by Doug Stanton
Almost none of the boys adrift knew anything about survival at sea. All were without sails or means to make sails. Only a few of the twelve rafts had functional paddles. No one aboard any craft had a compass. As the boys drifted through the predawn darkness, the temperature was already rising by the hour. No one knew what would happen next, yet most remained hopeful that sometime in the next forty-eight hours this unbelievable ordeal would be over. They be-lieved that when the Indy failed to show in Leyte at its scheduled time of arrival the next day, search parties would be dispatched. They told themselves and one another that rescue was imminent. They told themselves they could be in Leyte in less than two days—and out of the water before that. They prayed aloud for this.
Released from the giant air bubble and coughing up stomachfuls of seawater, Private McCoy cursed and struggled to regain his wits. He knew that he was a marine, and that he was expected to be tougher than any of the raw navy kids. If he quit, what would they do?
He tied himself tightly into his life vest and tried his best to assess his situation. He figured that a distress message must have gone out from the ship, but he couldn’t imagine that planes would be arriving anytime soon. Up ahead, he could make out a life raft and decided it was a far better place to spend this Monday morning than drifting alone in his life vest. As he prepared to swim to the raft, a shipmate slid up to him, completely taking him by surprise. The boy was in bad shape. He didn’t have a life vest, and he was straddling a gunpowder can about the size of a paint bucket. It was the only thing keeping the kid’s ass off the cold ocean floor.
McCoy looked at him. “We’re gonna have to get you a life vest.”
“I know.”
“Well, we’ll just wait for something to float by.”
“Where you headed?”
“Over to that yonder raft.”
“No, you stay here,” said the boy. “They’ll be picking us up any minute.”
“Like hell.” McCoy, who wished for a moment that he’d let the kid keep believing, took off. He tried stroking through the oil-covered sea to the raft, but the film was at least two inches thick. He could barely push through it in his sodden life vest. Shit. He struggled back to the boy, spitting out oil.
“I can’t make it,” the boy said.
“I see that.” At that moment, a dead body drifted out of the darkness and continued past them, as if on a mission of its own. McCoy couldn’t tell who it was; the face was smeared with oil. He paused, then gingerly reached out, pulled the corpse close, and removed the dead man’s life vest. Then he gave the body a gentle push. It sank beneath the waves and was gone.
McCoy handed the vest to the sailor, and tried to figure out the right next move. He could hear yelling from the direction of the raft; it sounded like a group of guys. “Over here, over here!” they kept shouting. “We got a raft!”
McCoy thought they sounded like they wanted company, and he didn’t blame them. As his legs dangled free beneath the surface, he felt that at any second something was about to grab at them again. To hell with it, he thought, and tore off his life vest and tossed it to the boy. Then he took an enormous gulp of air and started swimming.
McCoy dove deep and bobbed up every ten feet or so to breathe. He figured it was about 100 yards to the raft, but it was tough going. By the time he’d drawn close, he was gasping and nearly unconscious. His arms flailed until he finally grabbed hold of a line hanging from the craft’s side. He hung there, choking on the oil and staring at his hand, as if disembodied from it. Slowly, he watched it open and release the line. Then he began to sink.
It was at this moment that he felt somebody grab him by the hair and yank him aboard. He rolled over, vomiting, and then looked at the horrific-looking collection of boys before him. McCoy was shocked to see one man so badly burned that the skin was stripped from his arms. The boy’s pain was so intense that no sound was coming from his open mouth as he stared up at the sky.
McCoy stuck his finger down his own throat and started vomiting again, attempting to purge his system of the fuel oil and seawater. Inhaling the oil’s fumes was as bad as swallowing it, and he worried that his lungs were going to collapse.
On the raft were four other boys, all vomiting as well. The raft itself was a six-by-ten-foot rectangle of balsa wood stretched with gray canvas. It was already wrecked. Half the bow was gone, and the wood latticework floor was in pieces. Its floor was suspended off the frame on lines that let it hang about five feet beneath the ocean’s surface. McCoy wasn’t so much sitting on the thing as he was standing up in it, his arms draped over the side.
