The heavy cruiser Prince Eugen, nicknamed the "happy ship" by the sailors of the German fleet, passed the test of a nuclear explosion at the end of World War II. After being sunk, this vessel carries enormous risks to the environment.
In the South Pacific, waves wash over Bikini Atoll, where the United States began its second series of nuclear weapons tests in the summer of 1946. The goal of Operation Crossroads was to test nuclear weapons on ships. The operation consisted of two explosions, each with a yield of 23 kilotons. On July 1, 1946, the Able facility was detonated at an altitude of 158 meters, and on July 25, 1946, the Baker facility was detonated at a depth of 27 meters under water. The third explosion, Charlie, scheduled for March 1, 1947, was to be carried out at even deeper depths, but was canceled due to the US Navy's failure to deactivate the ships after the Baker test.
More than a hundred different ships were anchored off the coast of Bikini: aircraft carriers and battleships, cruisers and submarines, destroyers and military transport. On board, thousands of goats, pigs, rats, mice and guinea pigs appeared as a crew. At about nine o'clock in the afternoon from the opened hatch of a Boeing B-29 bomber, an atomic bomb, nicknamed "Gilda," rushed down, on which some pranksters had crookedly stuck photographs of American movie star Rita Hayworth. A monstrous shock wave and a temperature of 100 thousand degrees Celsius sank the American ship USS Gilliam (APA-57) and burned the rest of the ships, deforming their hulls and superstructures.
In that nuclear hell, only one ship survived - the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen, launched in the harbor of Kiel in 1938 in the presence of Hitler. According to the German admirals, this ship, named after the commander of the 17th-18th centuries, the generalissimo of the Habsburg Empire, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was to lead the Nazi fleet - the Kriegsmarine - to victory. The 21-meter cruiser, armed with 20-millimeter guns, is about to sail the waters of the Atlantic in search of British merchant ships. Joining up with the battleship Bismarck and the detachment under the command of Admiral Lutyens, the cruiser Prince Eugen in the second half of May 1941 entered its first battle with the forces of the Royal Navy of Great Britain. After two thousand English sailors were sunk, and other German ships received various kinds of damage, only the "Prince" remained afloat,received the nickname "happy ship" from German sailors.
The cruiser failed to hunt for the British on the routes to Canada. Circumstances forced the "Prince Eugen" to head to the captured French port of Brest. In February 1942, the cruiser took part in Operation Cerberus off the coast of England. In mid-1943, the "Prince" ended up in the waters of the Baltic, from where he headed to the port of Copenhagen, where he was caught by the surrender of Germany. They wanted to get the ship both in England and in the USSR, but the Americans did not seem to show any interest in it. However, the lot drawn from the captain's cap fell to the Yankees. The Stars and Stripes flag flew over the ship, and Prince Eugen entered the US Navy as test vessel IX-300. The command of the heavy cruiser "Prince Eugen" was taken by the captain of the first rank of the US Navy, Arthur Graubart, who came from a family of German emigrants. This happened not least because 600 German sailors continued to be on board the cruiser, instructing the American crew on the rules for handling ship equipment.
German technology, especially sonar instruments and a catapult for launching an aircraft on board the cruiser Prince Eugen, delighted American engineers. But the heavy cruiser Kriegsmarine had yet another blow to survive. As the American naval illustrated magazine All Hands reported in April 1946, Prince Eugen was expected to have a "rendezvous with the bomb." From Boston, the cruiser sailed on her last sea voyage. Leaving through the Panama Canal, where all the German sailors got off its board, on May 1, 1946, the cruiser "Prince Eugen" headed for Bikini Atoll, which at that time was a mandated territory of the United States. Exactly two months later, there was blown up object Able, named after the first letter of the alphabet of the US armed forces at the time.
To take water samples to determine the size of the radioactive contamination, remotely controlled boats were first sent to the scene of the explosion. When the radioactive danger somewhat decreased, a group of specialists went to the place of the explosion. Their souls were scraping. “In a somewhat depressed state, we entered the lagoon,” Rear Admiral Robert Conard later recalled. Most of the military did not have any protective clothing. They had to extinguish the burning earth, collect corpses and, using special devices, measure the level of radioactivity of the surviving and dead animals.
The heavy cruiser was eight to ten cables (about two kilometers) from the epicenter and looked intact. From the side facing the explosion, the shock wave ripped off all the paint. The Japanese ship Sakawa, located quite close to the epicenter of the explosion, was simply torn to pieces. The underwater explosion "Baker" in an instant destroyed the landing ship standing directly above it, and at the heavy cruiser it pressed only part of the casing sheets. The ship got water, but it did not sink and did not have any list. Thirty meter waves continued to flood the islands, causing an earthquake of magnitude five and a half. The blast shock wave split the hull of the battleship "Arkansas", the aircraft carrier "Saratoga" sank to the bottom with severe damage. All nearby ships suffered significant damage.
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The explosion created a crater 600 meters wide and nine meters deep. Affected Americans towed the cruiser for further testing at Kwajalein Atoll. By that time, its steel hull was not subject to decontamination for several months, although the sailors tried to clean it with water, alkali and soap. Shortly before Catholic Christmas 1947, apparently due to the loosely closed kingstones (side valves), the cruiser sank. The Americans tried to throw it on the coast of Carlos Island, but the next day the cruiser capsized and sank on the reefs of Kwajalein Atoll. The divers just removed all the measuring devices from it.
From the fuel tanks of the cruiser, whose rusted feed is still sticking out of the water, at any moment, threatening all living things, three million liters of oil can spill out. There is also an assumption that ammunition remained on board.