Transcription
There's an aircraft carrier sitting on the bottom of a lagoon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She's been there since 1946. She's 888 ft long, which makes her one of the largest divable shipwrecks anywhere in the world. And she's sitting upright, which means when divers go down to visit her, they're swimming along a flight deck that looks almost like it could still launch planes. But nobody's coming to get her. She's just down there and she's probably going to stay down there.
Now, if you're watching this, you probably already know the basic story of how she ended up at Bikini Atoll. But what I want to know is why she's still there. Why after nearly 80 years has nobody tried to raise her, salvage her, do anything with her? And as it turns out, the answer is actually pretty interesting.
But first, we need to talk about what kind of ship USS Saratoga actually was. Because she wasn't just some old carrier they decided to get rid of. She had one of the most remarkable careers of any ship in the US Navy. USS Saratoga, her crew just called her Sara, was commissioned in 1927. And here's something most people don't know. She wasn't originally designed to be an aircraft carrier at all. She was laid down as a battle cruiser, a massive, heavily armored warship built for fleet battle. But then a treaty got in the way. After World War I, the major naval powers signed the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922, which put strict limits on how many big warships each country could have. The US Navy had two battle cruisers already under construction, Saratoga and her sister Lexington. And instead of scrapping them, they decided to convert them into aircraft carriers. So the guns came off, a flight deck went on, and Saratoga became one of America's first real fleet carriers.
She was enormous. At full load, she displaced around 43,000 tons and could do over 33 knots. She could carry 90 aircraft. She was fast, she was big, and because she still had the torpedo protection built into a battle cruiser hole, she was tough in a way that later carriers weren't. She spent the 1930s doing fleet exercises and generally being one of the most important ships in the US Navy. And when Pearl Harbor happened in December 1941, she was one of the very few carriers the US Navy had left. She was in San Diego that day, not Hawaii, which meant she survived the attack intact. That mattered a lot in the months that followed.
In January 1942, barely a month into the war, a Japanese submarine put a torpedo into her. She survived, got repaired, and came back. By August 1942, she was in the Solomon Islands supporting the Guadal Canal campaign. Her aircraft sank a Japanese carrier. Then she got torpedoed again. A second submarine hit her. She survived that, too. Got repaired, came back again. She spent most of 1943 as the only operational US carrier in the entire Pacific. Think about that for a second. At one point, Sara was basically holding down the entire Pacific Fleet carrier force on her own. She attacked the Japanese base at Rabul. She supported operation after operation across the Solomons and the Pacific.
Then in February 1945 came her worst day of the war. She was off Ewima providing air cover for the Marine landings. Six Japanese planes came in low under cloud cover. In 3 minutes, five of them hit her. Bombs punched through the flight deck. Kamicazi slammed into her hull and hangar bay. She was on fire. 123 of her crew were killed. She survived, put her fires out, recovered her aircraft, and sailed herself back to the West Coast for repairs. After that, the Navy decided she was too old for frontline combat. She spent the rest of the war training night fighter pilots at Pearl Harbor.
By the time Japan surrendered in 1945, Sara had seven battle stars, had survived two torpedo attacks, five bomb hits, and multiple kamicazi strikes. She'd been at Guadal Canal, the Solomons, Bugenville, the Marshall Islands, Ewima. She'd covered more of the Pacific War than almost any other ship. And then, because there were plenty of newer carriers around, nobody needed her anymore. So, after all of that, 18 years of service, two torpedo hits, five bombs, kamicazis, a full world war, you'd think she would have earned a quiet retirement. Here's what actually happened.
The US military had a problem in 1946. They had just used two atomic bombs to end the war with Japan and had no real idea what those weapons would do to a naval fleet. Not in theory, physically. What does a nuclear explosion actually do to ships? Do they sink immediately? Do they survive? Do they become useless from radiation? So, they came up with a plan. They gathered a fleet of around 80 ships at Bikini Atal in the remote Marshall Islands, loaded them as if they were active warships, and set off atomic bombs in the middle of them. The program was called Operation Crossroads. USS Saratoga was one of the target ships. She was loaded with fuel, aircraft, ammunition, bombs, everything a carrier would normally have on board. Then she was anchored in the lagoon and the test began.
