In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (9 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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It was twenty knots.
11
He next swung his sub into position to meet the
Indy
broadside for the kill shot. From this vantage, he could see that his target, illuminated by the sliver of
moon peeking through the clouds, was indeed a large warship. She was huge.
As the attack procedure progressed, the four kaiten pilots became more and more adamant that one of them be launched. But in the excitement of the sudden rush to identify the ship, Hashimoto had actually forgotten about them. He now told the pilots that because of the conditions, with the target closing in, it would be nearly impossible to miss the kill; their lives would be wasted unnecessarily if he used them.
Then, with his eye pressed to the rubber cup of the periscope, Hashimoto gave the order to fire. It was 12:04 A.M.
The first torpedo shot from a forward tube of the sub and quickly accelerated to a cruising speed of forty-eight knots, or about as fast as a racing greyhound. It traveled at a depth of thirteen feet, leaving behind a swirling wake.
The torpedo carried 1,210 pounds of explosives and was configured with a preset firing range of 1,640 yards, a little under a mile. This was enough firepower to take out an entire city block. Hashimoto fired six of these, and they left the ship at three-second intervals, in a widening fan of white lines.
 
 
It took less than a minute for two of the torpedoes to intercept the
Indianapolis
.
At 12:05 A.M. all hell broke loose.
The first torpedo hit the forward starboard, or right, side and blew an estimated sixty-five feet of the bow skyward. It was simply obliterated. Men were thrown fifteen feet in the air. Those who weren’t blown in two landed on their feet, stunned, their ears ringing.
The second explosion occurred closer to midship and was even more massive.
12
The sea itself seemed to be burning. The first torpedo had smashed one gas tank containing 3,500 gallons of high-octane aviation fuel, igniting a burning river that reduced the bulkheads and doors to red-hot slabs of steel. The fuel incinerated everything in its path. The number-one smokestack, acting as a chimney for the inferno raging below, belched a volcanic streamer of fire that shot several hundred feet into the air, littering the ship with sparks and cinders.
The second torpedo had pierced the four-inch steel armor below the bridge, slightly aft of officers’ country. Also hit were the
Indy
’s boiler rooms, which provided steam to the ship’s forward engine room, called engine room 1, and the powder magazine for the 8-inch guns. Both torpedoes had smashed into the starboard side of the ship, actually lifting the ship off the water and whipping it to the left, onto a new course slightly to the south. The
Indianapolis
paused like a large beast struck between the ribs, then settled back in the water, plowing ahead at seventeen knots. With her bow gone, she began scooping up seawater by the ton.
It was 12:06 A.M.—just a minute after the torpedoing. The ship had been cut nearly in half. All compartments and crew forward of the number-one smokestack were struggling for life. Those areas aft of the stack, including the quarterdeck, the hangar deck, radio shack 2, and engine room 2, as well as compartments belowdecks such as the gedunk stand, the post office, and the mess halls, initially were relatively untouched by the explosions. Within minutes, though, this situation changed. Soon the armory, library, log room, and marine compartment were in flames, the mess halls choked with smoke and dust. The ship began
to slightly list, or tilt, to her starboard side. She had only minutes left afloat, and those aboard her had seconds to decide their fate.
All communications and electrical power in the forward part of the ship were dead, and it was impossible to talk with any crew in the engine rooms. It was a critical moment: it was imperative to shut the engines down to halt her forward movement and the flood of water she was taking on as she steamed ahead.
Down in engine room 1, near the number-one smokestack and the point of impact, sparks flew from the ventilation ducts and showered the compartment. Machinist’s mate William Nightingale, on midnight watch, stumbled among the turbine engines as they choked and died. The lights went out, and the room filled with smoke. The emergency generators, needed to provide auxiliary power, sputtered and then quit. Nightingale, with the aid of a flashlight, watched the boilers’ steam pressure drop as thick black fuel oil and seawater started pouring through the hatch.