The morning’s waves raised the broken craft about fifteen feet every ten seconds, then dropped it out from under the boys with its passing. The abrupt motion kept snapping McCoy’s head backward as if he was being punched again and again. His legs and arms ached; he felt like he’d been kicked in the chest. The waves were also making some of the boys feel seasick, compounding their oil-induced nausea. McCoy looked around and decided that he’d done a very stupid thing. This was a very bad place to be.
Nobody said anything; the screaming had stopped. McCoy couldn’t at first identify any of the boys because they were all smeared with fuel oil. He could barely remember his own name. Gradually, as he wiped the oil from his eyes, he took in the strange scene. In one corner was a tall, rawboned youth by the name of Bob Brundige, a cotton farmer’s son from Tennessee who was maybe nineteen. He silently eyed McCoy from behind his black mask of oil. McCoy simply could not bear to look at his baleful eyes.
In another corner of the raft was a thin, soft-spoken sailor from North Carolina named Felton Outland, eighteen and one of the ship’s anti-aircraft gunners. Felton had walked off the ship without even getting his hair wet. But then, like McCoy, he’d been sucked deep underwater by the vacuum of the sinking ship—he’d nearly drowned. He was fully dressed, in a long-sleeved denim shirt and dungarees, his white pillbox sailor hat stuffed in one of his pockets. He appeared unhurt.
Also aboard the raft were nineteen-year-old Ed Payne, a farmer’s son from Kentucky, and Willis Gray, about twenty-eight, from Chicago. Payne and Gray, shivering in the pitching raft, were dressed only in T-shirts and dungarees. Both had scrambled from their bunks in enlisted men’s country and didn’t have time to fully dress before jumping off the ship.18
“All right, loosen up,” McCoy announced. “We’re gonna get picked up in the morning just as soon as they find us missing at Leyte. Okay? So let’s keep a sunny side up to this situation!”
Outland pitched in to spread some cheer, but Brundige only grunted. Payne and Gray were busy getting sicker.
Tied to this raft were three more, each tailing the other on ten-foot lines, making a total of seventeen boys in the group. In the raft immediately behind McCoy’s was coxswain Mike Kuryla, who had also nearly drowned in the sinking ship’s suction. With every passing wave, all four rafts collided and knocked the boys against the rails, or pitched them forward on the submerged flooring, where they sunk before shooting up again, spluttering.
Kuryla was retching but looked like he felt better than McCoy. Kuryla had found his raft a half hour earlier, and his shouts had helped lead Payne, Outland, Brundige, and Gray to the relative safety of theirs. Kuryla reached over the side and plucked up what looked like a greasy black ball. Rubbing off the covering, he discovered it was an onion coated in fuel. He tucked it inside his vest for safekeeping.
McCoy was able to scavenge a tin of malted milk tablets from a passing wave. But, rooting around in the raft itself, he found nothing useful whatsoever. He badly wanted to get his hands on a signal mirror or some flares. Tied to the rail of the raft in a rope harness was a wooden water beaker, but it was empty, and McCoy guessed it had never been filled before the ship’s hurried departure. Ravenous, McCoy tried eating one of the malted milk tablets, but they just made him more thirsty; his lips and tongue were already dry as a bone.
Clearly, things were going from bad to worse. He resolved to
take action: he would clean his pistol. Reaching down into the water inside the raft, he found his holster still attached to the belt on his fatigues. He removed the .45 and held it up in the air, shaking the water from the barrel. McCoy could disassemble and put back together the weapon blindfolded, and that was essentially what he tried to do now. He guessed that he and his raftmates would need it sooner or later to signal a passing plane or a rescue ship.
McCoy told everyone to hold out their hands, then placed a gun part in each outstretched palm. Using his T-shirt, he wiped the oil from the receiver and grip—it was a poor cleaning job, at best. When a tin of petroleum jelly floated by, he snatched it and eagerly greased the action on the pistol.
