by Lynn Vincent
Hashimoto uttered a single word: “Dive.”
The four men on the bridge slid down the ladder. The last man down, the signalman, pulled the hatch closed. Hashimoto manned the periscope again. The black shape was still there, clear through the headwindow.
“Open the vents,” he said.
As the main ballast tank vents opened, water gushed into the tanks, and I-58 slid down until the lid of the sea closed above her.
“Ship in sight,” Hashimoto said.
An invisible charge shot through his crew, man to man. In the four years since he first lurked off Pearl Harbor, never had Hashimoto been in such a potentially advantaged position. The dark silhouette drew closer, but he could not yet discern the class of ship.
What if I-58 had already been detected? What if the shape was a destroyer pressing in for the kill? Thick darkness concealed Hashimoto’s face from the others in the conning tower, and he worked to keep his voice composed.
“All tubes to the ready,” he said. “Kaiten, stand by.”
14
* * *
JULY 30, 1945
Midnight
The Philippine Sea
MARINE CORPORAL EDGAR HARRELL got off watch a little before midnight and decided to sleep topside again. The night before, he and a buddy named Munson had bedded down atop the No. 1 gun turret. There were a couple of big life rafts lashed to the turret’s gently sloping roof, so it was nice and comfortable up there. The only problem was that it was against regulations. With Indy’s interior sweltering, Harrell wanted to avoid his bunk again, but he also wanted to avoid getting busted down in paygrade. Munson had opted for the life rafts again, but there was some open deck space under the barrels of the same gun. Harrell decided to sleep there.
The night was thick and warm. Harrell spread his blanket on the steel deck and tucked his shoes under his head for a pillow. As he gazed up at the sky, moonlight sifted down through the overcast, then disappeared again. He felt tired and homesick. Harrell thanked God for His protection and asked Him to watch over his family and Ola Mae, his girl back home. The deep hum of Indy’s engines and the swooshing of her wake carried him down toward dreams.
Well forward of Harrell, on the bow, Harpo’s friend Santos Pena stretched out on top of a ready-box full of 20 mm ammunition and gazed up into the moonlit clouds. His lookout shift would begin shortly, but for now he welcomed the silky night breeze.
• • •
I-58’s crew waited, breathless. The black shape on the horizon soon gathered itself into the shape of a triangle suspended in the moon’s silver light. But looking through the night periscope, Hashimoto still could not determine her class. Neither could he see the height of her mast in order to estimate the range. This lack of data opened the door to an array of possible mistakes, and his mind ticked through them all.
Without the range, course, and speed of the target, he could not make the proper calculations to obtain a hit. If the class of ship were known, he could estimate the speed by counting the target’s propeller blade frequency, but the hydrophones remained silent. And with the target pointed directly at him, its hull was masking sonar sounds. He would have to wait until the target was on a broader line of sight to ferret out its speed. Also, changes in the target’s speed and course could throw off Hashimoto’s aim, especially at night, so the moment of firing had to be determined in advance.
A whole kingdom of errors loomed. But if Hashimoto could keep them small and fire six torpedoes in a fanwise spread, he could ensure a hit. Even if he guessed wrong on one of the variables—or even if the target zigzagged, as it was almost sure to do.
A crisp demand interrupted his calculations: “Send us!”
It was the suicide pilots. Hashimoto had been so preoccupied with his Type 95 torpedo calculations that he had not followed up on his earlier order for the kaiten.
“Why can’t we be launched?” the pilots clamored.
Hashimoto understood their desire. The kaiten could steer to the target, regardless of its speed or course. But the touch-and-go, obscured visibility would make it difficult for the pilots to home in visually on the target over a period of tens of minutes. To get a Type 95 torpedo hit, all he needed was a reasonable estimate of speed and range, along with one good bearing, and he could send his fish to their target. That was the better option here, so he decided not to use the kaiten unless the oxygen torpedoes failed to hit their mark.
