by Lynn Vincent
Shortly after Spruance raised his flag on Indianapolis, he learned that Moore, of Knoxville, Tennessee, had been a respected newspaperman in civilian life. A staff writer at the Knoxville Sunday Journal, Moore had also traveled as a stringer for papers like the New York Times, taking expert photos to run with his stories. Spruance was keen to document American progress across the Pacific and quickly dubbed Moore “photographic officer.” From then on Moore, Spruance, and often Sedivi, boarded a Higgins boat and bounced into the beach of every conquered island.
Moore’s first trip ashore with Spruance was at Betio, Tarawa, and it marked him deeply. The island might as well have been hell. Crushed and blackened, the landscape wore the smell of death like a rotting skin. A thousand Marines and nearly five thousand Japanese had been killed. The stench was nearly unbearable and worked its way into Moore’s clothes so thoroughly that he later would not be able to get it out.
With Spruance and his staff, Moore picked his way through a sprawling vista of enemy corpses that stretched away like some grotesque landscape painted by a ghoul. Some Japanese had committed seppuku, ritual suicide, and their intestines protruded from their bellies in putrid loops. The images cemented Moore’s opinion that these men were fanatical warriors who would never surrender.
At Betio, Moore took his first pictures for Spruance, and the two would become good friends. Moore admired and respected the admiral more than any man he had ever known, loved his wry, quiet humor, and his dogged logic in the face of opposition. Of all the brass of whom Moore had taken pictures—Nimitz, Halsey, MacArthur, Fleet Admiral Ernest King—Spruance was one of the few who was reluctant to pose and never asked for copies. Along with Alfred Sedivi’s, Moore’s photos, processed in Indianapolis’s dark, cramped lab and absorbed into the Navy’s immense unbylined catalog, would become some of the most iconic of the Pacific war.
But neither man had had to document major damage aboard their own ship. Now, Sedivi snapped a series of pictures while Moore took notes. Wide gashes in the decks and skin laid Indy’s innards open to air and sea. Thick coatings of fuel oil clung to every surface. Multiple decks were jacked out of position, beams and framing buckled and twisted, bulkheads sheared from their stiffeners. Both the deep-sea dive locker and motor whaleboat hull had been destroyed. The explosion had also torn the No. 4 shaft completely off the ship, leaving another hole, two feet tall by six feet long.
After itemizing the destruction, Moore set an array of continuous watches. Sailors kept steady eyes on damaged areas, ready to report any signs of separation or weakening of bulkheads or watertight doors. Meanwhile, divers from Clamp worked to place soft patches over the holes.
• • •
On April 3, the admiral was striding across Indy’s mangled fantail when the chief salvage officer from Clamp walked up, crestfallen. “Sorry to report, sir, my men have dropped the propeller and it’s at the bottom of the harbor.”
The officer braced himself for a dressing-down, but Spruance said quietly, “That’s too bad.” Then he kept on walking.
This development did not dismay or surprise the admiral. He had chosen Indianapolis precisely because she was expendable. That was not the same as being substandard—in fact, far from it. Spruance had wanted for his flagship a quick, agile vessel powerful enough to defend herself, but with enough endurance to steam between the far-flung islands in this vast theater—perhaps the largest theater in the history of warfare. Whether his ship was taken out of the fight by the duties of command or by enemy fire, he had not wanted his withdrawal to weaken his fleet. Therefore, instead of setting up shop on a battleship or carrier, he had chosen a cruiser, and an aging one at that.
The plan now was for the ship to return to the States for repairs. The Okinawa landings had gone better than Spruance could have imagined, but he knew Japan’s ceding of the beaches meant fiercer fighting ahead. On April 5, Spruance shifted his flag to the battleship New Mexico. Before he and his staff trooped off Indy’s brow, the admiral pulled McVay aside and insisted that Indianapolis return quickly and resume duty as his flagship.
8
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APRIL 1945
Imperial Japanese Submarine I-58
Near Okinawa, Japan
ON APRIL 2, MOCHITSURA Hashimoto put to sea with the same kaiten crews he’d carried in his frustrated operation against Iwo Jima. Before his departure, he made a point of asking headquarters for detailed reports of the enemy’s positions off Okinawa. The Americans had already begun their bombardment there. Hashimoto was particularly keen to learn the disposition of American destroyer patrols off the island’s northern shore.
