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

by Daniel Lenihan

  Check time, check depth, check position of divers—all well. Murphy slowed for a shot too long; I rapped my tank once. He glanced, saw me spin my index finger in a “keep rollin’ ” gesture, proceeded—all well. Check time, check depth, one rap of knife, motioned Delgado “up three feet”—all well. Check time, two minutes to turnaround but we were almost at the stern so we continued.

  When we reached the stern of the sub, I motioned Murphy and Delgado to check air and switch sides. As planned, Nordby and Livingston reversed directions but stayed on the same side they had started on. The logic was that the illustrators needed more time on each side to draw than the others for photo and video acquisition.

  The benefits of this approach were dramatic. As long as I remained steady at the helm, the time divers usually spent worrying about their buddies—elapsed time, pacing, and depth variation—was greatly diminished. The results were sweet. We arrived back at the decompression stop in twenty-nine minutes. We had in hand: two rolls of film, a twenty-minute narrated video pan, and a sketched oblique perspective of both sides of the vessel. We used the technique on two more sites at Bikini, and it worked well in all cases. Besides information for the report we had a new word for the arcane SCRU vocabulary: Blitz.

  Except for the Blitz dives, Larry and Jerry continued mapping Saratoga, as Murphy, Delgado, and I completed assessment dives on other vessels, including Nagato. Eventually, it would be dives on this ship that stirred the deepest feelings on my part. They took place a year later when we completed our survey of Bikini.

  In 1990, we returned to finish our work, much of the report was written, and the ABC television people thought they had the makings of a great documentary, so they funded much of the operation. This time, National Geographic magazine writer John Eliot and photographer Bill Curtsinger were added to the brew. On this expedition, ABC television had changed producers—ABC Kane Productions had relegated Lee McEachern to an assistant role. From my point of view this was a mistake—the replacement producer had none of Lee’s savvy with the people or appreciation of the nuances of the underwater park story at Bikini that to me seemed so compelling.

  His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Ship, Nagato had enforced the Japanese vison of a new Pacific. The flagship of the Japanese Navy at the time of the raid on Pearl Harbor—this is where Admiral Yamamoto sat out the attack, waiting word from the strike force far to the east.

  We decided to do a modified Blitz on the Nagato’s deck and guns, which were probably crunched under the weight of the overturned monster in 180 feet of water. The same Blitz rules would apply, including the shoulder strobes, which were even more important now that four others from the TV team would be joining us in the water. We couldn’t swim the centerline, but I would still steer the dive and monitor the progress as on the Pilotfish. We wouldn’t have agreed to so many people in the water at once, except for the fact that Nick Caloyianis would be leading the ABC underwater camera team and we knew from past experience he was a highly competent diver. Also we had the strobes. As long as I could monitor the well-being of my four divers, distinguishable by their flashers, the dive would continue. If confusion became too great under the ship, we would call the dive short.

  As we passed beneath the upturned edge of the ship, the massive sixteen-inch-muzzles stared us in the face. Armor-piercing projectiles designed for these guns were modified into the bombs used to wreak havoc at Pearl Harbor. I thought of the USS Arizona and the time I had spent swimming around her wreckage. Not at all like the feeling of Nagato, for death is tangible on the Arizona: 1,177 lives cut short before their time. The Arizona lies heavy on the harbor bottom, weighed down with silt, and the bones and crushed dreams of nineteen-year-olds.

  The Nagato is different. It lies upside down, smashed with an atomic fist; no lives lost because it was just an “experiment.” They took the last capital ship of the Japanese Imperial Navy , the enforcer of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and made sure it was dead. Most of the other ships at Bikini were present to carry out a test of atomic warfare at sea. Journalists who accompanied the sailors to Operation Crossroads reported battle-hardened veterans weeping as the Saratoga sank beneath the quiet waters of the lagoon. They spat on the water over Nagato. The memory of USS Arizona was too fresh in these men’s minds for any thought of forgiveness; they wanted Nagato in hell—a twenty-kiloton flash granted them their wish.

