On July 25, 1946, at 8:34 a.m., 95 unmanned warships floated idly atop the aqua-blue waters of the Bikini Atoll, a secluded lagoon at the far reaches of the South Pacific. These were the target ships.
Just beyond this flotilla, a ring of 150 support vessels, containing nearly 40,000 members of the United States Navy, created a perimeter line surrounding the group of vacant ships. A mix of submarines, battleships, aircraft carriers, drydocks, yard oilers, cruisers, destroyers, and high-powered dreadnaughts — these target ships were made up, primarily, of obsolete U.S. Navy ships and surrendered German and Japanese vessels.
Viewed from the air, the pattern in the lagoon resembled a giant school of fish idling in the crystal waters, except, in this case, each vessel’s attention seemed trained on a single amphibious assault ship, the LSM-60, anchored at the very center of the armada. And for good reason: suspended directly below this ship, at a silent depth of 90 feet, the American military had positioned an atomic bomb.
It was humid that July morning in 1946, but otherwise conditions were clear. The breeze was light, the water calm. It was for these temperate conditions, and of course for its utter remoteness, that the Navy had selected this section of the Marshall Islands as a prime nuclear test site.
High-powered cameras were trained on the target fleet that morning. Newspaper reporters stood with pads in hand on the decks of the perimeter ships. It would be the first atomic test open to the news media.
At 8:34 and 59-seconds, less than a year after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the U.S. detonated a plutonium device, which exploded with a yield of 23 kilotons, instantly vaporizing the ship from which it was suspended and destroying, either by its blast or through radioactive contamination, nearly every other ship in its vicinity. Dubbed “Helen of Bikini” by the men on the ground, the bomb was the first detonation of its kind in the post-war era.
EIGHT MONTHS earlier, on the streets of Neosho Falls, 17-year-old Clarence Henderson, decided, at the urging of his three friends — Austin Dennis, Leslie Weiland and Loy John West — to take a break from high school and enlist in the U.S. Navy. It was Thanksgiving of 1945. The four boys said their goodbyes to their families and boarded a train bound for the Naval Training Center in San Diego.
After a term in boot camp, the young men were sent in their separate directions. Henderson was first assigned to an attack transport, the USS Renville, before taking assignment on an amphibious force flagship called the USS Blue Ridge.
And it was aboard Blue Ridge, on the morning of July 25, that Henderson — who at that point lacked a high school diploma because his rural school pointed out that he hadn’t yet completed his coursework in U.S. History — became a first-hand witness to the detonation of America’s fifth nuclear weapon.
IT WAS CALLED Operation Crossroads. Its purpose was to test the effects of nuclear weapons on naval warships. The operation proved controversial from the start. On one side, a number of military and scientific advisors considered the test wasteful and impractical. The U.S., the world’s sole nuclear power at that time, had fewer than 10 weapons remaining in its stockpile, and it wasn’t clear that the data retrieved from exploding a near-replica of the fission bomb that had already been used in Nagasaki would justify the multimillion dollar expense.
But the most urgent concernts centered on the potential consequences that could follow from detonating a radioactive bomb underwater. The results, scientists warned, could be catastrophic. And they weren’t far off.
The immediate blast sank eight of the target ships and contaminated beyond rescue all of the others. Nearly all of the test animals on board the ships, pigs and rats mostly, perished. Native islanders, who were relocated during the runup to detonation, were forbidden from returning to their homes.
The mission quickly shifted from intelligence-gathering to clean-up. Glenn Seaborg, the long-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called Operation Crossroads “the world’s first nuclear disaster.”
“The ship that I was on was considered what they called a ‘down-winder,’” explained Henderson. “And what happened was that some of it actually drifted over us, you know.”
The commanding officers gave their men very little information about radiation hazards and made minimal efforts to monitor their exposure. “They didn’t really get into that stuff much,” recalled Henderson, who at 89 years old, upright and sharp of mind, seems to have escaped any effects of the blast. “At the time, I just figured we was far enough aways from it that it wouldn’t harm us — but a lot of guys did get radiation, I guess.”
In short order, Henderson and his company would leave Bikini and continue their voyage — to Nauru, to Kwajalein, to Guam, and then up through the Panama Canal, and around to Norfolk, Va., before eventually docking in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in New York, where Henderson would spend three weeks before eventually receiving his discharge. “When I got to New York City — well, you know, that’s a big place. But I found out that once you get a map of them subways, you can go anyplace up there. So I got around pretty good after that.”
