Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  Quihuis and Pena were older than Harpo and tried to keep him out of trouble. But the kid was full of piss and vinegar, and having friends by his side only made him bolder. It didn’t hurt that Quihuis had once been the welterweight boxing champ of Arizona.

  Increasingly, when the rednecks ragged Harpo, he ragged back. Then one day, after a big Texan spat out an insult, Celaya wound up a roundhouse and clocked him in the jaw. The Texan’s nose spouted blood and he crumpled to the deck. Pena, Quihuis, and several other men grabbed Celaya and held him back.

  The Texan lumbered to his feet, towering over Celaya. “I’m gonna get you, you dirty goddamned Mexican! I’m gonna get you alone someday and kill you!”

  Celaya had been too happy to be afraid. He had finally given it to one of those rednecks, and good. But when he looked down at his punching hand, he saw that he’d also paid a price. A shard of naked bone poked up through his skin.

  Quihuis hustled him down to sickbay, where Indy’s chief physician, Dr. Lewis Haynes, examined Celaya’s hand.

  “How did this happen, sailor?” the doctor asked.

  “Slipped and fell, sir.”

  Haynes got to work. He put Celaya’s hand in a cast and installed the wire contraption. It was an experimental technique Haynes had never tried before, a kind of traction. Celaya hopped off the exam table to leave, but Haynes stopped him.

  “Yes, sir?” Harpo said.

  Haynes leveled his gaze, but a smile pushed at the corners of his mouth. “Next time you hit someone,” he said, “close your fist.”

  Harpo’s face flushed and he looked at the deck. “Yes, sir.”

  Now, walking down the port side, Celaya told Quihuis he’d probably get the cast off in another week. At thirty-one years old with a wife and three kids, Quihuis was as much an uncle as a buddy to Celaya, who was still only a teenager. Quihuis agreed with Pena that the kid needed to watch his mouth. After Celaya decked that Texan, Pena had pulled him aside and whispered fiercely, “If you keep up that attitude, you won’t be around anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Celaya said.

  “I mean, some night a bunch of those rednecks are gonna grab you and throw you off the fantail. That really happens! Is that what you want?”

  Apparently, Harpo did not, because Quihuis noticed that he settled down some after that, despite his big talk to the contrary.

  Suddenly, the high whine of props and acceleration hit Quihuis’s ears like a stinger. He froze, whipped his head skyward, and saw a suicide plane. It was headed straight for the ship.

  6

  * * *

  MARCH 31, 1945

  USS Indianapolis

  Okinawa, Japan

  THE JAPANESE PLANE, an Army Peregrine Falcon, burst through the low overcast at 7:08 a.m., whining wide open. The 20 mm gun mount on Indy’s fo’c’sle unleashed a chatter of bullets. McVay charged out from the charthouse, shouting, “Who is that trigger-happy—?”

  Then he heard the plane. McVay wheeled around and ordered general quarters—the signal for the crew to drop what they’re doing and prepare for battle. A boatswain’s whistle piped over the 1MC,I a one-way loudspeaker system that reached every compartment on the ship. “All hands, man your battle stations.”

  On the port side amidships, Quihuis yelled one word at Harpo: “Run!” He wanted to put some steel between them and the suicide plane and sprinted down the port side, Harpo on his heels. They plunged through a hatch and down a ladder, sliding down the handrails on their armpits, feet never touching the rungs.

  Edgar Harrell, a twenty-year-old Marine corporal from Kentucky, raced to the 40 mm gun mount on the fantail. He saw the plane screaming toward the ship. It appeared to be balanced on the twin pillars of fire streaming from its guns.

  On the fo’c’sle, the “trigger-happy” 20 mm gunner, Buck Gibson, kept shooting. He saw tracer rounds piercing the plane and his parents’ faces flashed before him. Would he ever see them again?

  On the mess deck, L. D. Cox heard the battle stations call, dropped his tray on the table, and flew out the door and up a ladder. He reached the main deck just in time to catch movement at the skyward edge of his vision. It was a suicider, and it seemed to be headed straight for him.