  The sixteen-inch muzzles still have tampions in them. I rolled over on my back and sculled my fins, gently propelling myself underneath the ship but far enough off the sediment to keep from stirring up a cloud of silt. We were as far from the surface as an eighteen-story building is high, where nitrogen narcosis makes strong impressions even stronger.

  Lacy white whip coral strung down from the deck like thousands of long, soft pipe cleaners. The light in my hand played over these strands bringing out their crystal whiteness and appealing texture. It is remarkable the colors artificial lights can elicit in a deep-water environment. Almost all surface light is filtered out at these depths so the eye normally sees only blues and grays. It would be similar to watching a black-and-white TV and having it suddenly change to Technicolor. A captivating scene in fifty feet of water, it is positively enrapturing at one hundred-eighty feet.

  Larry Murphy came behind me, flashing the strobe on a still camera. One was in his hand, another hung from his waist straps. Larry used these same cameras on USS Arizona years before. He moved with his usual grace, thousands of hours of diving experience evident in his parsimonious use of energy; almost imperceptible twitches of his fins propelled him fluidly under the ship.

  Suddenly we were both bathed in light as the ABC camera team found us. I could tell they were surprised how striking the scene was they had happened upon. I heard the whirring of $40,000 worth of sixteen-mm camera over my left ear. It’s a strange feeling, being alone with your thoughts as several million people look over your shoulder.

  I had assumed the superstructure, or lighter upper works, would be all collapsed under the tremendous weight of the warship, but a stirring sight greeted us. On the periphery of my vision, Murphy’s strong, even fin kicks slowed, and he no longer worked the film advance of his camera. He had seen it too. The bridge of the Nagato had somehow escaped destruction and lay intact on the bottom of the lagoon, miraculously preserved from the crushing weight of the hull.

  The film crew was confused because we had stopped swimming and were staring into the gloom ahead of us. They were yet to understand the significance of the twisted metal with the vertical rectangular ports. Then Nick realized what we’d found. He began a staccato kick of his fins, holding the camera with one arm extended and motioning wildly with the other to his light men.

  “Tora, Tora, Tora.” This is where Yamamoto stood when the coded message transmitted by flight commander Mitsuo Fuchida reached him in Japan’s Inland Sea, thousands of miles from its origin in Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Tiger, Tiger, Tiger: The fleet is at anchor in Pearl Harbor, surprise is achieved, attack to begin.

  The ABC producer wanted to use excerpts from our small video camera in his film to show the diver’s “point of view.” Jim Delgado, wearing the mask with microphone to video, didn’t disappoint him. “Unbelievable,” he yelled on seeing the bridge. I could hear his excited voice, muted through eighteen inches or so of water.

  Shipwrecks always have much to tell us as artifacts, but they can also be shrines to the past that focus us spatially and temporally. To us, the Nagato was more than a source of archeological information, it was the very fabric of the past, of a pivotal moment in history . Part of what we are came to be on the bridge of this ship fifty years ago.

  Shucking our gear off in the boat we were still buzzed from what we’d just seen. “Dives like this make me remember why I’m in this business,” Murphy murmured. We talked about how powerful an experience it will be for people lucky enough to see the place.

  “Why’s that, Dan?” The producer/cameraman turned his in
fernal machine back on, but this time I was up for it and my standard camera shyness dissolved. During the impromptu interview, I expressed my feelings about the remarkable nature of the monuments we had just visited under the sea. Creating opportunities for people to experience submerged history in the raw: “That’s what excites me, that’s what parks are about . . . it’s what we’re about.” I expanded on this by developing a vision of sport divers visiting the sites and perhaps a tourist submarine for nondivers.

  I had already come to a conclusion about what I was going to write in the eagerly awaited “recommendations” section of our monograph. The ships were spectacular visually and historically. Even considering how remote they were, they would eventually attract the most devoted of the world’s advanced divers. There was no credible evidence that they presented any problem to the health and safety of visitors due to radioactivity. The live ordnance on the ships did present a potential danger to the incorrigibly stupid. It was easily avoided by leaving the stuff alone. The real risks at Bikini, in my opinion, were the normal ones associated with remote, deep diving. Our report, with a foreword by the Secretary of the Interior, recommended treatment of the ships in a manner consistent with their being historic resources in a park: Visit, enjoy, and leave unspoiled for others.

