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Show fjewsinen Admit Apprehension of A-BonUiJV!ission By WALTER A. SHEAD WMU Correspondent ABOARD USS APPALACHIAN (vlf Navy Radio)-Civil and military mili-tary welcoming committees out of wreywi;. with the beauty and color of the' Paradise of the Pacific a pleasant memory interlude in the pleasant m miiitary ex- '"TluTptrwfrdB second leg of our up atoll and the atomic bomb est the results of which may "volutonize naval tactics. The waters of the Marshall Islands are not new to the Appalachian and the members of her crew who first took her into combat duty in these very waters the conquest and capture of kwajalein, which is our next port of call. She is a sturdy ship and bears few scars of her tour of duty in the war in the Pacific in the Marshalls, the Admiraltys, the Solomons, Solo-mons, at Leyte. the Marianas, at Guam and other action since Pearl Harbor. On this tour she is the press ship of Adm. W. H. P. Blan-dy's Blan-dy's task force and aboard are I ' "I X v i TO DROP BOMB . . . Major Harold Har-old Wood, age 30, of Bordentown, N. J., responsible for bullseye. picked newspaper men and representatives repre-sentatives of the other media such as news reels, radio, technical magazines, mag-azines, television and mothers. Although Al-though most of them are on other ships of the group, such as the Pan-amint Pan-amint and the Blue Ridge, there is a sprinkling of scientists aboard and a sort of friendly ribbing going on constantly between the "lay" or mine-run members of the press and these scientific writers, many of whom are members of the "I Am a Frightened Man Club" and predict dire results and dangers to personnel person-nel of this task force when the bomb burst, scheduled July 1, takes place. In spite of their fun-poking, the newspaper men generally privately admit they feel some apprehension and beneath the raillery there is a feeling of tenseness among ' many of as which increases daily. The trip thus far from Navy Pier in Oakland to Honolulu, where our two-day stay was all too short, has been like a pleasure pleas-ure cruise but now we are getting get-ting down to the serious part of this most stupendous military experiment in history. The information in-formation officers aboard ship offer every facility and we are scheduled for a series of round-table round-table conferences to orientate us to the main objectives of operations op-erations crossroads. One of the most interesting phases of this operation is' the time element. ele-ment. Fourteen different time zones are involved in the operation by virtue vir-tue of the location of Bikini west of the International Date Line. For instance if the first atomic bomb is dropped at 10 a. m. Monday, July 1, it will be 5 p. m. Sunday. June 30, in Chicago. As this is written out of Pearl Harbor we still have some 2,200 miles of trackless blue water to traverse tra-verse at a speed of approximately 11 knots or about 13 miles an hour Before we reach Kwajalein where we will spend a day viewing the elaborate installations which have been set up in quarters, laboratories, laborato-ries, air facilities as a base for the army air corps which will drop the bomb and the 37,000 men of the joint task force. The logistics and the planning winch have gone into this operation oper-ation will rival those In the invasion in-vasion of Normandy and scientists scien-tists in and out of the navy have ready for installation the most elaborate measuring .devices to 1 meter actual effects of the ex Plosion on the target array of combat and other ships, army and avv material, live animals tethered aboard some ships and ordnance for army, navy and a-r of all descriptions. In addition recording devices, spe- vision nrStrted Cameras for television, tele-vision, radar controlled drone Planes, which will fly through the it is this radio activity for the ex- ir """" "p: |