He now realized just how horribly the ship had been damaged. Two of the engines controlled the “outboard” propellers (located one each on the far port and starboard sides). When this engine went down, the propellers had stopped turning. If the ship had been torpedoed, as Nightingale sensed it had been, it seemed important to keep her moving, away from the oncoming sub. But there was nothing he could do here, and he hurried from the compartment, heading aft to engine room 2.
Chief engineer Richard Redmayne, Nightingale’s superior officer, had been in the officers’ head, standing at the toilet, when the explosion shook the compartment. The torpedo hit less than thirty feet away, and Redmayne smelled smoke and heard flames licking the starboard passageway on the other side of the door. Steeling himself, he ran out through the blazing gauntlet and stumbled, badly burned, through
fallen debris and billowing smoke to engine room 2, located behind the number-two smokestack, about 300 feet from the bow. There he found everything in working order.
All the generators around him were operating and supplying power. From midships back, the ship generally had power and lights, supplied by the auxiliary diesel generators that had started flickering automatically. Redmayne tried to use the telegraph and found it dead. He wanted desperately to contact the bridge for a report and further orders. But that was impossible. He tried pumping fuel oil to the port-side tanks to halt the ship’s list, but this did nothing to solve the problem.
The stunned and terrified man didn’t have the slightest idea of the bedlam in engine room 1. He wasn’t even sure what had caused the explosions. Reading his gauges, he discovered that the vacuum power was dropping in the engine that controlled one of the “inboard” propellers (located one each on the ship’s port and starboard sides, and flanked by the “outboard” propellers), but that the other was still turning. Redmayne believed the ship mustn’t stop if she’d been torpedoed. Since he couldn’t consult with Captain McVay or the damage control officer, he had to make a judgment call. He ordered the remaining propeller fired up to 160 rpms.
 
 
Up in his battle cabin, Captain McVay had been lifted straight off his bed and slammed to the floor. Rising, he stumbled through clouds of white smoke, his throat scorched from the acrid odor of the burning ship. Immediately, he kicked into battle mode and began collecting himself within a whirlwind of conflicting thoughts. Had they been hit by a kamikaze? Run into a floating mine? Were they under attack? The ship’s tremorous vibrations reminded the experienced captain of the kamikaze attack off Okinawa.
McVay quickly ruled out mines because he remembered they were too far out to sea for the Japanese to have strewn the water with the deadly floating spheres. He thought he detected a whipping sensation, as if the ship were shaking from side to side. He reasoned that the shaking of the deck and bulkheads was too violent for a single kamikaze plane to have caused.
The only rational explanation was that they’d been torpedoed. McVay had never encountered this precise kind of disaster before, but he knew his duties. He had three pressing jobs: assess the damage, take care of it, and engage the enemy—if indeed they were in battle. Most dreaded of all was the possibility that he would have to give the call to abandon ship if the damage was beyond control. But for now, his first concern was to get off distress messages detailing the ship’s condition and position. He stumbled nude and barefoot from his cabin to the bridge.
In times of stress and battle, a captain aboard his ship is like a king, to which all stations must report the extent of damages along with their prognoses. When McVay walked onto the twenty-foot-wide bridge platform, he found it in chaos. The darkness was so thick that the men had to identify themselves by name. McVay knew he needed to establish order by determining the extent of the damage. He looked for his damage control officer, K. C. Moore, but couldn’t find him.
What McVay didn’t know was that the water mains used for fighting fire had been ruined. Damage control efforts had proved impotent against the spreading inferno. On the quarterdeck, crews lugged heavy hoses across what remained of the forward deck and screwed them into hydrants, only to throw the valves open and find they had no water pressure. Other crew members, under Moore’s direction, were operating a series of valves spaced throughout the ship that opened and closed certain compartments; these could be filled and emptied with sea ballast in an attempt to balance the ship’s
list. So far, these measures, along with the dogging of the hatches of the blown area, were failing to halt the flooding or slow the increasing list of the
Indianapolis
.
