Word: kwajaleins
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...Love with the Boss. Unlike the Caine, the destroyer-minesweeper Zane, to which Wouk was assigned, swept mines aplenty-off the Marshalls, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, the Marianas, Guam, Saipan, Tinian. In two years Wouk was successively assistant communications officer, communications officer, ship's first lieutenant and navigator. Later he was reassigned to another minesweeper, the Southard, saw action in six Pacific campaigns. He rose to executive officer, had been recommended to become captain of his ship when it was wrecked in a typhoon at Okinawa...
After two days the Navy took them all to Kwajalein Island and made vigorous efforts to decontaminate them. By this time their first symptoms were gone. Calculations showed that they had received about 175 roentgens of radiation, which is less than half of a deadly dose (400 R). But they were watched carefully...
...year after Pearl Harbor Day, Pride got his first seagoing command: the carrier Belleau Wood, which joined with the Wasp, Enterprise, Saratoga and Essex as the first big carrier strike force. Some of the names entered on the Belleau Wood's log: Tarawa, Wake Island, Makin, Kwajalein, Truk, Saipan, Tinian...
...dawn on March 1, a Marine corporal on lonely Kwajalein saw an awesome sight. "All of a sudden," he wrote his mother, "the sky lighted up, a bright orange, and remained that way for what seemed like a couple of minutes . . . We heard very loud rumblings that sounded like thunder. Then the whole barracks began shaking as if there had been an earthquake. This was followed by a very high wind." In another letter, two days later, the corporal reported that two U.S. destroyers pulled into Kwajalein with victims of atomic radiation...
...Greatest Explosion. What the corporal saw and reported from his own perch was the result of the biggest explosion ever set off by man. It happened several hundred miles away from Kwajalein, somewhere in the U.S. proving ground in the Marshall Islands. In a precautionary rehearsal of a formal test shot from an Air Force bomber that will take place sometime in the next two weeks, U.S. scientists had exploded a thermonuclear device atop a tower. The force of the blast completely surprised them...