Okinawa’s airfields were just four hundred miles from Japan. Emperor Hirohito considered the island’s successful defense critical to achieving a negotiated peace with Washington and avoiding the shame of surrender. The garrison there had used their bare hands to extend a natural cave network into a labyrinth of trenches and bunkers. As at Iwo Jima, the strategy was to lie in wait, let the invading Americans come ashore, and then slaughter them wholesale. Japan’s military leaders hoped that if they could make America pay dearly enough for Okinawa, her leaders would judge the blood cost of a homeland invasion too high.
How had it come to this? Hashimoto wondered. He had been born in 1909, and by the time he was of age, Japan’s military was the pride of the nation. When he graduated from the naval academy and was commissioned in 1931, the nation boasted a robust economy and a string of war victories in Manchuria and China. This was as it should be, Hashimoto thought then. Was not Japan the land of destiny, chosen by the gods to lead the world? Was not even the emperor himself divine?
Now, as I-58 sailed south of Kyushu, a storm front crept in. Low dark clouds scuttled across the skies, and a gathering sea whipped and swelled. Hashimoto began to worry about whether he would be able to launch his kaiten. In this surge, they could broach and be destroyed.
The Type 1 kaiten—a name that means “the turn toward heaven”—was a modified Type 93 sanso gyorai, an oxygen torpedo. Each was small, less than an arm span across and about sixty feet long, and the fate of its pilot even more certain than that of the kamikaze. While the kamikaze might develop mechanical trouble and return to base, a kaiten could not redock with its mother sub. Once the pilot boarded the torpedo and closed the hatch, there was no escape. After launch, when the pilot reached final attack range, he surfaced to check his bearing and distance to the target via periscope and make any necessary adjustments. He would then submerge again, arm his warhead, and proceed on his final attack run. If he missed, he could make adjustments and try again. If he failed altogether, he could detonate his vessel as a last resort rather than sink to the sea bottom and slowly suffocate.
Though the kaiten’s creators both perished in failed underwater trials, IJN leaders had reason to see the project through. Japanese military planners thought the heavy, long-range projectile would give smaller vessels a mighty hammer with which to strike larger ones, such as battleships.
Hashimoto had not been able to launch kaiten since I-58’s first war patrol in January 1945. He remembered the send-off from Kure. As I-58’s virgin bow cleaved the harbor, the kaiten pilots sat on the converted hangar deck in their human torpedoes, swords held aloft, white headbands flying dashingly in the breeze. Hashimoto watched from the bridge as a festival of well-wishers in motorboats darted alongside, shouting good omens, prayers for success, and the names of these sailors about to sortie out and face the enemy. Beside the Japanese ensign flew another flag with the inscription “The Unpredictable Kaiten.”
On that patrol, Hashimoto had driven his boat to Guam, where he lurked eleven miles off Apra Harbor, lying to, waiting, dodging American ships and planes unseen. On January 11, thirteen minutes after surfacing, I-58 intercepted enemy radio traffic warning American ships that a suspicious vessel had been sighted.
Hashimoto tensed. Could it be us?
If it was, there was nothing he could do about it. His boat was two ho
urs from the kaiten launch point off Guam. He pressed on.
An earlier air reconnaissance report had shown twenty large and forty small transports moored in Apra Harbor. No glorious targets such as an aircraft carrier or large man-o’-war. Inwardly, Hashimoto felt sorry for the kaiten pilots, that they were about to sacrifice their lives for mere consolation prizes. But he rallied their spirits and counseled them each to search for the largest, most heavily loaded transport they could find. He also reminded them that the recon report was nearly thirty-six hours old. “Perhaps an aircraft carrier has come in since the report,” he offered as encouragement.
Hashimoto and one of his navigators climbed up through the conning tower to the bridge and looked out over the gunnery deck where the kaiten were lashed to the hull. Billowing clouds sailed in a dark sky that shimmered with starlight. Two kaiten pilots reported to the bridge, both wearing only fundoshi, the traditional Japanese undergarment. Except for the ocean swell sluicing against the hull, silence spread across the moment.
