Transcription
Have you ever wondered why the USS Arkansas battleship is still sitting on the bottom of Bikini Lagoon? I do not mean how it got there. If you are watching this video, you probably already know that. What I want to know is why is it still there? The wreck lies at about 180 ft of water. Deep, but not unreachable. Divers still visit it today. So, why is nobody returned in 80 years to salvage it?
As it turns out, the involves radioactivity, the remoteness of Bikini Atoll, and a wreck so badly damaged by a nuclear bomb that what remains barely resembles the ship that went in. If you are unfamiliar with how the Arkansas got there, the battleship was used as a target in the nuclear weapons tests known as Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The second bomb, an underwater detonation, exploded so close that the witnesses said ship was crushed as if by a tremendous hammer blow from below. The Arkansas sank within minutes. It has sat on the bottom of Bikini Lagoon ever since.
Commissioned in September 1912, the battleship Arkansas served in both World Wars, something very few American warships can claim. During the First World War, the Arkansas operated with the British Grand Fleet in the North Sea. In the years that followed, the Arkansas spent much of her time as a convoy escort and training ship. By 1941, she was nearly 30 years old and escorting Atlantic convoys, the oldest battleship in active service in the US Navy.
Her real combat moment came on June 6th, 1944, D-Day. The Arkansas took up a position about 4,000 yd off Omaha Beach in the early hours of the morning. At 5:52, the battleship's guns opened fire, the first major combat bombardment of her career. The Arkansas unleashed dozens of 12-in rounds at German fortifications above the beach that morning. German shore batteries at Cherbourg later straddled the Arkansas with return fire, but scored no hits.
From Normandy, the Arkansas moved to support the invasion of Southern France, then transferred to the Pacific for the final push against Japan. The battleship bombarded Japanese positions at Iwo Jima, then spent 46 days continuously firing at Okinawa while fighting off kamikaze attacks. At the end of the war, the Arkansas ferried thousands of American troops home as part of Operation Magic Carpet.
By 1946, the Arkansas was 33 years old, ancient by warship standards. Rather than scrap the old battleship, the Navy sent it to Bikini Atoll along with 94 other vessels to be used as targets in Operation Crossroads. These were the first nuclear weapons tests to be publicly announced beforehand, and they were watched by an invited audience, hundreds of reporters, politicians, and international observers, along with 42,000 military and scientific personnel. The world was watching.
The bombs used in Operation Crossroads were identical in design and yield to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Each one produced 23 kilotons of explosive force. The first test, called Able, was an air burst on July the 1st, 1946. The bomb was dropped from a B-29 bomber, and it actually missed its intended target ship by nearly half a mile. Even so, five ships sank. The Arkansas survived. The battleship took significant shock damage to her masts and upper works, but her hull and armored turrets held. Within a day, crews could reboard most of the surviving ships for inspection. The Arkansas was battered, but still there.
For the second test, called Baker, on July the 25th, the Arkansas was positioned just 250 yd from the epicenter of an underwater nuclear detonation. That is about the length of two and a half football pitches from a nuclear bomb going off beneath the surface. When the weapon detonated 90 ft below the water, the shockwave hit the battleship's hull directly, unattenuated by air, and transmitted straight through the water into steel. Witnesses described the Arkansas as appearing to be crushed by a tremendous hammer blow from below. The hull plating on the starboard side failed almost instantly. The battleship capsized and was driven down into the shallow bottom by the enormous column of water falling back after the blast. The Arkansas sank within minutes.
This is the bit that got me when I was researching this. In the famous photographs taken of the Baker test, you can see the enormous column of water rising above the fleet. Ships visible on either side of it are blown sideways by the blast. In one of those photographs, there is just a dark mark where the USS Arkansas was. Not the ship, just a mark where it used to be.
When divers eventually got down to survey the wreck, what they found tells you everything about why nobody has ever tried to salvage it. The Arkansas is lying upside down at 180 ft. The hull armor was 11 in thick in places, and the Baker blast left indentations up to 6 ft deep pressed into that armor between the hull beams. The superstructure, the entire upper portion of the battleship, has never been found. It is most likely pounded into the coral silt underneath the inverted hull. The 12-in gun turrets broke free when the ship rolled over, and are now lying separately on the lagoon floor. The only way for divers to get inside the wreck at all is through a tight squeeze in the port side casemate. What remains is essentially the inverted bottom of a severely deformed hull sitting in the sand.
Now, unlike the Prince Eugen, which had a formal feasibility study done by the US Navy in 1974 that calculated salvage costs against scrap value, I have not been able to find any similar study ever commissioned for the Arkansas. And when you look at the condition of the wreck, that is not surprising. The Prince Eugen was inverted, but largely intact. The Arkansas is inverted and severely deformed by a nuclear blast at point-blank range. The superstructure is gone. The turrets are scattered. There's very little left to salvage in any conventional sense.
The reasons the Arkansas is still there follow the same patterns as the other Bikini wrecks. The atoll is thousands of miles from anywhere with salvage or ship-breaking equipment. Everything needed to attempt any recovery operation would have to be shipped across the Pacific. The Baker test contaminated every ship in the fleet with radioactive material, and the official report from 1947 concluded that removal of radioactive contamination from the target vessels could not be accomplished successfully. In the years immediately after the tests, no one was going near these wrecks. The remoteness, the cost, and the radioactivity question meant no one ever seriously pursued a salvage operation.
And there is one more factor. The Marshall Islands owns the wrecks in Bikini Lagoon, and the entire atoll was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. The Arkansas has become a diving attraction, one of the most technically demanding wreck dives in the world given its depth and location. Divers descend past the inverted hull, past the deep indentations pressed into the armor plate by the nuclear blast, past the scattered debris of a ship that was at the center of an atomic explosion. The 12-in guns lie on the lagoon floor pointing in directions the ship's designers never intended.
Lying just a few miles away in the same lagoon is the Japanese battleship Nagato, the flagship of Admiral Yamamoto from which the Pearl Harbor attack was planned. Both battleships, one American and one Japanese, ended up at the bottom of the same remote Pacific Lagoon after the same nuclear tests. There is something about that fact that is hard to shake. The Marshall Islands is not going to allow anyone to break that up for scrap. It never made commercial sense, and now it is too historic to touch.
The Arkansas is still there because it was too radioactive to approach immediately after it sank. It was too remote and too expensive to justify salvage. It was too damaged to be worth salvaging even if someone tried. And now it is historically important, so it must be left undisturbed. This battleship opened fire for the first time on D-Day. It fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It survived one nuclear bomb, then went down within minutes after a second nuclear bomb detonated 250 yd away. It has rested on the bottom of a remote Pacific Lagoon ever since.