Hashimoto put his eye to the scope again and saw the top of the triangle resolve into two distinct shapes. He could make out a large mast forward and estimated its height at ninety feet. His heartbeat quickened. She appeared to be a large cruiser, ten thousand tons or bigger. Now I-58’s hydrophones gurgled to life, announcing enemy propeller revolutions that were moderately high. Using visual observations, Hashimoto adjusted and put the target’s speed at twelve knots, course 260, range three thousand yards.
He alone could see all this. Without him, the crew could know nothing. As they awaited his word, straining in the deadly quiet, an exhilarating thought formed in his mind: We’ve got her.
• • •
Ensign John Woolston had the 8 p.m. to midnight watch in damage control central. Four officers rotated through the watch from dusk to dawn, and Lieutenant Hurst, the new damage control officer who’d come aboard three weeks after Woolston, usually joined the primary watchstander. He did this night, freeing Woolston to roam the ship to ensure that watch teams were doing their required inspections and setting the proper damage-control condition. Woolston emerged topside to make sure the ship was fully darkened and also took a peek at the weather. At that moment, it was a pitch-black night, and thick clouds intermittently obscured a nearly full moon.
Touring the decks, he found the ship fully darkened, with no errant lights that would paint a bull’s-eye on Indy for an enemy sub. Woolston checked his watch and headed back to damage control central. At almost exactly midnight, his relief appeared, and Hurst cut Woolston loose. Gratefully, Woolston headed up to the wardroom, where he greeted the lone steward, a young black man, working behind the serving window.
“Coffee, please, and a ham sandwich,” Woolston said.
He looked around the wardroom, which was roughly square with a low overhead. Several rows of long tables sat empty, surrounded by thinly padded, heavy metal chairs. Woolston mused that when he toured Indy as a kid, he had sat and eaten a sandwich in this same space.
The steward rustled up the coffee and sandwich, and slid it to the serving window. Woolston picked up the cup and plate, found a table, and sat down.
• • •
Aboard I-58, a sonarman thought he heard the clinking of dishes.I Twenty-seven minutes had passed since I-58’s navigator spotted the enemy ship. It now became apparent that the target was approaching off the starboard bow. He ordered the torpedo director computer set to “green sixty degrees”—the torpedoes would turn sixty degrees starboard after launch.
The target closed the distance: twenty-five hundred yards . . . two thousand . . . fifteen hundred.
“Stand by . . .” Hashimoto commanded in a loud voice. “Fire!”
At two-second intervals, six torpedoes ejected from tubes carved into the sub’s forward hull, one tube after another until all six were away. A report came from the torpedo room: “All tubes fired and correct.”
It was about five minutes after midnight, and six warheads streaked toward the enemy warship in a lethal fan. Hashimoto snatched a look through the periscope, brought his boat on a course parallel to the target, and waited. Every minute seemed an age.
* * *
I. Yamada, Goro. “Sinking the Indianapolis: A Japanese Perspective.” Interview of an I-58 crewman by historian Dan King.
15
* * *
THE FIRST FISH SLAMMED into Indy’s starboard bow, killing dozens of men in an instant. The violent explosion ejected McVay from his bunk. The ship whipped beneath him and set up a rattling vibration that caused him to flash back to Ok
inawa.
Had they been hit by another suicider?
No, he thought. Impossible.
In the blink of time those thoughts took, another shattering concussion rocked Indy amidships. Acrid white smoke immediately filled McVay’s emergency cabin, and he could not see. He picked himself up off the deck, felt his way to the cabin door, swung around the bulkhead, and appeared on the lightless bridge stark naked. At that moment, there were thirteen men on the bridge. Only three would survive.
• • •
The first explosion knocked Pena off the ready-box, and he felt the ship’s bow lift from the water. A brilliant yellow flash bloomed straight up from the bow and along both sides, an immense fan of fire. The spray hadn’t yet settled from the first blast when the second struck farther back, near the No. 1 gun turret. Pena scrambled to his feet and looked forward. Less than ten feet from where he was standing, it looked to him as if Indianapolis’s entire bow was gone.