The first bomb called Abel was dropped from a plane on July the 1st, 1946. Saratoga survived with minor damage, a small fire on her flight deck from the heat. That was about it. The second bomb called Baker went off on July the 25th. And this one was different. Baker was detonated underwater about 500 yd from Saratoga. The explosion sent a massive column of water into the air and created a wave that washed clean over the top of her flight deck. The force of it threw everything off the deck. Planes, equipment, all of it knocked loose. But that was not what sank her. What got her was the water pressure from the underwater blast. It hauled her hull in multiple places below the water line. Water started pouring in. The Navy tried to save her. Damage control teams worked on her for hours, but the radiation made it too dangerous to do much. You could not send men below to properly seal the flooding. 8 hours after the Baker test with her funnel collapsed across her deck from the force of the blast. Saratoga slipped under the surface of Bikini Lagoon. A reporter from the New York Times who watched her go down wrote that there were many in the observing fleet who had served on her and wanted to save her. But she died a lonely death with no man upon her decks. She settled on the bottom sitting upright exactly as a carrier should be. The flight deck landed at about 90 ft down. The bridge is accessible at around 40 ft. The bow sits in roughly 170 ft of water.
So, here's where it gets interesting because unlike a lot of wrecks, nobody ever seriously tried to raise Saratoga. And the reasons why are actually pretty straightforward once you understand what's down there. The most obvious problem is the radiation. After Baker, the entire target fleet was contaminated. That's what stopped salvage attempts immediately after she sank. You couldn't safely work on the wreck. The radiation issue faded over time and today the wreck is considered safe for diving. But in the years right after the sinking, it ruled out any recovery efforts.
By the time the radiation concern had faded, there was a new problem. Nobody really wanted a 1927 aircraft carrier. The Navy had moved on. By 1946, there were already plenty of modern Essex class carriers. Sara was obsolete before she even hit the bottom. There was no operational need to raise her. And then there's the practical side. Saratoga is sitting in about 170 ft of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the nearest shipyard. Raising a wreck that size, 43,000 tons. From that depth would have been an enormous engineering challenge, even in ideal conditions. And Bikini Atal is about as far from ideal conditions as you can get. There's no infrastructure there, no port facilities, no salvage equipment. Everything would have to be brought across the Pacific. The cost would be astronomical compared to any possible value from the metal.
On top of that, she went down loaded. There are bombs still on that wreck. Air drop torpedoes, depth charges, rockets, 5-in gun ammunition. It's all still down there, scattered around the wreck and the lagoon floor. Divers visit the wreck and find bombs sitting on the hanger deck. You can see them. Any serious salvage attempt would have to deal with all of that first. And the deeper truth is that nobody owned the problem. The US Navy didn't want her anymore. There was no insurance claim to chase, no shipping lane to clear, no environmental threat pressing anyone to act. She was just down there and it was easier to leave her.
Bikini Atal is a UNESCO World Heritage site now. It has been since 2010 and Saratoga is the centerpiece of it. She's one of the only divable aircraft carriers anywhere in the world. And the dive is genuinely remarkable. You descend and you are looking at a flight deck the length of almost three football fields. The aircraft elevator shafts go down into the hole. You can swim through the hanger deck, the galley, crew quarters, the machine shop, the dentist's office. Yes, there's a dentist's office down there with the chairs still in place. The helm and navigational equipment are still in the bridge. There's even a forklift sitting on the hanger deck that was on board when she sank. Some of her A aircraft are still there, too. Hellcat fighters and Avenger torpedo bombers sitting on the lagoon floor where they were thrown when the Baker blast washed over the deck. The pilot's gear is still inside some of them. Nobody has explored more than about 10% of the interior. She is so large that even experienced technical divers running multiple dives over a week barely scratched the surface. And she's in good enough condition that new spaces are still being found. Raising her now would be unthinkable. She's a protected historical site. She belongs to the Marshall Islands. She's generating tourism. She's a piece of living history. and she's been home to coral and marine life for nearly 80 years. The reef that's grown on her is part of the wreck.
Now, there's something strange about Sara's story when you look at the whole thing. She survived being torpedoed twice. She survived bombs and kamicazis at Ioima. She survived the first nuclear test with minor damage. And then the second one got her. not instantly but slowly over 8 hours while the men who wanted to save her watched from a safe distance because the radiation wouldn't let them get close enough to help. She's still out there in Bikini Lagoon, sitting upright on the bottom, flight deck intact, bombs in the hanger, planes on the sea floor around her. The Japanese claimed they'd sunk her four times during the war and were wrong every time. In the end, it took an atomic bomb to do it. She's not going anywhere. The reasons to leave her grow stronger every year, while the reasons to raise her basically don't exist. And honestly, she's more interesting down there than she ever would be a scrap metal.
If you enjoyed this and want to see more videos like it, let me know in the comments and I'll cover more ships. Subscribe so you don't miss those. and I'll see you next time.