Odd this day
This was the night of a party at the Officers’ Club of the Army War College in Washington, D.C., at which the attendees enjoyed a nice bit of cake.
No, I can’t imagine why it was controversial, either. It’s just a gathering of people marking
the disbanding of Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One, the body that organized and oversaw the first post-war atomic tests in the Pacific.
The people you can see here are — from left to right — Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, commander of said Task Force, his wife Roberta, and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry, a veteran of both world wars. And they’re simply cutting a cake. They’ve finished a successful joint operation, the weapons tests at Bikini Atoll, known as Operation Crossroads, and they’re marking it with a party and a cake. A perfectly ordinary cake. Yes, granted, the Conelrad blog, which seems to have the most comprehensive history of this (and pretty much every other) aspect of the atomic age, notes that it must have been “elaborately engineered”, but otherwise it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about, no?
Admittedly, they add that the “highly publicized detonations” in question were known “for displacing an entire indigenous population of islanders”, but…
Oh, all right. The tests at Bikini Atoll, and the party, took place, of course, the year after 200,000 people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the cake, while it was indeed a feat of engineering… might be considered a little on the nose, let’s say.
Still, at least there was no one there from a photographic agency, otherwise a record of this event might have sparked some controversy.
Ah.
Someone from the Harris & Ewing Studio was there, and two days later
the bizarre photograph was published as the centerpiece of the Washington Post’s society column under the headline ‘Salute to Bikini’.
(Please make your own joke here about how the Post has successfully put controversy behind it in the 21st century.)
Three days after that, 10 November, was a Sunday, and one Arthur Powell Davies, Unitarian minister at All Souls Church in Washington D.C., gave a sermon. He’d seen the Post, and was not altogether pleased.
I have with me here in the pulpit this morning a page from a newspaper. From a very fine newspaper. It contains a picture — as it seems to me, an utterly loathsome picture. If I spoke as I feel I would call it obscene … The caption says it is made of angel food puffs. I do not know how to tell you what I feel about that picture. I only hope to God it is not printed in Russia — to confirm everything the Soviet government is telling the Russian people about how ‘American degenerates’ are able to treat with levity the most cruel, pitiless, revolting instrument of death ever invented by man… The naval officers concerned should apologize to the armed service of which they are a part, and to the American people. No apology would be sufficient to efface what it may mean to the people of the world.
Gentlemen of the cloth getting involved in politics, and having a pop at the armed forces, is the sort of thing that garners attention, of course, and soon ‘Salute to Bikini’ was far from the only headline the cake had prompted.
It made Time magazine, and — despite the reverend’s hope that the Russians would not get to hear of it — also reached readers of Izvestia, and a union newspaper, Trud. Apparently, Izvestia remarked
that American “atomists” would “like to stew a big atomic kasha [a Russian cereal] and make millions of peaceful people bear the consequences”
Little wonder, then , that Blandy became known as the Atomic Admiral. Intriguingly, though, the incident had more positive effects — admittedly on a small scale — on America’s relationship with the country on which it had dropped the ultimate weapon. Dr Howard Bell, part of the provisional government in Japan, wrote to Reverend Davies to agree with him, and to raise the matter of poverty there. He asked Davies to ask U.S. school children to send spare school supplies out to children in Japan. Davies did exactly this, and organised the collection of
over a half ton of paper, pencils, crayons, erasers, paste and other items. The material was then shipped to Japan where it arrived in December of 1947 — just in time for Christmas. The supplies were distributed to two schools and an orphanage.
In due course,
crayon drawings and watercolor paintings from the youthful artists at the Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima
…made their way back across the Pacific, and went on a national tour. As the blog remarks:
What had started out as a trivialized media story about an “atomic cake,” had, in the end, led to a lasting expression of peace.
To me, though, one question remains unasked. We have addressed, I think, the question of taste, but something else about the cake bewilders me.
The unusual pastry was there in the first place because of an order to an East St. Louis, Illinois bakery by Lieutenant John T. Holloway, a member of Blandy’s staff. “It was strictly a business request,” said Eugene Kuehn to the Associated Press at the time. Kuehn, with the help of a bakery supply salesman named L.Y. Stephens, designed the strange looking dessert and had it delivered by car to Washington.
Just how good was this bakery in Illinois? Or how bad were the bakeries in Washington? Even allowing for the remarkable shape and stability of the cloud, and its ability to remain cloudlike with no visible means of support, surely there can’t only have been one bakery in the entire 3.8 million square miles of the USA which could achieve such a thing?
Why, then, ask someone to create something so difficult, and then require the baked good in question to survive an 800-mile road trip?
I mean, I am right about this, aren’t I?
…or is there another East St. Louis? Still, hats off, I suppose, to a single bakery item which can make you ask ‘What were they thinking?’ in two entirely different ways.