One pilot gazed into the heavens. “Captain,” he finally said, “which is the Southern Cross?”
Hashimoto tilted his eyes at the sky but could not find the constellation. He turned to the navigator and asked him to point it out.
“The Cross isn’t showing yet,” the navigator said. “It will appear soon, though, to the south.”
The pilot showed no disappointment, but said simply, “We embark.”
The pilots shook hands and climbed down to their kaiten, followed shortly by another pair of pilots, including Lieutenant Ishikawa, a young officer of twenty-two. Hashimoto wished them luck and gave them orders to board their torpedoes. Their composure at that moment struck him and would remain with him for the rest of his life.
I-58 submerged, and at 2:30 a.m., Hashimoto gave the order: “Stand by to launch.”
The kaiten aligned their rudders with the submarine, and a half-hour later—ninety minutes before dawn—the launch began. Two suicide torpedoes shot into the sea, their pilots shouting, “Three cheers for the emperor!” just before their telephone lines were ripped from the mothership. A third pilot had communication problems and could not be heard. The fourth pilot’s telephone line was working, but he jetted away from I-58 without uttering a sound.
For the next ninety minutes, Hashimoto and his crew listened on the hydrophones for clues that their brave comrades had hit their targets. A periscope search to the east showed promise—smoke, perhaps. But then again, it might have been only a dark cloud. In the end, nothing was confirmed.
That night at the evening meal, Hashimoto and his officers prayed for the souls of the departed pilots. Afterward, they attended to the young men’s personal effects, which included each man’s Isho, or “death letter,” containing last thoughts. Lieutenant Ishikawa had written:
The day of decisive action together with three other men on board has arrived. We are all well and in good spirits. . . . Great Japan is the land of the Gods. The land of the Gods is eternal and cannot be destroyed. Hereafter no matter, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of boys, and we now offer our lives as a sacrifice for our country. Let us get away from the petty affairs of this earthly and mundane life to the land where righteousness reigns supreme and eternal.
Now, so close to Okinawa, Hashimoto hoped for better success. But as at Iwo Jima, harassment by enemy fighters and bombers had again rendered him unable to charge his batteries. On April 6, he reached the area west of Amami Shima and at 1 p.m. spotted a ship, its superstructure slicing into the horizon. Though he was still close to home waters, the enemy’s advance had shrunk the seas like a harshly washed garment. Hashimoto could not afford to assume the ship was Japanese. Instead, he ordered a dive.
9
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APRIL 6, 1945
USS Indianapolis
Kerama Islands
ON THE MORNING OF April 6, enemy planes grazed the Kerama Retto anchorage, then banked back toward the main surface force that was still shelling the beach at Okinawa. The Japanese first targeted the outer ring of destroyers on picket duty, then swept down on the flattops at the center of the fleet. As many as twenty planes would swarm a single ship. Antiaircraft gunners shot most of them down, but pilots who managed to slip through crashed decks and superstructures, igniting infernos like the one that had torched Franklin. In all, ten coordinated attacks, more than three hundred enemy planes, dove on the American fleet that day, the largest coordinated suicide attack of the war. Japanese pilots dispatched by Vice Admiral Ugaki sank two destroyers, a high-speed minesweeper, and two cargo ships, while damaging dozens more.
From Kerama Retto, Indy’s gunners could see oily smoke piling up over the horizon, the noise terrific even from a distance. At 4:41 p.m., they opened fire on an enemy plane sighted to the west. After nightfall, two more planes attacked Kerama’s southern anchorage. One was shot down, while the other crashed an ammunition ship and exploded in a sheet of flame that seemed to reach the heavens.
The men of Indy thought Kerama Retto—“Island Chain Between Happiness and Good”—a gruesome place and wished they could get the hell out of there. The scuttlebutt was that the ship would go all the way back to the States for repairs, but some of the fellows said only to Pearl Harbor. On April 7, McVay weighed anchor, and at first it seemed he might have to shoot his way out of the little harbor. Gunners spotted enemy aircraft in the area as early as 3 a.m., and an hour later commenced firing. But at a quarter past six, the senior officer present in the anchorage gave the all clear. A half hour later, McVay stood on the bridge, sending commands down to the engine room.