  • • •

  On the 40 mm gun, Ed Harrell was ready to shoot. He was waiting for the gun sights to connect to radar when the pilot changed course slightly, possibly deflected by Gibson’s gun. The plane now flew almost parallel to Indy, but then seemed to lose control. It veered left, dove, and slammed into the main deck aft with a thunderous sound, just inside the port gunwale, and a five-hundred-pound bomb dropped free of the wing. The crash tore a hole in the main deck, four feet by five, its outboard portion open to the air, like a bite out of the ship.

  The projectile plummeted nose first through the main deck and drilled down through the ship, just three feet inboard of her skin.

  The bomb punched a sixteen-inch hole through the second deck and kept falling. On the mess deck, Lyle Umenhoffer, Verlin Fortin, and Troy Nunley saw it crash through the overhead and pierce the deck eight feet from their table. The impact sprayed them in a maelstrom of beans.

  The bomb continued banging down through the ship, smashing straight through a crew berthing compartment where Seaman First Class Tony King saw it fall right past his bunk. The bomb kept falling, drilling the first platform deck and cracking open the skin between frames 112 and 113 and spilling out into the sea.

  Then it exploded.

  The blast shook Indy with seismic force. A shock wave boomeranged back through the bomb’s exit hole, blowing its edges inward and tearing what had been a smallish rupture into a yawning hole, four feet high and five feet wide. Seawater and fuel oil burst up through the main deck in a geyser a hundred feet high. The explosion caused the ship to whip so violently that the abrupt movement snapped antennae off the foremast and knocked the planes from the catapults.

  All over the ship, men fell against bulkheads or to their knees, doused in showers of grime and dust. Gear tore loose and clattered to the deck. The force of the blast ruptured portions of the deck, jacked others up at angles, buckled framing, and wrinkled Indy’s skin like the corrugated roof on a shed. On every deck, men heard the low, eerie groan of twisting steel.

  The impact threw Cox into the air. The fantail plunged, and blue water washed across the stern. Seawater flooded the aft 40 mm gunmounts. The suicide plane still hung on the rail, like a malevolent insect. From the bridge wing, Morgan saw four sailors rush to the plane, lay their hands wherever they could, and give a mighty shove. Most of the plane tumbled over the side and splashed into the sea.

  Indianapolis was rapidly taking on water. A voice blared over the 1MC: “Set Material Condition Afirm.” The call, which ordered the crew to secure all watertight hatches, reverberated belowdecks and echoed through every compartment.

  Amid the mad scramble up the ladders was nineteen-year-old Troy Nunley, who had crawled out of the mess hall through a carpet of beans. He couldn’t believe he was leaving all his stuff behind in his locker—he’d said he never would—but he had to get out, had to. Water was rushing down the second-deck passageway like the Mississippi River. Nunley clambered up a ladder, men on his heels, and popped out into daylight in the center of a knot of sailors. They surrounded the hatch and were shouting back down—“Come on! Come on! We have to dog it down!”—urging the climbers up with wild gestures.

  Nunley heard men calling up from below, chased up the ladder by the deluge. He turned and looked down into the hatch. He could see a man submerged to his waist and another to his chest. Adrenaline flooded Nunley’s body. He reached into the hatch and yanked up one man—the young bugler, Earl Procai, who was badly wounded—and then another.

  The water was rising fast.

  “We gotta shut it!” the men on the deck called. “We gotta dog it down!”

  Nunley heard more voices from below—“Help! Help us!”

  He heard another voice at his shoulder. �
�Water’s almost to the top! We gotta dog it down! Help us!”

  But Nunley couldn’t. He knew it was either save the sailors below or save the ship, but he couldn’t shut the hatch on those men.

  Next he heard a heavy clang, the hatch slamming shut. The voices below were severed, but Troy Nunley would hear them for the rest of his life.

  • • •

  In sickbay, Dr. Haynes and the junior ship’s physician, Lieutenant Junior Grade Melvin Modisher, were working furiously on the wounded when Harpo Celaya burst in waving his arm.

  “Doc, you gotta get me out of this cast! They need me topside!”