High over Pena, on watch in forward fire control near the top of the superstructure, Troy Nunley happened to have his eyes trained on the bow when the first torpedo slammed home. He saw the mammoth blast peel the bow leftward and down, opening the front of the ship from the bowsprit aft to frame 12. In the explosive flash, he glimpsed the bow’s dark form hulking underwater, still attached by thin tendrils of steel like the lid of an opened tin can. Nunley, who had watched men sealed below decks after the suicide strike at Okinawa, knew instantly that any man who had been forward of frame 12 was dead.
• • •
In the pilot house, Glenn Morgan felt the deck vault up and wallop him in the back. Caustic smoke slithered in through the portholes and sucked his breath away. He flicked on his red-lensed flashlight and aimed it at his watch. It was a few minutes after midnight.
Morgan saw his good friend Ralph Guye, a quartermaster, peering at him, the red beam lighting his face in an eerie glow.
“What do you think happened?” Guye asked.
“Maybe a magazine exploded,” Morgan said. But that was as wild a guess as there ever had been. In truth, he had no idea, and the uncertainty bothered him.
“Do you think we should go up to the bridge?” Guye asked. Morgan agreed and they took off.
On the quarterdeck, Harpo heard Thorpe screaming. The first torpedo blast had lifted both men off the deck. The second blast amidships sent a fireball their way. Harpo saw that Thorpe had been singed from head to toe. He himself felt as if he had just been doused in fire. His hair was gone. His eyelashes were gone. The heavy woolen blanket was gone as well. It had burned up entirely, but had saved the rest of him. Both men jumped up and ran toward their battle stations.
• • •
When the explosions rocked the ship, Clarence Hershberger woke up in midair to see a fifty-foot pillar of smoke and flame shooting straight into the night sky. In a flash, he realized this inferno was roaring up from the same hatch he’d been sleeping beside only moments before.
Hershberger hit the deck half-stunned. When he gathered himself, he noticed that his uniform was soaking wet. How could that be? He could only guess the explosions had sent a wave over the bow. If so, why hadn’t it washed him overboard?
No time to think about that now. The deck was getting so hot it was beginning to burn his socks. He hotfooted it back to berthing in search of his life jacket.
• • •
Down in the officers’ quarters, Dr. Haynes had been blown out of his bunk. He staggered into the smoke-clogged passageway to find the surrounding compartments engulfed in fire. He felt his way toward the wardroom, where, beyond the fire, John Woolston had been about to take the first bite of his ham sandwich when a hollow, metallic boom shook the ship. Whirling caterpillars of flame flashed in through the wardroom’s two forward doors then flashed out again, as though there were a dragon in the passageway.
Woolston had just three seconds to realize that he’d been singed when the second, louder blast directly beneath him threw him to the deck. Two more sheets of flame poured in through the wardroom doors. Then the lights went out.
• • •
Hashimoto peered through his night periscope at the scene of destruction unfolding quickly before him. On the target’s main and after-turrets, skyscrapers of silver water shot toward the moon. Red tongues of flame followed immediately after, tasting the night. A third column of water rose alongside the No. 2 turret and seemed to swallow the ship.
“A hit! A hit!” Hashimoto shouted, and his elated crew improvised a victory dance.
With the target now offering no threat, Hashimoto raised the day periscope and let the men in the conning tower have a look. The hydrophones then registered deep, heavy explosions—secondary blasts far greater than the torpedo strikes themselves.
“Depth-charge attack!” some of the sub crew shouted in fear.
“No,” Hashimoto said, reassuring them. “It is the target exploding. There is no other enemy in sight.”
Hashimoto put his eyes to the scope again and saw flashes of fire rippling across the target.
• • •
Nine thousand feet above Indianapolis, Army Captain Richard G. LeFrancis gazed down from the cockpit of his Douglas C-54 Skymaster at what looked like a spectacular naval battle. LeFrancis, an Army transport pilot en route from Manila to Guam, had been briefed that the Navy was planning fleet gunnery practice somewhere between the Marianas and the Philippines. His instructions were to stay clear and fly about twenty miles north of the area.
