Tag Archives: Hiroshima

Heavyweight Match

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A special Warship Wednesday today. A moment frozen in time, some 80 years ago today.

The afternoon of 6 August 1945.

President Harry S. Truman and his party aboard the Northampton-class “medium-heavy” cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31) for the return trip from the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference are seen watching boxing bouts. 

The bespectacled Missouri National Guard artillery colonel and Great War veteran is seen ringside, wearing a driving (newsboy) cap. He is flanked by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes (left) and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (right). Note the crew in crisp summer whites and an obsolete Curtiss SOC-1 Seagull floatplane on the catapult above.

NARA 80-G-700302, National Archives Identifier 521002

Laid down on 18 December 1924 as a “treaty” light cruiser, Augusta was nominally a 9,000-ton ship with a veneer of armor plate (as thin as 0.75 inches on the turrets, only 1.25 inches on the Conning Tower, and a maximum belt of 3.75 inches). She was later reclassified as a heavy cruiser because she and her sisters carried 8″/55 guns.

USS Augusta CA-31 in her pre-war livery. NH 57459

Serving with the Asiatic Fleet pre-war, a 1940 refit saw her as one of the first dozen warships to receive the early RCA CXAM-1 radar, and she was sent to the Atlantic in 1941 where ADM King used her as a flagship and she was pressed into service as FDR’s flagship for the Newfoundland conference, tied up next to the much larger battleship HMS Prince of Wales which had carried Churchill to Argentia.

Very active during WWII, she remained a ship that “stars fell upon,” carrying Patton during the Torch Landings in North Africa, Bradley during Overlord off Normandy, Chidlaw to Corsica, and hosted Forrestal during the Dragoon landings in Southern France (during which she also fired all but the last 50 rounds of 8-inch in her magazine during NGFS ashore).

Augusta carried the Truman party from Norfolk to Antwerp and back, with the leg from Belgium to Berlin carried out by the 8th Air Force

Augusta was further key to history as Truman was on the ship when he got the news that Hiroshima had been hit by the first atomic bomb (Little Boy) used in warfare, and held the first press conference on the matter with embarked war correspondents. 

The news hit right before the above boxing match.

Besides all the American “who’s who,” Augusta also hosted King George VI at least twice while in Europe for the conference.

She put into Norfolk on 7 August 1945 to disembark Truman and company, spent several months in “Magic Carpet” operations, bringing GIs home from Europe, and decommissioned on 16 July 1946.

USS Augusta Description: (CA-31) Anchored in the Hudson River, off New York City, at the time of the Navy Day Fleet Review, circa late October 1945. Collection of Warren Beltramini, donated by Beryl Beltramini, 2007. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105561

Augusta was lucky; three of her five sisters– Northampton, Chicago, and Houston— were sunk in the Pacific during the war.

Laid up in mothballs at Philadelphia while Truman was still in office, Augusta was disposed of in 1960 and sold to the breakers.

Augusta received but three battle stars for her World War II service. Her name has been recycled for an Independence-variant littoral combat ship (LCS-34) that was commissioned in 2023.

Battleship Nukes

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While a number of battleships met their end at the hand of atomics at Bikini Atoll, likely the only dreadnoughts to carry nuclear weapons for tactical use were the Iowa class.

Those fast battleships “may have” toted such devices in two forms.

Between 1956 and 1962, the Navy had a limited stockpile of about 50 MK-23/W23 “Katie” nuclear shells for the Iowas‘ 16-inch guns, each with a yield of some 15-20 kilotons, with most ships of the class equipped to carry as many as 10 of these mushroom makers. Of note, Hiroshima’s Little Boy was a 15kt bomb.

Per NavWeaps:

USS Iowa, USS New Jersey, and USS Wisconsin had an alteration made to Turret II magazine to incorporate a secure storage area for these projectiles (the Nuclear projectile). USS Missouri was not so altered as she had been placed in reserve in 1955. This secure storage area could contain ten nuclear shells plus nine Mark 24 practice shells.

