney for the hot gases of the fireball. The gases, mixed with excavated lagoon bottom and radioactive materials, formed a mushroom cloud atop the column. The upward blast crushed, capsized and sank the battleship Arkansas in less than a second.

  The blast also created “atomic tidal waves.” The first wave, a 94-foot wall of radioactive water, lifted and crashed into the aircraft carrier Saratoga with such force that it twisted the hull. The falling water also partially smashed the flight deck, and Saratoga sank within seven and a half hours. Nagato, its hull broken open, sank two days later. Beneath the water, the immense pressure of the bomb’s burst crushed three submarines that settled onto the seabed, leaking air bubbles and oil.

  On the surface, a boiling cloud of radioactive water and steam penetrated the surviving ships. Radioactive material adhered to wooden decks, paint, rust and grease. For weeks after the tests, the Navy tried to wash off the fallout with water and lye, sending crews aboard the contaminated ships to scrub off paint, rust and scale with long-handled brushes, holystones and any other “available means.” In August, worried about radiation, Admiral Blandy cancelled plans for a third test and gave orders to sink badly damaged ships. As Operation Crossroads steamed away from Bikini, it towed the battered, irradiated fleet of targets to nearby Kwajalein, and then to Pearl Harbor, Bremerton in Washington, and Hunter’s Point and Mare Island in California. There, sailors stripped the hulks of ammunition and left them to rust.

  Starting in 1948, the Navy began taking the Crossroads target ships to sea and sinking them. The explanation was that the sinkings were part of training exercises and tests of new weapons. That year, Dr. David Bradley, M.D., a radiological safety monitor at Bikini, published his journal of the tests in a book titled No Place to Hide. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for ten weeks. No Place to Hide was a forceful book that told the “real” message of Bikini. According to Bradley, Operation Crossroads, “hastily planned and hastily carried out… may have only sketched in gross outlines… the real problem; nevertheless, these outlines show pretty clearly the shadow of the colossus which looms behind tomorrow.” Bradley’s metaphor was the target ships rusting at Kwajalein, many of them seemingly undamaged but “nevertheless dying of a malignant disease for which there is no help.”

  The “cu
re,” being enacted as Bradley’s book was printed, was to sink the contaminated ships. In February 1949, Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson called the tests a “major naval disaster.” He reported that “of the 73 ships involved in the Bikini tests, more than 61 were sunk or destroyed. This is an enormous loss from only two bombs.” Pearson, like Bradley, pointed to what he viewed as a military effort to keep the true lesson of Operation Crossroads — the virtual destruction of the target fleet by radioactivity — from being fully apprehended by the public. Although the story had ultimately leaked out, it was downplayed by the government, and the credibility and patriotism of those who spoke out was questioned.

  DIVING THE GHOST FLEET

  I traveled to Bikini as part of Dan Lenihan’s National Park Service team in 1989 and 1990. Lenihan, Larry Nordby, Larry Murphy, Jerry Livingston and I were the first to visit most of the wrecks since Operation Crossroads, and we were undertaking the survey at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Bikini Council. The Bikinians, in their exile on the remote island of Kili, far away from their contaminated homeland, were eager to work with the Department of Energy to see if the sunken “swords” could be transformed into tourism plowshares. The National Park Service had the government’s only team of diving archeologists at the time, and our park-oriented approach was not at odds with tourism. Since I was the NPS maritime historian, I easily wrangled my way onto Dan’s crew. As well, my proximity to the National Archives and my love of research meant that I could do advance work to learn about the history of the ships and the tests, and thus help the team to figure out just what we would be seeing in the blue depths of Bikini lagoon.