In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (35 page)

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Authors: Doug Stanton

BOOK: In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

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Nagasaki bombing
Naquin, Captain Oliver
Naval Academy in Annapolis
Navy, U.S.

assigns secret mission to McVay
directive to CL-45
exoneration of McVay
escapes inquiry into failure to rescue survivors
Indy
disaster haunts
vs. Marines
Unit Citation to crew of
Indianapolis

New Mexico,
USS (battleship)
Newport, Curt
Newsweek
New York Times
Nightingale, Lieutenant Lawrence
Nimitz, Admiral Chester and atom bomb test and court martial and
Indy
inquiry vs. MacArthur
Nolan, Captain James
NPR

Okinawa

Battle of
occupation of
plans to invade

Oldendorf, Vice Admiral Jesse
Omaha,
USS (cruiser)
Operation Centerboard
Operation Coronet
Operation Iceberg
Operation Olympic
Operation Stalemate
Oppenheimer, Robert
Ormac Bay
Orr, Lieutenant John
Osaka
Outland, Felton reunion with McCoy

Pacific campaign
Parke, Captain Edward

adrift
death of

Parsons, Captain William S.
Payne, Ed
Pearl Harbor, bombing of
Peddie convoy route

and inquiry
intelligence reports declassified
McVay not informed of Japanese submarines in

Peleliu island
Pensacola,
USS (cruiser)
Philippines
Philippine Sea

Battle of the
forward area of

Philippine Sea Frontier

Indy
reported lost
Indy
survivors spotted

photophobia
plasma shift
Playmate 1
(plane)
Playmate 2
(plane)
Potsdam conference

Declaration to Japan

Procai, E. P.
Proceedings
(Naval Institute)
pulmonary edema
Purnell, Admiral William R.
PURPLE code

radar
radio shack 1 (Radio Central)

distress signal sent from

radio shack 2 (emergency)

distress signals sent

Ralph Talbot,
USS (destroyer)
Redmayne, chief engineer Richard
Register,
USS (transport ship)
Regosia, Florence
rescue operation

begun
crews sent
dead bodies retrieved and identified
distress signals received but ignored
identity of survivors finally learned
Leyte fails to send rescue party
Navy escapes inquiry into delay of
nonreporting of
Indy
nonarrival delays
press conference of, after rescue
and sharks
size of

Reuben James,
USS (destroyer)
Ringness,
USS (transport ship)
Rogers, Edith
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
Russia

Saipan island
Sancho, Lieutenant Commander Jules
San Francisco
Saturday Evening Post
Savo Island, Battle of
Scarborough, Rep. Joe
Schechterle, A1
Schmueck, Lieutenant John
Scott, Hunter
sea water

caustic effect of
effect of drinking

secret cargo

on board
delivered to Tinian
and McVay

Seventh Fleet
sharks

number of men killed by
and rescue effort
repelling attack by

Short, Maj. Gen. Walter
Smith, Senator Bob
Smith, Winthrop, Jr.
SOA (Standard Speed of Advance)
Solomon Islands

Battle of

South Dakota,
USS (battleship)
Spinelli, John
Spruance, Admiral Raymond,

and court martial
and McCoy
visits survivors in hospital

Stephens, Richard
Stout, Lieutenant Commander Ken
survivors

and aftermath of rescue
exoneration of McVay and
homecoming of
In Harm’s Way,
reaction to
interviews with
McCoy organizesreunion
positions of, at sea
press to clear McVay
reunions
reunited at hospital
vow to live
see also crew,
adrift; rescue; sharks

Tacloban naval operating base
Tamon group
Tarawa
Task Force
Task Force 95.6
Tibbets, Lieutenant Colonel Paul
Time
Tinian island

bomb assembled on
Indy
arrives at
Indy
ordered to deliver secret cargo to
Japanese in jungles of

Tokyo

bombing of

Tokyo Rose
Tolosa, Leyte

and nonarrival of
Indy

torpedo(es)

attacks
technology, on
I-
58 sub

Torpex
Toti, Captain Bill
Tranquility,
USS (hospital ship)
Trinity test

Indy
pauses during
Nimitz first learns of

Truman, Harry S.

announces loss of
Indy
and atom bomb
and court martial

Twible, Ensign Harlan

adrift, and
aftermath
rescued
and shark attacks

Ulithi island
ULTRA (code-breaking program),

and court martial
declassified

Underhill,
USS (destroyer escort)
U.S. Congress

and amendment of October 2000

U.S. Senate Armed Services

Committee hearing of 1999

Uranium-235, carried on
Indy

Van Wilpe, William
V-J Day celebrations

Waldron, Lieutenant Joseph
Warner, Sen. John
Wasp,
USS (carrier)
Wild Hunter
(merchant ship)
Woods, L. T.
World War I

Yamada, Goro
Yamamoto, Admiral Isoroku
Yap island
“yoke-modified” position
Yokohama, Japan
Yorktown,
USS (carried)
Young, Clair B.

zed position
“zigzag” course

and inquiry
planned, to Leyte
stopped

Notes

One crew member describes not just a single black canister being unloaded from an army truck, but two of these receptacles, which he and another sailor struggled to carry up the gangway to the
Indy.
This is contradicted, however, by other eyewitness accounts, including that of Dr. Haynes.