These nuclear projectiles were all withdrawn from service by October 1962 with none ever having been fired from a gun. One projectile was expended as part of Operation Plowshare (the peaceful use of nuclear explosive devices) and the rest were deactivated. USS Wisconsin did fire one of the practice shells during a test in 1957. It is not clear whether or not any of the battleships ever actually carried a nuclear device onboard, as the US Navy routinely refuses to confirm or deny which ships carry nuclear weapons.

At least one inert Mark 23 shell body still exists at the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Enter TLAM-N

Then in the 1980s came TLAM-Ns, the so-called nuclear Tomahawk cruise missile with its W80 150 kiloton warhead. First fielded in selected fleet units, only about 300 made were produced and the Obama administration dismantled them in 2010.

Below is a great video done by the curator of the USS New Jersey (BB-62) Museum, where he shows off the (possibly) TLAM-N related areas of the ship, including the panels, Marine guard post, and ABLs.

Touching the Sun, 75 Years Ago

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Last summer, I had a chance to stop in at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and, while the collection is impressive and even has a Space Shuttle, the centerpiece is and probably always will be the Enola Gay.

Every military history buff is of course familiar with the plane. I, perhaps, more so than others as I have studied Col. Paul Warfield Tibbets, coming close enough in North Carolina to his flight suit to see the sweat stains on the collar, and long ago meeting Enola Gay navigator Theodore “Dutch” VanKirk in Georgia before his death. VanKirk thought that dropping the bomb saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the end, ironically most of them Japanese.

The sentiment was repeated when I spoke a few years ago to navigator Russell Gackenbach, who flew on the Hiroshima photographic plane, Necessary Evil, on that fateful day. Like VanKirk, he too has passed.

It is hard not to look at the sheer size of that “aluminum overcast” and feel a sense of spooky unease about the hell that B-29 unleashed once upon a time. Talk about touching history.

One of the most curious facets of my visit to the Enola Gay was to note that it was teeming with crowds of Japanese tourists, many in their teens, all eager to get a look at the plane.

While Al Jazeera argues the Hiroshima bomb is a war crime, I’ve talked about that subject before in past posts and tend to side with VanKirk and Gackenbach as other alternatives seemed more deadly for all concerned in the long run.

Speaking of the long run, most of the nation’s five-star admirals and generals later went on record against the use of the A-bomb. Here is what the two top admirals in the Pacific had to say on its use:

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet stated in a public address given at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.  . . . [Nimitz also stated: “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan. . . .”]

In a private 1946 letter to Walter Michels of the Association of Philadelphia Scientists, Nimitz observed that “the decision to employ the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was made on a level higher than that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946:

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.

Professor of History at Notre Dame, Father Wilson Miscamble, weighs in on the subject with the opinion that dropping the bomb shortened the war and saved countless lives — on both sides.

Prof. Miscamble is not speaking off the cuff. His 2007 book, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War was published by Cambridge University Press and received the Harry S. Truman Book Award in 2008. He subsequently published The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs and the Defeat of Japan in 2011.

Was it Wrong to Drop the Atom Bomb on Japan?

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Today, on the 71st anniversary of the first atomic attack, that of the bombing of the city of Hiroshima, Japan, some argue that Truman was wrong to order that the Army Air Force undertake to have Little Boy tumble out of the bomb bay of the Enola Gay.

Most of the nation’s five star admirals and generals later went on record against the use of the A-bomb. Here is what the two top admirals in the Pacific had to say on its use:

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet stated in a public address given at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.  . . . [Nimitz also stated: “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan. . . .”]

In a private 1946 letter to Walter Michels of the Association of Philadelphia Scientists, Nimitz observed that “the decision to employ the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was made on a level higher than that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946:

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.

Professor of History at Notre Dame, Father Wilson Miscamble weighs in on the subject with the opinion that dropping the bomb shortened the war and saved countless lives — both American and Japanese.