Kuryla couldn’t believe it; this crazy marine was cleaning his gun in the middle of the ocean. McCoy racked a round and announced that the gun was clean. Then he spotted something floating on the horizon—something huge and gray. It was heading directly for them.
“You see that?” he asked Kuryla. McCoy became convinced that it was a ship, and he was certain that it was coming to rescue them. He raised his pistol and fired off a shot. The gun’s sound was instantly swallowed by the air. McCoy peered anxiously into the dark, hoping to see a return flash from the ship, some signal he’d been spotted. Nothing—he saw nothing.
“What’s wrong with these people!” He racked another round, then fired again.
“Sonofabitch! Why don’t they see us!” And then McCoy had an awful thought: What if whatever he was shooting at started shooting back? He suddenly realized that the silhouette might be a sub. Or maybe a Japanese destroyer.19 He felt dumber than he’d ever felt in his life. He wondered if he had gone out of his head without even knowing it; he knew he had to keep a close check on his feelings, his actions. He felt like throwing up again.
Dr. Haynes and his group of boys were on the verge of collapse. Herding them together had been painstaking work, and it seemed to Haynes they would never get everybody rounded up. The tireless efforts of Father Conway and Captain Parke aside, the boys were close to scattering in all directions.
“Count off!” Captain Parke bellowed. Parke, the boys had always said aboard ship, might give them hell, but he also gave them credit for their efforts as military men. Slowly at first, they began sounding off, until the number grew to 400. To Haynes, it was an amazing spectacle of command and endurance on Parke’s part. The marine then ordered the boys to tie their life jackets together to keep them from drifting apart. It worked. Instinctively, each one wrapped his legs and arms around the boy in front of him. In this way, each one could also lie back on the chest of the boy behind him. Together, they drifted like this, looking up at a blackness that had no shape and that felt nearly suffocating.
In the center of this human ring, Dr. Haynes floated in his life vest. Like most of the men, his face was covered in oil. Many of the sailors didn’t recognize him. Soon the cries started out, “Hey, anybody seen a doctor? We need a doctor here!”
Haynes considered the request. He felt curiously ambivalent about announcing himself. He knew it would be much easier to hang back, to slink away into the crowd and shirk the responsibility of treating boys who were really too sick to be helped. The prospect of facing the misery around him without the aid of any medical supplies filled him with dread.
Then he heard a voice: Your job is to make people better. It was as if his mother were whispering in his ear. He hadn’t thought of her much lately. Now he pictured her with his father in their comfortable house on Fifth Street in Manistee, Michigan. He wondered if she was looking at the lake, and whether it was sunny there. His father would be at his dental practice, filing away on some farmer’s teeth. When Haynes snapped out of the reverie, he realized what he needed to do.
A few boys were vomiting so violently that they were actually doing somersaults in the water. Trying to keep calm, Haynes called out: “Here! Right here! Where is the sick sailor?” And then he moved into the throng. About a dozen sailors were holding a body aloft, an incredible feat of strength considering they were all treading water furiously to stay afloat beneath the added weight.
The man in question was in terrible shape. His eyes had been burned away. The flesh on his hands was gone, and what remained were bare tendons. The boys held him in an effort to keep these wounds out of the stinging bath of salt water.
Haynes recognized the man as his good friend and liberty buddy, gunnery officer Stanley Lipski. Miraculously, Lipski had made his way blind from the quarterdeck, off the ship, and into the water. Haynes knew that Lipski’s pain must be intolerable—he himself could barely look at his old friend, who was moaning softly. Stanley, he knew, was one tough bird; Haynes also understood that he didn’t have long to live. Reluctantly, he turned away to those he could actually help.
The horizon glowed with a faint bloom of sunrise. Dr. Haynes prayed that daylight would comfort the boys.
Floating to the northeast of both Haynes and McCoy, Captain McVay was formulating his own plan for survival. Other than the oil in his eyes, he was neither injured nor in other physical distress. He was actually in remarkably good shape. Even his wristwatch was still working perfectly. He was, however, unable to shake the fear that he was the only one to have made it off the ship alive.