In general, confusion has surrounded the details of the actual loading. At least two previous accountings of the
Indianapolis
disaster describe this mysterious cargo being loaded on July 16, which contradicts Captain McVay’s own narrative of the event written nearly two months after his rescue.

The term
kamikaze
arises from two thirteenth-century battles that outnumbered Japanese warriors fought against Kublai Khan, whose 40,000 troops, after conquering Korea and China, had landed at Kyushu. During the first battle, a storm sunk 200 of the invader’s 900 ships, and Khan retreated. Seven years later, however, he returned, this time with over 140,000 troops and 4,400 ships. Again his fleet was devastated by a storm whose “divine winds” sunk nearly all his ships. The Japanese believed that these winds had been sent by the gods.

Generally speaking, however, the navy suffered its worst losses of the war at Okinawa, with 9,700 casualties, 4,907 of which were fatal.

It set a record that remains unbroken today.

The two officers were seeking a knowing face that could tell them if the Trinity test had been successful. When the
Indy
paused before leaving San Francisco, not even Nolan or Furman knew why; the reason was only disclosed later in the postmortem of the atomic effort.

In fact, Nolan was spending a good deal of time in the flag lieutenant’s cabin, where, with the use of a Geiger counter he kept hidden from the crew, he measured the canister for possible radiation emissions. There were none.

Spruance, although he may have known of McVay’s special delivery mission to Tinian, most likely wasn’t privy to the existence of the atom bomb. Two days before this conversation Admiral Nimitz—Spruance’s superior officer—had had his first glimpse of the awesome power of the weapon when he watched a film of the Trinity test. He’d been shown the footage by Captain Parsons, the officer who had given McVay his secret, hurried orders to sail two weeks earlier in San Francisco.

Clarification as to why Naquin didn’t recast this important intelligence in a form McVay might have used disappeared at his death in 1989. In his lifetime he would never fully explain why he didn’t communicate at least a portion of his intelligence, except to say that the
Indianapolis’
s risk of enemy submarine attack seemed of “very low order.” In short, his was a judgment call.

Indeed, while “Loran A” navigation was possible for about 50 to 60 percent of the Guam—Leyte route (loran navigation, still popular today, uses a series of ground waves sent from onshore radio antennae to fix a ship’s position), dead reckoning was both an art and the
Indy
’s default choice of travel. Today’s weekend boater equipped with a Global Positioning System has more sophisticated navigational equipment than the
Indy
’s.

As later explained by Goro Yamada, a petty officer aboard the
I-58
, the sub’s sonar man had identified the sound of “clinking dishes” from about 20 kilometers, or 12.5 miles away. The sound, according to Yamada, was emanating from one of the galleys on board the USS
Indianapolis.

The Indy was actually travelling at seventeen knots under a staggered engine pattern, meaning that her four propellers were moving at different rpm rates. This was standard practice, used precisely to confuse the kind of hydrophone readings Hashimoto had just taken.

The remaining four torpedoes were not accounted for; presumably they missed their target.

A small portion of the crew actually decided to leave the ship within minutes of the torpedoing, leaping from both the port and starboard sides. These early jumpers, finding themselves alone in the sea, would try later to connect with larger groups once the ship had gone down. However, the majority of the approximately 900 crew members who got off the ship did so in the final minutes of the sinking.

At least one-quarter of the thirty-nine-man marine detachment were killed instantly in the torpedoing. As McCoy was climbing the ladder from the brig, in fact, his bunk and the entire sleeping area were in flames. Had he not relieved the brig watch ahead of schedule, he would have been incinerated with the others in the blast.

Several days later, Young would notice that the
Indy
had been assigned a berth in the Leyte harbor. He would notice as well that she hadn’t yet shown up in that berth. Remembering the radio message, he was puzzled, but said nothing because, as he later explained, he knew that other people were aware of the SOS, too. In other words, as a lowly enlisted sailor, he felt his hands were tied and that his opinion would matter little.

Clair Young’s account didn’t come to light until 1955. That year, after reading a
Los Angeles Times
story and a subsequent
Saturday Evening Post
article about the sinking, Young was surprised to learn that no record existed of anyone receiving the
Indy
’s SOS. Young wrote to the Navy Department, which replied that the
Post
story, in particular, was “an account of an individual survivor, and not sponsored in all its facts and conclusions by the U.S. Navy.” Russell Hetz and Donald Allen made their recollections public in 1998, as the survivors were working in Congress to exonerate Captain McVay.