  That night we talked about what really went on at Bikini in 1946. Why did the U.S. military really blow these ships up? Robert Oppenheimer, the orchestrator of the Manhattan Project that built the bomb in our home state of New Mexico, had drily opined that if you drop an atomic bomb on ships, the ships will sink—an indication of his opinion of the Crossroads Project.

  Much was learned at Bikini, despite Oppenheimer’s skepticism, about what happens to ships when they are nuked. For example, they don’t all sink. In fact, only a small percentage sank after two tests, but they sure went through hell. Radiation was discovered to be a more complex problem to deal with than expected and revelations about its effects would continue for decades. But few modern-day miscalculations will ever rival the spectacle of Navy sailors a few hours after the blasts at Bikini swabbing down the decks of the Saratoga in short-sleeve shirts. They were “cleaning” the ship of radiation.

  Whatever other reasons there were for the tests, we figured the target audience was really Moscow. The Able and Baker blasts, the first shots in the Cold War, were a sort of ritual combat in which goats and pigs were killed instead of men. The atomic bomb was replicated by the Russians in 1949 as were the hydrogen bombs tested in Bikini in the early 1950s.

  And why not? Ritual combat is a time-honored mammalian tradition, as I recalled discussing in introductory anthropology classes I taught at Florida State. Lions and wolves rarely fight to the death when it’s clear they can easily cause irreparable damage to one another. As mammalian predators maneuver for territory, they shove and display their teeth to convince the other how awful will be the outcome if their domain has to be defended. For decades the United States and the Soviet Union bared their technological fangs at each other—Operation Crossroads was the first serious snarl.

  Through the earpieces of my Walkman, the Drifters sang of “Magic Moments” against the steady drone of the Air Micronesia jet whisking me back to the desert Southwest. I tried to sort through a jumble of emotions, as reefs in the lagoon below asserted themselves in brilliant greens and turquoise—bold slashes in a navy-blue ocean.

  We had seen the destruction of great warships by a scientific trick I really couldn’t comprehend. Splitting atoms. Fission bombs, nukes. Toys! These things that sunk and irradiated the fleet at Crossroads were toys compared to what came later. I thought of the Bravo crater from the 1954 thermonuclear blast that became the largest detonation ever set off by America. It wasn’t intended that way, but it was at least 300 percent bigger than anticipated—a fifteen megaton monster that vaporized three small islands and doused radioactive fallout over a good part of the Marshalls.

  One pop of fifteen megatons equals fifteen million tons of TNT, more than all the explosive detonations of all the wars in history compressed into a second. The crater was still visible from the small planes we took from Bikini to Kwajalein.

  The Bikini flag is a variation of the American stars and stripes. It has three stars provocatively separated from the others in the upper right corner, a memorial to the islets that disappeared in a mushroom cloud. This symbolizes the loss of land, a precious commodity in Micronesia .

  “Men otemjej rej ilo bein anij” is inscribed along the lower half of the flag. These were the words spoken by the Bikinian leader when asked if his people (all 150 of them) would agree to leave their homes to accommodate the Crossroads tests. The tests were, after all, for the “ultimate good of mankind.” The English translation of the man’s response after looking around him at the assembled military might of the most powerful nation on earth was “All things are in God’s hands.”

  A few weeks after my return I was driving to my Santa Fe office in the early morning. In the distance were the flickering lights of White Rock, the bedroom community for Los Alamos where the Crossroads bombs were born. My next-door neighbor was picketing the entrance of our subdivision. Dressed in attire reminiscent of lab technicians’ protective clothing, she waved a sign, “WIPP Route,” her way of reminding her neighbors that the trucks carrying nuclear waste to the new Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad were going to drive right past our homes.

