Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire: The Extraordinary Saga of the Unsinkable Nevada

At 9:00 in the morning on July 1, 1946, Major Harold Wood, bombardier of the B-29 Superfortress Dave’s Dream, peered through his bombsight at a massive fleet of warships gathered below. As the crosshairs fell over his target, he released his weapon, and the pilot, Major Woodrow Swancutt, pulled the aircraft into a sharp turn. Seconds later a blinding flash filled the air as history’s fourth atomic bomb detonated over the turquoise waters of the Pacific. But this was not some alternate timeline where the nascent Cold War suddenly went hot, but rather an elaborate test dubbed Able, part of a larger series of nuclear experiments called Operation Crossroads carried out at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. And while the target fleet included several former Axis ships including the Japanese battleship Nagato and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the vast majority were American, a motley array of obsolete battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, landing craft, and various auxiliary vessels. And at the very centre of the assembly, painted bright orange to serve as an aiming point, was a truly remarkable vessel: the battleship USS Nevada. A revolutionary design when she entered service in 1916, Nevada was present at Pearl Harbour on the morning of December 7, 1941 when the surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy marked the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier over the battleship. And now, at the end of her career, she bore witness to another technological revolution: the dawning of the atomic age. This is the remarkable story of the USS Nevada, a ship that served through one of the most eventful periods in the history of naval warfare. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices