by Lynn Vincent
As the 6 to 8 p.m. watch approached, Lieutenant Junior Grade Charles Brite McKissick made his way toward the bridge to relieve the officer of the deck. McKissick, a winsome twenty-five-year-old from McKinney, Texas, had been standing this critical watch for less than a year. Technically, he was still in training, and since the OOD was the direct representative of the skipper, he was careful not to cut any corners. Per McVay’s standing orders, he had stopped into CIC (Combat Information Center) for a brief on the tactical situation and found nothing out of the ordinary.
The deck swayed under McKissick’s feet. He judged the seas as somewhere between choppy and rough. Before assuming the watch, he picked up the communications board. It contained dispatches and other information for which every OOD was responsible during his watch. McKissick flipped open the metal cover and paged through the message traffic.
His eye fell on the dispatch Janney had spoken of—possible enemy submarine contact somewhere ahead. The dispatch included latitude/longitude information: 10-26N, 131-45E.
Over the past dozen hours, an equal number of messages concerning USS Harris’s submarine hunt had burned across the Philippine Sea between Captain Granum’s office in the Philippines and Captain Naquin’s at Guam. Most were also streaming out on one or more of the FOX schedules. Salting this chatter were such troubling terms as “oil slick”—the ghost residue left on the ocean’s surface by a submarine—“sound contact with engine propeller,” and “evaluation positive.” A message marked Operational Priority Secret noted that Harris attacked ten times with hedgehogs, and that USS Greene had joined in the hunt, contributing two depth-charge attacks. “Negative results. Lost contact,” that message concluded. “Classified as probable sub.”
It is unclear which hard-copy message made its way from Indy’s communications office to her bridge. All that is known is that the one clipped into the silver folder was dated July 29 and that it struck McKissick as routine. If a warship routed itself around every suspected sub, he knew, the U.S. Navy would never get anywhere.
As he relieved the watch, McKissick discussed this dispatch with the off-going OOD. The two agreed that even if the sub in question was steering an intercept course, the closest it would come to Indianapolis would be seventy-five to a hundred miles.
Glenn Morgan was just finishing up his watch when his friend, Quartermaster Third Class Vincent Allard, showed up for the 8 p.m. to midnight watch, along with one of his strikers, the new kid, Billy Emery. Captain McVay came to the bridge and Morgan listened as he and McKissick assessed the visibility. Allard had already noticed that it was too poor even to visually determine the direction of the swells.
McVay and McKissick walked out onto the port bridge wing to evaluate the sky. Though it was still technically twilight, as the sun had set less than an hour before, the darkness was already so nearly absolute that neither man could distinguish the features of the others on the bridge, just a few feet away. In the tropics, the transition from day to night passes quickly.
McVay told McKissick that at the end of the evening twilight he could secure from zigzagging and return the ship to base course.
“Aye, sir,” McKissick said.
Allard entered the captain’s order in the deck log. It was standard procedure to cease zigzagging as full darkness fell when visibility was poor. The standing orders, a sheaf of typewritten pages tucked into the back of the regular night order book, required the OOD to notify the captain immediately of any changes in sea conditions or weather.
McVay departed the bridge. And when darkness fully blanketed Indianapolis, the helmsman began steering a straight course.
• • •
As I-58 cruised on the surface, squalls fought each other aloft but did not trouble the sea. Hashimoto had hoped to remain on the surface, but a thick marine layer clotted the area and he could see no farther than if he had been staring into the bottom of an iron teakettle. The moon would rise in two hours. Perhaps visibility would improve then. Hashimoto ordered a dive and set a westward course at a submerged speed of two knots.
He went to the wardroom, having left orders to be roused at 10:30 p.m. Two-thirds of the crew also found places to lie down, stripped off their uniforms, and sprawled naked in all corners of the sub—atop torpedoes and rice sacks, even between shelves. Silence seeped through the dimly lit boat, interrupted only by the air-conditioning plant, the whisper of hydroplanes and rudders, and the scurrying of rats. These vermin were ubiquitous on IJN submarines. A perfect plague, Hashimoto thought, impossible to keep down. He had offered twenty yen cash plus an extra night of shore leave to any man who caught and killed one. Now he stripped off his uniform, lay down in his bunk, and listened to the strange music of his subaqueous domain.