  Disposing of radioactive waste was and is a “hot” issue in my hometown. Fear and anger about the subject are intense. I waved to her and mouthed some words through the closed window. She nodded as if in comprehension and waved back, although I don’t think she really understood what I’d said: “Men otemjej rej ilo bein anij.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE ALEUTIAN AFFAIR

  I felt the Aleutian cold reach through my Thinsulate and down garments right into my bone marrow, even in early September. As Larry Murphy and I conversed on the fantail, rolling North Pacific swells made the deck of the Navy salvage ship seesaw beneath our feet. We spoke in loud voices to overpower the noise of the engines and, in unconscious synch, sidestepped a few feet to the right, then the left, to match the ship’s roll.

  Puffs of breath visibly punctuating his words in the cold, Larry briefed me on what had transpired so far on this expedition to locate and document remains of the only fighting on North American soil during World War II. We were heading for Kiska, hoping to finish survey work there, and then we were to move on briefly to Attu, at the very western end of the chain.

  Larry had hitched a ride up to Alaska from Pearl Harbor on the USS Safeguard, a 250-foot Navy rescue/salvage ship. It was September of 1989. We were on the way back from Bikini, when we parted in Hawaii: he to head north and get the survey started, while I headed back to Santa Fe for a few days with family before flying up to join him in Adak.

  In 1942, the occupation of these two islands, Kiska and Attu, off the coast of Alaska by the Japanese was seen as an ominous development by the American public.

  Many now feel the Japanese assault on Alaska was a diversion to distract the American Pacific Fleet from the real focus of the Japanese Navy’s next major offensive: Midway. The Imperial Navy had been riding high since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Their victories in the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Burma, the battle of the Coral Sea, and the sinking of the two largest British warships in the Pacific off Indochina—all made it easy enough to believe that the destiny of East Asia would lie under a rising sun. Indeed, in the spring of 1942, a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere under the aegis of Japan seemed an attainable dream, with Hawaii and the Western Aleutians not necessarily excluded from this vision.

  Six months of glory and the prospect of a final showdown with the U.S. Navy made for heady moments, a sense of purpose, and belonging for a generation of Japanese who felt their nation was finally coming into its own. The more cautious among their leaders were, however, driven by a different force, the knowledge that anything less than quick destruc
tion of the U.S. Pacific fleet would spell eventual disaster for Japan.

  Admiral Isokuro Yamamoto had spent enough time in America to understand the overwhelming industrial capability of the United States and to be less than certain of the prevailing conviction in Japanese military circles that Americans lacked the will to fight. A particularly disquieting event had occurred during these months of headlong victory, which gave him additional pause in this regard. On April 18, 1942, about lunchtime, sixteen American B-25 bombers appeared, seemingly from nowhere, and bombed Tokyo. Although the tactical effect of the “Doolittle raid” was negligible, it was symbolically stunning. It was a daring attack, difficult to reconcile with a spineless enemy.

  Yamamoto and his staff knew that the twin-engine B-25s were long-range, land-based bombers; where did they come from? It would be weeks before the Japanese became fully convinced of the truth—that the raiders had been specially trained to fly these planes from an aircraft carrier and that the USS Hornet was their origin. Not being clear where these planes came from raised the frightening possibility: that the United States had managed to build long-range bomber bases in the Aleutians. Suddenly, scant weeks before the Japanese made the curious decision to divide their forces between Midway and Alaska, the Doolittle raiders had given the Japanese additional reason to strike north besides simply presenting a diversion for their assault to the south.

  Regardless of motive, the Aleutian campaign became one of the most compelling events in American military history. It was the first time enemy troops had occupied U.S. soil in North America since the War of 1812, so when the drumroll began to evict the invaders, it derived as much from national pride as strategic decision making.

  The NPS divers aboard the ship included Larry, Mike Eng (SCRU law enforcement specialist who had replaced Ken Vrana), Jay Wells (formerly of Isle Royale, now chief ranger at Wrangell St. Elias in Alaska), and me. Susan Morton, a land archeologist from our Alaska Office, and representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Air Force rounded out the primarily Navy complement of shipboard personnel. The Safeguard had a crew of approximately eighty men and women.