Not until this writing has the position of the survivors as they drifted over the Pacific been determined. These estimated positions appear courtesy of undersea salvage expert Curt Newport, who in 2000, in partnership with the Discovery Channel, began a deep-sea search for the
Indy
’s gravesite. The drift positions were arrived at by means of CASP, or Computer-Aided Simulation Program, the system used by Coast Guard rescue crews today to determine the most likely position of shipwreck survivors.

A stoic, gentle man who has rarely talked about his experience aboard the
Indy
, Felton Outland does not remember Ed Payne being aboard the raft; indeed, he remembers another sailor, a ship’s cook named David Kemp, as part of this group. When asked, however, if Payne could have been a fellow rafter—as McCoy insists he was—Outland assented. Kemp died in 1985. Outland and McCoy are the only living survivors from this group.

In fact, what they were seeing was the Japanese
I
-58 that had sunk the
Indy
. Lieutenant Commander Hashimoto would later explain that he had resurfaced in an attempt to confirm a hit. Unable to find anything, he gave up after an hour.

The tractor planes did not report the
Indy
missing at the appointed hour; it’s possible that McVay’s request was never carried out.

Present-day wisdom concludes that a potential attack victim should lie perfectly still, as thrashing may excite the shark into thinking it’s spotted wounded prey.

Accurate data on shark attacks on World War II servicemen may never be known since medical records did not note them. In fact, the navy was sufficiently concerned about loss of morale that it discouraged public mention of the menace.

On Tuesday, McVay picked up a ninth and final boy adrift on a raft. It took the captain and his crew nearly five hours to paddle the fifteen hundred yards to his rescue.

Its beaches had been stormed by some 200,000 Allied troops on October 20, 1944.

In the years following their rescue, the survivors of the
Indianapolis
missed no opportunity to call Chuck Gwinn their “angel.” They mobbed him whenever he showed up at their biannual reunions and made him an honorary member of their survivors’ organization. Gwinn, who died in July of 1993, was often moved to tears by this display of affection.

There is debate about which sea rescue of World War II constitutes the largest. The
Indy
’s, which involved a total of eleven aircraft and eleven ships over a six-day period (including post-rescue recovery of bodies), certainly ranks among the most significant.

When adjusted for differing military time zones, this dispatch confirms that the
Indianapolis
left Guam on July 28, 1945, at 9 A.M.

The sharks had, in fact, remained a constant presence throughout the men’s ordeal, even during the daylight hours. Not long after Gwinn showed up, a massive shark attack—involving an estimated thirty fish—had, in about fifteen minutes, taken some sixty boys perched on a floater net.

There is no record of the survivor’s identity.

Today, the former captain of the
Ringness,
William C. Meyer, does not recall an ammo can appearing on his radar and claims that circling search planes guided the
Ringness
to McVay. But John Spinelli recalls being told that this was how the group had been located.

Previous accountings have described McVay as a willing participant in composing the dispatch, while portraying Meyer as reluctant to include the details about the zigzagging. Meyer, however, while supportive of the captain, stands by this second version.

It has previously been reported that Captain McVay and his group were the last to be rescued; according to former
Ringness
captain William C. Meyer, these prior accounts are erroneous.

According to a navy memorandum, dated August 8, 1945, 316 ultimately survived the disaster. However, more recent review of rescue records by the USS
Indianapolis
survivors’ organization has corrected this final number to 317.

Arriving on the scene on August 5 was the unescorted transport ship USS
General R. L. Howze
(AP 134), carrying 4,000 troops to Manila. In apparent contradiction to the naval directive of August 3, unescorted ships were still being routed through the Peddie area in which the
Indy
was sunk. The USS
Cecil J. Doyle
ordered the
Howze
from the area.

Those rescued by the
Bassett
and taken first to Samar had traveled by airplane to Base 18. The majority of the survivors traveled from their initial hospital lodgings on Peleliu via the hospital ship
Tranquility,
a journey of two days.

McCoy and his mother later figured out that at about the time she’d awakened, McCoy was making his way to the raft that held Payne, Outland, Gray, and Brundige.

A month earlier, Congress had begun hearings concerning the attack at Pearl Harbor. A post-attack court of inquiry had found Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel and Major General Walter Short guilty of “derelictions of duty” and “errors of judgement.” A July 1946 congressional report would strike the first charge but retain the second.

It is unlikely that even the court’s seven judges possessed sufficient security clearance to allow them knowledge of ULTRA’s existence. The details of the program would remain classified until the early 1990s. The court of inquiry and Navy Inspector General documents detailing the charges against McVay, and the navy’s thinking in arriving at them, were not declassified until 1959.

All of these letters, however, would eventually be withdrawn by Secretary Forrestal. The military records of the four men would emerge unblemished by the sinking of the
Indy.

The survivors’ efforts to clear McVay’s name were diligently aided by a Ransom Middle School student from Cantonment, Florida, named Hunter Scott, who took up the cause in 1997 as part of a history project. Where the gray-haired, senior citizen survivors of the
Indy
hadn’t succeeded, Scott was able to bend the ear of Washington’s politicians.

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