This "Kid’s Cruise" was no picnic!
From shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to the atomic bomb testing at Bikini, Bill McGee experienced WWII in the Pacific like few others.

A Montana country boy, McGee joined the U.S. Navy in 1942 on his 17th birthday He had to agree to serve in the regular Navy until he was 21. These minority enlistments were tagged a "Kid’s Cruise"—probably by some salty old bosun—but McGee was no kid when his four-year hitch was over.

$35.00, Softcover, 546 pages, 250 photos and illustrations, plus appendices, bibliography and index, 6 x 9, ISBN 0-9701678-0-6, revised edition 2000. Foreword by C. A. Lloyd, Chairman, USN Armed Guard Veterans of WWII.

All aboard for the Armed Guard!
Bill McGee was assigned to the Naval Armed Guard, the Navy branch that protected Merchant Marine ships and their valuable cargo and crew from enemy attacks and sabotage. After gunnery training, McGee’s “Kid’s Cruise" threw him in the middle of air attacks at Guadalcanal and torpedoings in the South Pacific; carried him through the action in the Western Pacific; and ended in peacetime on the cruiser USS Fall River with the atomic bomb tests at Bikini.

from p. 249: USS David Belasco starboard liberty section ashore in Honolulu, August 1944. Standing left to right: Bonnalie, Carr, McGee, Cain, Burton. Front, left to right: Blum, Cassidy, Casey, Bushey.
(Author’s Collection)

McGee's enlisted man's perspective on the Bikini atomic bomb tests—by itself—makes this book worth owning.


Aboard the heavy cruiser USS Fall River, the rear admiral’s flagship, Bill McGee had a front row seat at the beginning of the Atomic Age. "Operation Crossroads," the post-war atomic bomb tests, grew from a few thousand people into a mammoth operation of 150 ships, 75 aircraft and more than 42,000 men, including political observers, the media and scientists of every calling.