* * *
I. Reports conflict as to whether the contact between Indianapolis and LST-779 was visual or by radio.
13
* * *
JULY 29, 1945
Near Midnight
The Philippine Sea
THERE WAS SCUTTLEBUTT FLYING around Radio 1 that evening. Radio 1 was the main communications shack and was located at the base of the ship’s forward superstructure one level above the fo’c’sle deck, where Admiral Spruance did his laps when he was aboard. A sailor leaning over the rail on the starboard bridge wing could see the door to Radio 1. Radio 2 was much farther aft, tucked in behind the second smokestack.
Fifteen or twenty minutes before midnight, Lieutenant Junior Grade David Driscoll, the communications watch officer, walked from the adjoining office into the main shack and made the gossip official: “Got a submarine report,” he said to the room. Such messages were decrypted in the comm office then passed to the OOD, who usually shared them with Commander Janney so that he could check the positions on his charts.
Elwyn Sturtevant, a Los Angeles native, reported to Radio 1 for the midwatch, along with four other men. He clamped on the headphones, sat down at the mill, and prepared to fish important messages out of the FOX schedule flood.
Though only twenty-one, Sturtevant was an old hand by the standards of the war. A radioman second class, he’d served in the ship’s radio department since May 1943, and considered the shacks greatly improved since the most recent Mare Island overhaul. Yard technicians had installed several new receivers, two new transmitters, and a direction finder to replace one that had its antenna sheared off by a friendly carrier plane at Okinawa.
The crew was in fine shape, too. A couple of new kids, Jack Miner and Fred Hart, had reported in the yard, but a lot of the men were experienced hands, while the division officer, Chief Warrant Officer Leonard T. Woods, was absolutely tops. All the men revered him, both as a technical expert and as a surefooted leader. Woods exuded the quiet authority of a man much older than his twenty-six years.
It was Driscoll, however, who had the duty with Sturtevant. A radioman sat near Sturtevant guarding Jump FOX, which, like the FOX schedule, was another fire hose of coded information. There were a couple of new strikers on duty, trainees in their assigned departments. Seamen Jack Cassidy and James Belcher had perhaps the most important midwatch job of all: taking care of the coffee gear.
Sturtevant registered Driscoll’s announcement about the submarine but was unbothered. Driscoll seemed bland about the message. Apparently, the sub was hundreds of miles south.
• • •
Lieutenant Commander Stanley Lipski appeared on the bridge to relieve McKissick at 8 p.m. The thirty-four-year-old gunnery officer from Northampton, Massachusetts, had served as a naval attaché in Helsinki before the war, and spoke fluent Russian. He was also a former intelligence officer and naval aviator. Everyone liked Lipski because he was that rare man who was both fiercely competent and a genuinely nice fellow.
This night, he wore two hats—OOD and supervisor of the watch. With him was Lieutenant Redmayne, the engineering officer who had relieved the disgruntled DeGrave. Redmayne was under instruction as supervisor of the watch and had stood duty on Indy’s bridge only a
bout half a dozen times. Before Indianapolis, he had served on two seaplane-tending vessels. Indy was his first chance to serve on a capital ship. When Redmayne relieved the watch, he noticed that visibility was very poor, with no moon.
Shortly after 8 p.m., Commander Janney, the navigator, appeared briefly on the bridge to deliver the night orders, then returned between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m. The Wild Hunter encounter had yielded new information, he told Lipski and Redmayne. A destroyer escort and a patrol bomber (known collectively as a “hunter-killer” group) had been dispatched to chase a submarine spotted by the merchant ship. The sighting was well ahead of Indianapolis’s path, in an area they would pass through at about 8 a.m. the following morning.
Meanwhile, in a second-deck berthing area near the stern, Harpo Celaya curled around a woolen blanket, trying to catch some shut-eye. The sweltering Pacific heat had turned the compartment into a greenhouse. Celaya had drawn a top rack, nearest the overhead where all the heat collected with no place to escape. He was used to heat, but at home in Arizona it was the dry bake of the Sonoran Desert, not a boiling hell like out here. He tossed and turned, half-dreaming and bathed in sweat.