LeFrancis had a brigadier general aboard, a big cheese who worked directly for MacArthur. The captain called the general up to the cockpit to check out the action below. The senior officer took the copilot’s seat and seemed to LeFrancis to really be enjoying the action.
“Looks like the target is firing back,” the general remarked.
LeFrancis agreed. As the men peered down, the fireworks below were a bit surreal—spectacular, but because of the plane’s altitude, entirely silent.
• • •
When Hashimoto’s torpedoes struck Indy, her aviation fuel stores ignited, and a maelstrom of flame and explosions incinerated or severely burned anyone belowdecks in the forward part of the ship. The blaze torched men sleeping in sickbay, the forward enlisted berthing, the Marine berthing, and the compartment occupied by the ship’s stewards. A deck above, those in officers’ country were also in peril as fires ripped upward.
The Japanese Type 95 torpedo carried a huge explosive payload designed to mortally wound battleships and cruisers. The initial pressure blast was meant to buckle the ship’s skin and weaken her internal framing. The warhead’s second effect was to punch a cavernous, temporary hole in the ocean beneath the target. These first- and second-order effects created a kinetic ambush: With a well-aimed torpedo, the weight of both the weakened ship and the displaced water would crash back into the void and break the vessel in half.
Hashimoto’s first torpedo rammed Indy’s starboard bow just below the forward 20 mm antiaircraft guns. Before anyone had time to process what had happened, the explosion was over, its work done, and Indy’s bow was in shambles. Ripped away between frames 12 and 13, the bow clung to the keel of the ship like a hangnail, held there by only a few threads of hull plating. Two seconds later, the second torpedo exploded below the waterline near frame 45, missing Indy’s armor belt by just a few frames. The twin blasts and water cavity effects ruptured the hull, tore open the thin outer strakes, and opened the ship to the sea.
With the bow sheared off, and the propellers still pushing the ship forward, the honeycomb of exposed passageways and compartments funneled the sea into the interior of the ship. A wall of seawater surged in, drowning the men immediately behind frame 12. The main and second decks continued flooding fast, and fuel oil floated atop the seawater.
As Indianapolis lay broken on the surface, many men thought instantly that she was doomed. Others thought she would weather the blasts, whatever they had been.
“Hurrah!” cried one sai
lor who had been standing watch near the 40 mm guns. “One of the boilers blew up! It’s back to the States for us!”
16
* * *
ON THE BRIDGE, MCVAY addressed the officer of the deck, Lieutenant John Orr. “Do you have any reports?”
“No, sir. I’ve lost all communications.” Orr, agitated, added that he tried to stop the engines, but was unsure whether the order got through to the engine room.
With the steel deck of the bridge tilting slightly under his bare feet, McVay made a rapid calculation. The engine room telegraph was electrical, and it was out. So, too, were the ship’s service phone, the battle phones, and even the sound-powered phones. That was it: All comms were down.
Orr told McVay he had already dispatched Lieutenant Junior Grade Paul Candalino two decks directly below the navigation bridge to tell the men in Radio 1 to send a distress signal. Orr had also sent the boatswain’s mate of the watch, Coxswain Edward Keyes, to pass word that all hands were to report topside.
McVay looked at Orr. “See what other information you can get,” he said, then turned to go back to his emergency cabin for clothes.
• • •
From his station a hundred feet above the waterline in the main battery director, Firecontrolman Third Class Robert Witzig saw all hell breaking loose below him: men dashing to their battle stations; others burned, broken, and screaming; the damaged bow belching smoke and swallowing water. Looking aft, he saw smoke, flames, and sparks jetting from the forward stack, and a crowd beginning to gather on the quarterdeck.
Marine Corporal Ed Harrell was headed there himself as he tried to reach his emergency station. Moving aft, he saw burned men climbing up from below, shrieking in agony. Melting flesh dripped from their faces. Bones jutted through their skin. Harrell’s stomach turned at the charred stench of burned human flesh.
