John Schettler - Lions at Dawn

They had initially planned to return to Japan via Manila, but Harada thought that route would expose them to far too many curious eyes, so he requested an alternate route, well out into the Pacific. They would meet with an oiler, and then proceed home.

“Six hours, sir. That was Bikini Atoll on Otani’s screen a few hours ago. We’re due west now and should be at Eniwetok by noon at this speed.”

“Then we fuel up and take a breather. Anyone want to stretch their legs? We’re meeting the Kazahaya right off Runit Island. What’s the story on that ship?” He looked at Fukada.

“First in its class, a new oiler laid down in September of 1941. It just launched this month, so this is their maiden voyage. In fact, it’s the only ship in its class, hull 304. Hull 306 was converted to a hybrid Tanker/Carrier. All the others were cancelled. This one was sunk in October of this year by a couple US subs.”

“No use mentioning that when we meet their Captain,” said Harada.

“Agreed,” said Fukada. “Though I think we should have warned Yamamoto about what might happen this April—Operation Vengeance. That was the successful American attack on Yamamoto’s plane in the Solomons.”

“You think that will happen?”

“Who can say? We convinced them to change their code, but the American Intel effort was very good. If they break this one, then they might get wind of Yamamoto’s itinerary in the Solomons.”

“Assuming he has one,” said Harada, unconvinced. “No, I think the deck is well shuffled here. We might rely on your birth and death stats as the ships are concerned, except for that lot we were screening down south. I never heard of most of those ships.”

“Me neither. They were all new,” said Fukada. “This war has more than a few surprises.”

“Right,” said Harada. “Including us.”

“Eniwetok…” Fukada was tapping a pad device now. “Yes… This was where the US tested a number of its nukes after the war in the early 1950s. In fact, they popped off nearly 80 detonations here, including Ivy Mike, the very first H-bomb test. That was the biggest detonation in this region, over 15 megatons, and it blew the islet of Elugelab right off the map. It no longer exists in our day, but we can see it here in a few hours. How’s that for a good shore leave destination? The island Ivy Mike ate for breakfast in 1952.”

The massive Eniwetok Lagoon stretched in a wide circle of coral reefs washed by white foam and pristine aquamarine and cobalt blue seas, about 20 miles wide and 25 miles long. The main island with installations and the principle airfield was in the south, on the eastern edge of the widest entrance to the lagoon. The island Fukada had fingered, Elugelab, was once in the far north, one of many that would vanish over the decades.

During the war, the Japanese navy would make the atoll a busy refueling base, and after they took it, the Americans used it as a forward base to stage hundreds of ships in the lagoon, nearly 500 ships there on any given day by mid-1944.

Takami made its rendezvous with Kazahaya , and the crews set about the process of transferring fuel oil. As usual, they could see the crewmen on the oiler gawking at their strange looking ship, but Harada had decided to limit communications to lamp or flag signals, and radio chatter. As they hovered off Runit Island, Fukada was out on the weather deck with his field glasses, searching the northern segment.

“What’s got your attention?” asked Harada.

“Just looking for the spot where they built that big concrete dome,” said Fukada. “I think it was right there,” he pointed. “In 1958 the Cactus ground burst test blasted a 350 foot crater into that spot. The ground was so radioactive that they poured 30 feet of cement over it in a massive dome. You can see it on Google Earth. It looks just like a big flying saucer sitting on the island. Locals came to call it the eye of the swordfish after they eventually returned. That spit of land was the blade of that fish, and the island its body. The dome looked like a big fisheye.”

“Very colorful,” said Harada. “Well, we’re topped off and ready to move. We’ll be escorting that oiler back to Yokohama, but let’s go see your phantom island first.”

In 2021 it was just a deep blue hole in the sea, two kilometers wide, one of many blasted into the reefs and islands that surrounded the atoll. Now, as Takami eased in close, it was a small green islet covered with a lush stand of palm trees. It was hard to believe that the entire island had been completely vaporized by the massive fireball and shock wave of Ivy Mike.

The project had been born as America’s answer to the “First Lightning” detonation by the Soviet Union, announcing to the world that the U.S. was no longer the only superpower that possessed these terrible weapons. Decades later, that arms race would make an end of both nations, but no one knew that just then, though they could feel the impending shadow of the event growing in the deepening gloom of relations between Putin’s Russia and the West.

It would be a test of two weapons, with big Mike to be the main event, followed two weeks later by a much smaller device, the “King” shot, which would only be 25 times as big as “Fat Man” at Nagasaki. King was a T “Super Oralloy Bomb,” abbreviated S.O.B. by the technicians, who came to call it the “Little Son-of-a-Bitch.” If it had been dropped on downtown San Francisco, it would have obliterated the heart of the city, killing 225,000 people instantly and injuring over 365,000 more. The thermal radiation from that blast would have covered the entire peninsula, coast to coast, singed the Golden Gate, and burnt the pastoral shores of Sausalito, encompassing all of Treasure Island in the East Bay.

The little King’s big brother was much larger. If big Mike had gone off over the financial district in San Francisco, the air blast radius alone would have extended out as far as King’s thermal radiation. Everything as far north as San Rafael would burn in the thermal radiation, along with everything to the east, including all of Oakland, Richmond, and the Berkeley Hills. The terrible heat would just be starting to dissipate when it reached Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill. The fallout from that blast would be heavy over Sacramento, according to prevailing winds, reaching all the way to Reno Nevada with radiation between 100 and 1000 Rads per hour. 782,000 would have died instantly, and another 650,000 would be severely burned and injured. A weapon like Ivy Mike used in the 21st Century would literally be hell on earth wherever it fell.

One of the first men to know the massive hydrogen bomb had detonated successfully was Edward Teller, at the Berkeley facility in California. The bomb was his brainchild, using a special deuterium fuel within a uranium tamper. It would go off with a one-two punch, a smaller fission bomb exploding in the nose to compress the deuterium and uranium fuel in the body of the bomb. In effect, Teller was using the power of a nuclear fission explosion as his hammer to pound the fuel that would yield a hydrogen explosion. It was this design, perfected by Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, that would be used for most warheads wanting some real clout.

Had it gone off in San Francisco in 1952, Teller would not have survived it at his lab in Berkeley. Instead, it would detonate over that lonely isolated coral atoll in the Pacific, right where Captain Harada and Fukada were admiring the little island it vaporized. On All Hallows Eve, in 1952, it sat there in its 82 ton cylindrical cryostat thermos, called ‘the sausage’ by the technicians, a mindless supercritical mass waiting to live in the fire of that hydrogen explosion. When it went off, it was 500 times more powerful than either Fat Man or Little Boy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.