On the bridge, McVay turned to the matter of getting off a distress signal. He ordered Commander John Janney below decks to radio shack 1. It was imperative that their latitude and longitude positions be broadcast repeatedly.
Get the message out that we’ve been torpedoed
, he told his trusted navigator,
and that we need assistance, on the double
. Janney raced from the bridge; McVay would never see him again.
McVay next yelled for his officer of the deck, Lieutenant Orr, and the young officer snapped to attention at his captain’s side. The twenty-two-year-old Annapolis graduate was deeply upset, knowing that as the
Indy
continued sailing, she was rapidly taking on water. He calmed himself enough to explain that because the electrical system was out, he couldn’t talk with the engine room. “I have tried to stop the engines,” he told McVay. “I don’t know whether the order has ever gotten through.”
McVay took the news in; this was the first report he’d heard of the ship’s condition, and he was still undecided about its severity. Judging from the slight list and the probability that the back half of the ship hadn’t suffered any damage at all, it seemed likely that the
Indy
could be saved.
McVay rushed back to his battle cabin, where he grabbed his khaki and captain’s hat, and returned to his command post, dressing as he awaited Janney. Shortly, Bob Gause entered the dark, smoke-filled bridge. (Gause’s bunk was midships, right over the powder magazine that had blown the ship apart. But he hadn’t been in his bunk; a bad case of boils had led him to sleep on a bare cot in the catapult tower that loomed over the quarterdeck, port side.) There he found McVay, with gunnery officer Stanley Lipski, leaning out over the storm railing. Lipski had been horribly burned; it was amazing that he was even alive. His hands had been
cooked down to tendons; and his eyes were burned to two blackened holes. Somehow, feeling his way along the bulkhead and the lifeline skirting the ship, he had made his way by memory to the bridge.
McVay was glad to see Gause, whom he affectionately called “Conch” (Gause was from Florida). He had last seen the quartermaster at 9 P.M., when they exchanged the night order book. Now that seemed like years ago. McVay asked Gause if he had any idea what had happened to Commander Janney.
“Captain,” Gause said, “there is no radio shack 1. It’s all blown to hell.” McVay was surprised. The situation was sounding more disastrous by the minute.
The ship was crawling with men—there had to be at least 900—in various stages of order and entropy. All awaited the next order. A majority of the boys were still under the impression that this was an air battle. They thought maybe they’d been hit by a Betty—a Japanese plane that released armor-piercing bombs. Or maybe they’d been shelled by an enemy battleship. Who knew?
 
 
The
Indy
was now perched at a fifteen-degree list to the right, which gave the deck a slight uphill climb. With one propeller still turning, she was plowing ahead now at about twelve knots, or fourteen miles per hour, and the list was increasing by the minute. With her bow torn off, the front of the ship resembled a mangled snout rooting ahead through the sea, gulping water. The massive incoming tide was punching through auxiliary bulkheads, taking on a life of its own, roaring back through the ship toward the stern, seeking out all dry places.
Already roughly 100 men were dead—burned, blown up, or drowned. Most of those sleeping forward of the 8-inch
guns on the bow had been vaporized. The bodies that remained were charred beyond recognition. The survivors stumbled back from the forward part of the ship onto a deck covered with an inch of blood, their skin smoking in the hot night. Crew members sleeping belowdecks in the final 115 feet from the forward turret to the bow also had died instantly. These boys had been trapped in passageways and quarters by walls of fire that advanced toward them and sucked the air from their lungs.
Lieutenant Commander K. C. Moore had been running through the ship, trying to secure the most badly breached compartments. The key was to stop the flooding before it pulled the ship underwater, but the damage control officer was having trouble finding any repair parties to aid him. As the water poured in, the boys who had managed to survive the explosions tried stealing up ladders to the deck. They found themselves turned back by fires raging above them. Others, racing through the narrow passageways toward the dogged hatches of the stern, were trapped by the accumulating water, flattened against the bulkheads as the ship continued its starboard lean, the nose pointing toward the ocean floor.

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