Young Sailor Witnesses Dawn of Nuclear Age

At the Crossroads

COMMUNITY BY: BILL MOAKLEY

PRESENTED BY CENTURIONCG.NET

For Billy Malone, enlisting in the military as World War II wound down seemed the natural thing to do. After all, he was following his five older brothers into service. A seventh Malone brother would later enlist.

A native of Los Angeles, Malone joined the Navy in January 1946 at the age of 17 with his mother’s permission. Three days after finishing boot camp in San Diego, Malone was assigned to the USS Independence.

“I thought I was going to see the world,” he recalled with a wry smile. “They sent me down to Long Beach on a Saturday and put me in some barracks for the night. The next day was my birthday, and I got on a transport ship to leave for the Independence.”

While onboard the Independence, Malone noticed an array of crates packed with military equipment and wondered what precipitated the need as the war had ended.

“I saw these crates of equipment with tanks and armaments, everything you could imagine,” he said. “I thought, ‘what is all this about.’ I asked somebody and they said, ‘didn’t you volunteer for this?’ I said, ‘volunteer for what?’ He told me we were leaving for the Marshall Islands, and I was going to be part of some bomb testing.”

Turns out that Malone would be taking part in Operation Crossroads, the first detonations of nuclear devices since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. The purpose of the tests was to investigate the effects of nuclear weapons on warships. Some 95 warships, including the Independence, were gathered at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands and subjected to testing. Under the watchful eyes of scientists, military officials and members of the press, the first of two tests took place on July 1 when a bomb nicknamed Gilda after Rita Hayworth’s character in the 1946 film Gilda, was dropped above the gathered fleet. A second test would follow underwater on July 25.

“I could see it with my naked eye,”Malone said quietly of the first blast. “I remember they were aiming for the USS Nevada which was painted orange, but they missed it. It hit a Japanese ship behind it.

Billy Malone

“Within five hours the ship I was on at the time cruised into where the damage was. Fires were still going on. Radiation was still falling out from the blast cloud.”

Three days after the blast, Malone and his fellow sailors boarded the USS Independence and began assessing damage.

“It was totally destroyed,” Malone said.

“We had to survey the ship and report the damage. On the hangar deck, the airplanes there had been mangled together. The airplanes and tanks on the flight deck were the same way.”

Crews were on the ships for months conducting tests on the ships themselves, as well as the animals and ammunition that had been stored on the ship.

“A lot of the ammunition was still live, but a lot of it had exploded,” Malone said. “We did all kinds of reconnaissance on the ship. The top of the ship, the flight deck, had bubbled up in the middle. It was incredible.”

Malone recalled no measures were taken to protect sailors who were on the ships five days a week for months.

“We had no equipment,” he recalled. “No Geiger Counters, no protective clothes. I had on blue jeans and a T-shirt.”

Malone left active duty a year later, but he remained in the naval reserves. After a couple of years in the construction industry, he joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a reserve deputy and would work his way into active duty. He retired at age 72 after a long career that included serving as the head of search and rescue for the department and later moved to Oklahoma to join his son and daughter-in-law in Norman. - 19SM