There was no secret about where we were headed. All the Pacific forces were preparing for the invasion of Japan, the ultimate battle of World War II, with countless lives at risk.

The Morse code--all dots and dashes--was streaming through my headphones and out my fingers onto the typewriter in front of me. We had been so thoroughly trained at the radio operators' school at the University of Wisconsin that we could "take code" without even thinking about it. Most of what we received was encoded--groups of five numbers and letters that were meaningless to us, but were converted into messages by the communications officer on a bulky decoding machine behind locked doors at the front of the radio room. Tonight, though, I was copying Morse code in plain English, at a speed of about 60 words a minute. This copy would become the morning news sheet distributed to all the crew.

Suddenly a flood of dots and dashes caught my attention. It was difficult to capture, because the combinations were unusual: in the middle of the first word of the headline was a series of six dashes representing the letters "t" "o" "m". The following word was similarly unusual, with an "o" "m" in the middle. Fortunately, the key words were repeated, and I saw for the first time in my life the words "atomic bomb" appear on the paper in front of me.

It was the initial release of the news about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, earlier that day. I can't remember exactly how I felt at the time. The words were new and strange, but it was clear that this was a device many times more powerful than anything manmade the world had ever seen. The news was distributed to the crew the next morning, and was the major topic of conversation.

In the days that followed, it became clear that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, followed by a second dropped on Nagasaki a few days later, had changed the course of the war. With Japan's surrender soon after, we knew that we would not be participating in any battles to capture the Japanese homeland. In a real sense, we knew that our lives could very well have been spared.

Receiving that message was one of the most memorable moments of my service in the Navy.