Then something nudged him. It was a potato crate. He hopped on top and grasped it between his legs, continuing to scope the horizon. But he still couldn’t see any other survivors.
He could hear voices in the distance, though. Two life rafts drifted toward him from the darkness, and he stroked over atop his potato crate. Finding the rafts empty, he climbed aboard one of them and quickly lashed it to the other. Out of the night came a yell: “Help! Anybody out there!”
“Yes! It’s the captain here!” Bearing down on the paddle, he rowed ahead to meet three blackened, indistinguishable faces. He pulled a quartermaster named Vincent Allard aboard his own raft, and then hauled the other two sailors into the second.
McVay knew Allard well. At thirty-three, the quartermaster had served on the Indy for three years—since the ship’s early days of the Aleutian Islands bombardment at the beginning of the Pacific war—under five different captains. A quartermaster served his captain in the daily enforcement of the ship’s regulations, and this morning McVay had never been happier to see him.
With Allard were Angelo Galante, twenty, and Ralph Klappa, eighteen: two seamen of the lowest rank. Klappa, in fact, had only come on board the Indy in San Francisco. Angel Galante had been on the ship for just several months. The two boys were true green hands, and McVay feared they were dying. They had apparently swallowed a good deal of salt water and oil, and were vomiting.
Twenty minutes later, some good fortune followed. Out of the early morning light came another raft. On board was twenty-two-year-old John Spinelli, a cook from New Mexico whose wife had recently given birth to a baby girl. (Spinelli, in fact, had received the order to return to the ship at Mare Island while visiting his wife and new daughter in their hospital room just two days after she was born.) With Spinelli were John Muldoon, a thirty-year-old machinist’s mate from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who’d been aboard the Indy for over two years; yeoman Otha Havins, twenty-two, and his buddy Jay Glenn, twenty-one, an aviation machinist’s mate; and George Kurlick, twenty-two, a fire control man. Kurlick was naked, blanketed only by life vests, but all the others were dressed in their dungarees and denim shirts. And except for the persistent intense stinging in their eyes from the fuel oil, none was seriously injured.
“Boys,” McVay said, surveying his motley crew, “is this all that’s left of us?” Spinelli didn’t have an answer. Only several hours earlier, he’d been playing a little after-hours pinochle with his buddies in the bakeshop, a pan of fresh rolls cooling on the table. And then his world had sunk beneath him. But being in McVay’s presence was a huge comfort.
McVay took command of the three rafts, one floater net, and eight sailors—a ragtag flotilla that he intended to lead, nonetheless, w
ith unbending fairness and sturdy naval discipline. “Don’t worry,” he told the crew, “we will be rescued—don’t lose faith. Keep heart.”
The words rang hollow; McVay realized that there was no guarantee rescue would come anytime soon. He hoped that the pilots of the tractor planes that he’d requested to meet him for gunnery practice at 6 A.M. on Tuesday, July 31, near Homonhon Island (fifty miles east of Leyte) would report their failure to show.20 If they didn’t report the ship missing, McVay further reasoned, and if no one had received their SOS, rescue would begin when the Indy didn’t show up in port at Leyte midday on Tuesday.
With this in mind, he told his group that Thursday seemed the earliest date they could hope for aid. He confidently announced that it would be ships, not planes, that would find them. “Planes,” he explained, “would be flying too high to ever see us.”
All the boys, though bone-weary and scared, felt good about their chances.
At dawn, when the sun launched off the horizon and began its race into the sky, the temperature shot from a nighttime cool of low 80s to over 100 degrees. Just twelve degrees north of the equator, the heat was merciless. The men’s exposed heads baked as they squinted in agony and paddled about.
The large group led by Ensign Harlan Twible and Richard Redmayne seemed to have everything it needed to survive—life rafts, floater nets, and food—but lacked cohesion among their ranks. Unlike the group headed by Haynes, Parke, and Father Conway, which was performing as one unit bent on survival, this group was mostly an uneasy collection of alienated souls. Redmayne had been badly burned in the explosions, and although he was an officer, he was not in a position to command.