  Haynes turned from the man he was working on, sheared off Celaya’s cast, and sent him on his way. Post-attack musters revealed that eight men were missing, prompting officers and chiefs to organize search parties. There were twenty-one wounded, including Procai. Though Nunley had helped pull Procai clear of the flooding, the young bugler died of his wounds.

  Meanwhile, Indy herself had sustained grave injuries, and the crew broke into damage control parties that sped like ambulance teams to minister to her wounds. Waterlogged compartments on the port side dragged her off-kilter, and she listed to port, eventually canting her decks seventeen degrees.

  Spruance immediately expressed his suspicion that the Japanese pilot had targeted Indy, knowing she was the 5th Fleet flagship. He ordered his flag lieutenant to see whether a code book had dropped from the plane’s wreckage before it was pushed overboard. A search was made, but no code book was found.

  The damage to the ship was too serious for repairs at sea. On the bridge, McVay ordered the OOD,II or officer of the deck—the captain’s direct representative on the bridge—to set course for Kerama Retto, an island twenty miles away. The Keramas had been the first islands Spruance ordered his forces to hit in the Ryukyu chain, part of his bold plan to secure both a seaplane base and a fleet anchorage in support of the main Okinawa invasion. The 77th Division, under Major General Andrew D. Bruce, had begun landings on March 26 and finally secured the Keramas just two days before Spruance’s own ship needed safe harbor.

  At 10 a.m., escorted by USS Twiggs, Indy cautiously spun up her starboard screws and limped to Kerama Retto under her own power. Word from underwater demolition teams was that sharp reefs fringed the islands, with treacherous coral heads lurking scant feet below the surface. The twenty-mile trip took two and a half hours. McVay guided his stricken ship gently, and once in the anchorage, nudged her into berth K-66.

  • • •

  Late in the afternoon on March 31, Glenn Morgan stood at attention on the quarterdeck, a silver bugle in his hand. He felt as if some evil force had peeled open his chest and plucked out his heart. His best friend, Calvin Ball Emery, and his little buddy, Earl Procai, were among nine men killed in the kamikaze strike. Captain McVay had already ordered the colors lowered to half-mast and mustered the crew to render Procai his final honors.

  Indianapolis’s officers and chiefs—the most senior enlisted men—stood in solemn ranks wearing long-sleeved cotton grays. Petty officers and below wore dungarees and chambray shirts. The formation bent in an L around a plain wooden box. Procai’s body lay inside. An American flag lay over the box, just large enough to cover the top.

  From the quarterdeck, Morgan could see the Kerama islands, some so narrow they could be measured in yards. Procai was to be buried on one of those little slivers. It was so far from his home in Minnesota, Morgan thought. From his mother and father and sisters who adored him. From the Orthodox church where Procai had performed the Ukrainian “Hopak” dance on holidays. From all the things he had told Morgan he loved.

  A Marine honor guard stood at the rail, and the detail leader barked a command. Morgan fell in line with the firing party and sounded “Officers Call” on his bugle.

  “Crew!” an officer called out. “Parade rest!”

  The crew took the stance and Father Thomas Conway, the chaplain, stepped up wearing vestments, a lector in his left hand. He spoke scripture over the boy and administered a rite of hope and consolation.

  Conway called the men to prayer and they lowered their heads. Afterward, Morgan brought the crew to attention with a bugle call. Three times, the Marine detail leader uttered a deep command: “Aim . . . fire!” The honor guard fired three volleys into the sky over the rail. Then Morgan raised the trumpet and sounded “Taps” for his dear friend. It was one of the calls they’d practiced together.

  * * *

  I. 1MC is pronounced “One-Em-See.”

  II. The OOD (pronounced “oh-oh-dee”) is the officer of the deck. A rotating crew of qualified officers take shifts or “stand watches” in this position, which is located on the bridge when the ship is under way.

  7

  * * *

  APRIL 1945

  USS Indianapolis

  Kerama Islands

  FOLLOWING THE KAMIKAZE ATTACK, Spruance sent a message to Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of 5th Fleet’s amphibious assault troops. After months of planning and with twelve hundred ships ready to strike Okinawa, Spruance himself would be sitting D-Day out.

