Sailing in and out of war

Abstract

It was Monday, 6 August 1945, as an aircraft carrier nicknamed “Tokyo Express” ploughed a steady and majestic path through white-capped waves somewhere east of Okinawa. Ahead of the carrier, the ocean’s curve and the treacherous grey skies blended to form a melancholy azure, warning of a typhoon that the ship’s captain was seeking to avoid. That day, however, the overcast skies and white-caps were of little interest to the vast majority of the 3,500 men aboard the Essex-class carrier USS Shangri-La (CV-38), who had been busily preparing to launch air strikes against mainland Japan as soon as the weather cleared.

The morning had brought some astonishing news and they were understandably confused, but cautiously excited. The ship’s radio operators had begun to pick up reports of a single, massively destructive bomb that had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima in southwestern Honshu As well, reports began to circulate the ship of vast numbers of civilian Japanese casualties. An atom bomb, they were told, but no one had any idea what an atom bomb was, or its destructive power. In fact most of them had no idea where Hiroshirrl^as located, or why it had been targeted. “We thought we knew the principal cities of Japan,” recalls Dale Cox, then a 24-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, but he, too, was confused by the reports.