Down in engineering, Commander Glen DeGrave used engines No. 1 and 2, starboard only, since the No. 3 shaft was unusable and the No. 4 screw now lay at the bottom of the sea. At half past seven, Indy passed through the northern antisubmarine net and by 1:15 p.m. had rendezvoused with the thirteen-ship task unit that would see her safely to Guam.
At the same time, a few miles to the west, Admiral Spruance was about to check off another objective on his war plan: The Japanese supership Yamato was crumbling under the assault of hundreds of American fighter-bombers. Twin waves of U.S. planes swarmed the mighty vessel until she resembled from the air a mastodon set upon by a pack of predators. As she made her final death roll, the ship disappeared in a great flash of light. A column of red fire shot skyward, then melted into a boiling thunderball. Aboard New Mexico, Spruance got word: Yamato was down. Her death marked the worldwide end of the battleship era—and also of Japanese surface resistance in the Pacific war.
In Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito heard the news, and for him, Yamato’s defeat signaled the futility of pressing on with the war. His generals, however, did not agree. They would fight to the death, even if it meant arming schoolgirls with bamboo spears. The next day, Hirohito secretly charged his new prime minister, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, with a new mission: find acceptable means of ending the war. Any means short of outright surrender.
10
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APRIL 1945
Alsos Mission
Stadtilm, Germany
NEARLY SIX THOUSAND MILES west of the emperor’s palace, another secret mission was nearing its climax. Army Major Robert Furman arrived in Stadtilm, Germany, to find that the Nazis had beaten him to his target by two days.
Furman was chief intelligence officer for America’s Manhattan Project. His mission was to learn how close the Third Reich was to developing an atomic bomb. Traveling with Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch-American physicist, Furman landed in Stadtilm, a close-built village of steep-gabled roofs and Gothic church spires, on April 10. The pair had tracked to the town a man whose name was near the top of their target list of German scientists: Kurt Diebner, a physicist with the Heereswaffenamt, the weapons agency of the German army.
Furman and Goudsmit, key agents in a clandestine U.S. mission called Alsos, wanted to question Diebner about the state of the Nazis’ quest to build a bomb. But by the time they arrived, the Gestapo
had already scooped up Diebner and other scientists and whisked them away to Adolf Hitler’s mountain fortress in the Bavarian Alps.
Pushing across Europe in the wake of advancing Allied troops, the Alsos mission had two main goals: to nail down the final truth about the state of German atomic science and to track down every last gram of fissionable material hidden on the continent. In Stadtilm, Diebner’s group had left behind a small cache of fissionable material in the form of pressed uranium oxide, as well as an atomic “pile,” or reactor. Goudsmit examined the pile and found it pathetically rudimentary. Added to the intel that had cascaded into Alsos all spring, the Stadtilm find was further evidence that the Nazis were years away from turning the doomsday theory of fission into a working weapon.
But mere evidence was not good enough for Furman’s boss, Major General Leslie Groves. The forty-eight-year-old general headed the war’s most closely guarded secret, America’s own bomb-building project, the Manhattan Engineering District. The specter of a German atomic weapon had haunted Groves since the summer of 1943, when Manhattan scientists working for him—including several German expatriates—raised the awful possibility.
There were signs. The Nazis’ heavy-water production in Norway, for example. There were also large missing caches of uranium ore, including boxcar loads that the Germans had seized in Belgium in 1940. And what of the news that Werner Heisenberg, considered by many to be the world’s foremost practicing physicist, was engaged in atomic research on Germany’s behalf?
Meanwhile, American atomic experts cloistered in covert labs at the University of Chicago, the Oakridge labs in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Los Alamos in New Mexico raised an even more chilling possibility. U.S. scientists had experimented with multiple ways of making fissionable materials, all complex and time-consuming, but all successful. Could that mean there might be other methods, too? Had they missed some tiny epiphany that would unlock the secret of a simpler fission, one the enemy had discovered already?