  Until the kamikaze, the lucky Indy Maru, as the men called her, had charged across the Pacific at the head of the fleet, challenged but unscarred, trailing victory in her wake. Now, though, the crew’s seeming shield of invincibility was shattered. Worse, they were trapped in the Kerama Retto anchorage. Japanese doctrine called for sinking not the greatest number of ships, but the greatest aggregate tonnage. In a harbor filled with sitting ducks, Indianapolis was the prize bird.

  Morgan found the whole thing unnerving, Indy swinging helpless on the hook and the venomous Japanese still buzzing around. “Since we’ve been anchored and disabled,” he wrote in his contraband diary, “we’ve felt as though we are living on borrowed time.” The crew had been warned not to keep diaries or journals lest they fall into enemy hands. But Morgan thought it would be all right since he never entered any secrets into print. “Air attacks from suicides continued last night and this morning, three more ships got hit. At first, being at war was adventurous, but after being hit, it is entirely frightening. Suicide boats are at night running in the harbor. A security watch is posted and a boat circling the ship all night continually.”

  With Lyle Umenhoffer and others, Morgan had escorted two sets of bodies—in canvas bags stitched by Indy’s sailmaker—to one of the outlying islands for burial. On one trip, a Japanese boy ran up to him. He couldn’t speak English, except to chirp, “New York! New York!” The boy gave Morgan a wooden flute. He was a friendly little kid, a bright spot in a grim errand. Then a Marine warned the funeral detail that while the island was mainly secure, rogue Japanese snipers were still taking potshots. Morgan hotfooted it back to the small boat that had brought them ashore and got the hell out of there.

  On the night of April 1, he addressed his diary entry to his wife, Mertie Jo. A pretty brunette with wide-set eyes and a Rita Hayworth smile, she’d married Morgan just after he graduated from boot camp. Morgan recounted to his wife the loss of Emery and Procai, who lived for only a few minutes after he was found. “It doesn’t seem possible that such a thing as this could happen. When you find out about it, my darling wife, I know you’ll feel as I do now, for you knew little Earl and good old staunch C.B., who many a time took my watch so I could see you.” Morgan ended the diary entry with his usual closing line, “I love you, Mertie Jo.”

  • • •

  L. D. Cox was ramming a slab of steel wool back and forth in a giant cooking pan, sweat streaming south in his collar. Beside him, a mile-high pile of pots and pans climbed toward the overhead, and steam snaked up from the deep sink to cook his face. Cox let go of the wool and flipped his palm up to look at it. The steel wool had chewed his fingers bloody.

  After the plane hit, he’d been sent to the scullery, where he’d been scrubbing pots and pans for two days straight. He was about to grumble aloud when he remembered the dead boys they’d buried at Kerama Retto. He deci
ded to stop feeling sorry for himself, picked up the scouring pad, and started in again.

  “Are you Loel Dene Cox?”

  Cox looked up to see an unusual sight—an officer in the scullery. “Yes, sir, I am,” he answered.

  “I noticed in your record that you’ve had some college. Since that suicider, we’re shorthanded up in navigation. How would you like to move from deck division to navigation? You’d work up on the bridge.”

  Cox tried not to sound too eager. “I’d like that, sir.”

  “Well, son, drop that pan and follow me.”

  Cox dropped the pan so fast and hard he imagined it ringing all over the ship, and in his mind, he licked that officer’s boots all the way up the ladder.

  Up on the bridge, he found Admiral Spruance and Captain McVay, a couple of other officers, the bugler Morgan, a yeoman named Buckett, and Lieutenant Commander Kyle “Kasey” Moore, who had been his boss up until a few moments ago.

  Now this is more like it, Cox thought, though he did think he detected the skipper giving his haircut an appraising glance.

  • • •

  A salvage ship, USS Clamp, had moored alongside Indy, and her chief salvage officer worked closely with McVay’s first lieutenant and damage control officer, Kasey Moore. Though “lieutenant” refers to a rank, “first lieutenant” is a Navy job title, and Moore’s included supervising maintenance of the ship’s hull. Now, in the wake of the kamikaze strike, Moore toured the hash of gnarled steel inside Indy’s skin and, with Photographer’s Mate Alfred Sedivi, snapped pictures to catalog the destruction.