“Celaya . . . ?” A jostling hand accompanied the whisper. It was his new crew chief, Everett Thorpe, a watertender. Thorpe let Celaya know that he was headed topside where it was much cooler and asked his friend to join him.
Both men had the 4 a.m. watch. Thorpe suggested that one or the other of them could be responsible for making sure neither overslept. Harpo agreed. Bleary-eyed, he climbed down from his rack, dragging his blanket behind him. It was about 9 p.m. They stopped by the galley and grabbed sandwiches, then climbed up to the main deck where, it appeared, they were late to the party. The heat belowdecks had driven much of the crew to seek respite topside. Bodies lay everywhere—men tucked under the gun turrets, sprawled out on the fo’c’sle, and under nets that held dozens of life jackets. Just when it seemed they wouldn’t find a space large enough to lie down, they found an empty spot on the quarterdeck.
Harpo and Thorpe sat down and started eating their sandwiches. Harpo liked Thorpe, who was from the Deep South and one of the few fellows aboard who didn’t seem to notice that he was Mexican. On the run over to Tinian, the two had spent almost nine days together in the fireroom with Harpo teaching Thorpe to speak a little Spanish.
Noticing that Celaya was carrying his heavy blanket, Thorpe questioned his judgment. The temperature topside was nearly as sweltering as below. What in the world did he need a blanket for?
“I can’t sleep without it,” Harpo said. “It goes back to when I was a kid, and if you tease me about it, I’ll have to kill you.”
Thorpe laughed. The truth was that back home in the Sonoran summer, if you slept without a blanket the mosquitoes would eat you alive. But Harpo thought it was funnier to let Thorpe think the blanket was some kind of childhood quirk. When he finished his sandwich, Harpo stripped off his pants and rolled them into a pillow. He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and lay down, staring up into the night, unconsciously toying with the St. Anthony’s medal that hung around his neck. His mother had given it to him before she left his father. Harpo always wore it for good luck.
• • •
In the red light of the charthouse, McVay reviewed the plot and night orders with Janney. The ship was darkened and the door to the charthouse was open. A night breeze whispered in, humid and salt-laden. McVay stepped out onto the bridge. By now, he estimated, Indianapolis had hit the PIM—the Plan of Intended Movement—although with the stars imprisoned behind the overcast, they were unable to take a celestial fix to confirm. Soon thereafter, Flynn directed the ship’s speed increased to about seventeen knots.
“I want to have a little bit of gravy up my sleeve in case we have to use it,” Flynn said, by which he meant make up ground they’d lost while zigzagging. That was fine with McVay. It would make a difference of only a few miles, and anyway, McVay remembered what Commodore Carter said: Things were quiet.
He could feel Indy undulating through long, deep swells, along with an irregular lateral motion. Even in the darkness, he could glimpse the fitful sloshing of ghostly whitecaps. This indicated a confused sea driven by opposite-direction weather patterns potentially hundreds of miles away.
Moonrise was expected a half hour before midnight, but it was now nearly 11 p.m. and the quartermaster, Allard, hadn’t seen even a hint of it yet. The bridge was so utterly dark that Allard couldn’t tell his strikers apart unless he got right up in their faces. Lookout stations were fully manned: Both wings of the navigation bridge had a pair of sailors on permanent stations with mounted binoculars. There were more lookouts with binoculars one level lower on the signal bridge, as well as additional full-time lookouts with mounted binoculars at “sky amidships” near the No. 2 stack. In all, no less than twelve men with binoculars were on watch at all times.
The 20 mm and 40 mm gun crews each had a man dedicated to lookout duty, adding ten more pairs of eyes. All night long, a petty officer would make regular rounds to ensure all these men were doing their jobs instead of catching a few winks.
Having given his stateroom to Captain Edwin Crouch, a friend and fellow Academy grad who had hitched a ride at Guam, McVay retired to his emergency cabin, less than ten paces aft of the bridge. The air in the tiny space sweltered. He stripped naked and lay down in his rack. Near his head, a voice tube from the bulkhead connected him with the OOD. Murmured conversation from the bridge floated through it into the cabin and carried him down to sleep.
