TECHNOLOGICAL OFFENSIVE 



to be adequate for the peculiar purposes of these Tests. 

 A whole new set of instructions was therefore worked 

 out and printed; it contained over 250 pages, and 

 showed exactly how each part of the ship and each piece 

 of equipment should be inspected. Equally important, 

 it proposed standard forms for reporting the inspec- 

 tion results. Without uniform reporting, it would be 

 almost impossible to add up the information to get 

 meaningful totals and comparisons. Two thousand 

 copies of these instructions and five thousand inspec- 

 tion notebooks were distributed. 



There was no formal parade of ships to Bikini, and 

 little drama. Ships put out from east coast Navy 

 yards as early as March 4, 1946. By mid-March the 

 Panama Canal was making its contribution to the Op- 

 eration. Many of the ships had left the west coast ship- 

 yards by early March. Ships were drawn from remote 

 Pacific bases also, including Manila, Shanghai, Guam, 

 Okinawa, Saipan. The Japanese battleship NAGrATO 

 came from Yokosuka, Japan, and the cruiser 

 SAKAWA came from Otake, Japan. The German 

 cruiser PRINZ EUGEN had come from Germany, via 

 Boston, Philadelphia, and the Panama Canal. 



The great size of the Task Force became apparent 

 at Pearl Harbor, where, in mid-May, over one hundred 

 of the ships were assembled. But Pearl Harbor, fa- 

 miliarly known as "Pearl" or "P.H.," was more than 

 an assembly point; its huge shipyard had taken on 

 the work of preparing a large number of the ships. 



55 