HENDERSON spent a total of two years in the Navy. When he returned, he went to work for the post office in Yates Center. Eventually he was made postmaster in Neosho Falls. In 1951, Henderson, who’d been on dry land at that point for nearly four years, was called on to put his maritime skills to use once again. It was The Year of The Flood. Rising waters closed over the riverside town, destroying businesses and crop fields and washing a number of homes downriver. Henderson was in Yates Center at the time but got word of the disaster roiling his hometown. He and a friend from the P.O. raced toward Neosho Falls, put a boat in the water about two miles south of town, and floated it up to the attic window where his mother and stepfather awaited rescue. “Boy, that was the one,” said Henderson, recalling the downpour that nearly wiped the little town off the map and caused irreparable harm to its future prospects. “Over the years, it just flooded too many times here. That’s all there is to it.”
But as the life of Neosho Falls was receding, Henderson’s was just beginning.
In May of 1953, Henderson married Opal McCullough at the Neosho Falls Methodist Church. “She’s a pretty girl,” said Henderson in a conversation earlier this week. A framed sepia-toned photograph of the young couple sits beneath a lamp on the side table next to Henderson’s chair. He reaches for it. “See?” he says. “That’s her.”
“How did you meet?” I ask.
“Oh, just here and there,” says Henderson. “Back in those days, you had a dance hall here. She loved to dance. Now, I wasn’t too whippy at it, but I tried. And then, besides that, my uncle married her sister. So of course we were acquainted that way too.”
The Hendersons traveled to Colorado for their honeymoon, setting in motion a habit which would see them across 62 years of marriage. “Whenever I’d get my vacation from the postal service,” recalls Henderson, “away we’d go. We had a camper and traveled all over this country.”
And yet, for a couple so on the move, the Hendersons were intensely of Neosho Falls. Their families went back generations and they both possessed a devotion to the history of the place. Especially Opal, who never let her passion for the town lie idle. In 1980, she, along with the Hendersons’ only child, Terri, published a history of Neosho Falls, “To-day, beginning, yesterday.” Clarence is listed as the book’s photographer.
And they both continued to nourish lifelong friendships in the area. Henderson, for one, never lost touch with the three schoolmates with whom he enlisted. All three made the decision to return to southeast Kansas after their stints in the Navy. “Loy John, he went to work in the oil fields around here,” recalled Henderson. “And Austin, he went to work for a newspaper. And Leslie Weiland went to selling cars. But they’ve all passed away but me. I’m the only one left, out of four.”
Opal, too, passed away, in late-January of this year. “She got pancreatic cancer,” said Henderson. “And, boy, you go pretty fast with that.”
Henderson continues to live in the same small house he shared with Opal, a little box-frame structure on a tree-shrouded street on the west side of Neosho Falls. A giant yellow maple tree towers over the Hendersons’ front yard.
“Oh, it’s pretty quiet over here now,” says Henderson. “I do have a pecan grove, though. That keeps me pretty busy. We planted it 50 years ago, down by the river. We’ve got 35 trees down there. Matter of fact, I’m going down there today. We’re going to do some harvesting. I sure wish the sun would come out, though. I’ve got a thing called a Bag-a-Nut. It’s about this wide and yea big and it’s got little fingers on it, and you pull it behind the riding lawnmower. I go around and around and around the trees, and it picks them up and puts them in the basket.”
ON THE DAY of the atomic test, the men were warned to avoid looking directly at the explosion. So, during countdown, the many thousands of men who crowded onto the decks of the ships surrounding Bikini Atoll, all turned their backs on the blast site. Henderson, who had never even seen the ocean before joining the Navy, turned too. What he saw when he returned his gaze was this: a colossal mixing of sea and sky — two million tons of water bursting like a geyser from the horizon, creating a hollow chimney of spray more than 6,000 feet tall and 2,000 feet wide, the top of which bloomed like a head of cauliflower, rising higher and higher into the atmosphere. When the structure collapsed, it precipitated a mountainous wave that rocked every boat within a 100-mile radius. And, then, in less than a minute’s time, nothing. The experiment was over. “But during that moment,” said Henderson, “it was sure something to see.”