• • •
A few minutes before midnight, Kasey Moore relieved Lipski as supervisor of the watch and took a turn around the navigation bridge. All watchstanders were posted and alert. McVay had ordered “Yoke modified,” a cruising condition normally set when there was little threat of attack. Under the standard wartime steaming condition, known simply as “Yoke,” a cruiser of Indy’s class was zipped up much too tightly for comfortable cruising. To seal the number of doors and hatches required for maximum watertight integrity would mean stifling both ventilation and the ability of essential watch personnel to move forward and aft.
Shortly after the war began, “Yoke modified” became the new standard for older cruisers. Aboard Indy, this configuration was more habit than prescribed. Main-deck and second-deck doors were left completely open, as were select others. While this improved the flow of air and personnel, it would also improve the flow of seawater through adjoining compartments if Indy were hit, potentially flooding the ship. The condition was a holdover from the previous skipper. Moore and McVay had discussed revising the damage control organization and procedures, even sending the ship’s damage control books down to San Diego so that trainers there could prepare appropriate damage control and battle problems. But the special mission to Tinian yanked Indy out of the States so quickly that they’d had to send a messenger down to retrieve the books immediately.
On the navigation bridge, L. D. Cox had his headphones on and was ready to pass data back and forth to the engine room. It had been pitch-black when he first took the watch at midnight. Now, though, the clouds had begun to break apart, and he glimpsed quicksilver slivers of moon.
Bugler Donald Mack ducked into the charthouse to talk with the quartermaster on watch, Jimmy French. Billy Emery, a spanking new graduate of quartermaster school in Bainbridge, Maryland, was there, too. This was Emery’s first ship. Since she looked to be in drydock for months and unlikely to see action again, his father, Lieutenant Commander John Emery, had pulled some strings to get Billy stationed on Indianapolis.
• • •
As ordered, I-58’s petty officer of the watch had roused Hashimoto at 10:30 p.m. with nothing new to report. Hashimoto dressed, visited the shrine, then mounted the conning tower, where he could use the periscope.
“Night battle stations,” he announced.
It was a routine order, something to keep the men on their toes. As the crew hustled to comply, he let his eyes adjust to
the darkness. Hashimoto ordered the diving officer to make his depth sixty feet.
It was 11 p.m. Moonrise was nearly sixty minutes old.
“Raise night periscope,” Hashimoto said.
When the instrument was just clear of the surface, he bent to the eyepiece and had a quick look around. The earth’s rotation had already flung the nearly full moon high into the eastern sky. It flirted with heavy cloud cover, lunar light glinting off the heaving sea. Hashimoto could almost see the horizon. At intervals, the moon shook herself free of clouds, and he judged the light sufficient for a submerged attack.
He nudged the periscope higher, then swept the headwindow left and right, scanning carefully.
“Stand by Type-13 Radar.”
Crewmen raised the antenna above the surface and detected no aircraft. With no skyborne enemy and a clean sea, Hashimoto decided to surface and look for enemy ships. He gave the order and I-58’s crew leapt into motion. Alarm bells sounded. Sailors hurried to their posts.
Hashimoto snapped the periscope handles into their housing. “Surface. Blow main ballast.”
High-pressure air rushed into the main tanks, expelling seawater and lifting the boat. I-58 broke the surface. When her decks were awash, the conning tower hatch was cracked open, sending a welcome stream of fresh air into the ship. Ears popped as pressure inside the boat equalized with the atmosphere.
When the pressure was fully equalized, a signalman climbed onto the bridge, followed by the navigator, who was intent on trying to take at least a partial celestial fix. The surface radar operator prepared to scan the area.
Hashimoto was still scanning through the night periscope when he heard the navigator shout, “Bearing red nine-zero degrees, a possible enemy ship!”
Hashimoto lowered the night periscope, bounded to the bridge, and raised his binoculars. Yes! There it was! A black spot on the horizon, hanging on the rays of the moon.
