by Lynn Vincent
Harrell saw Marine Lieutenant Edward Stauffer standing near canvas bags full of life jackets secured to the bulkheads.
“Sir,” Harrell called. “Permission to cut down the life jackets?”
“No,” Stauffer said. “Not until we’re given the orders to abandon ship.” Then another burn victim staggered out onto the deck. It was the gunnery officer, Commander Lipski. Burned flesh hung from his arms and his eyes were charcoal pits in his face. “Help me,” he moaned.
“Get the commander a life jacket,” someone yelled, and immediately sailors rushed in and cut the canvas bags down. Yeoman Victor Buckett grabbed the kapok vests and started handing them out to the crew. Harrell grabbed one and put it on Lipski.
The quarterdeck was quickly overrun as injured men were brought up from below and from the forward parts of the ship. Amid the bedlam, the gravely injured Lipski stood calmly, ordering men to grab life jackets.
• • •
On the signal bridge, nineteen-year-old Signalman Third Class Paul McGinnis heard the keening of men being cooked alive somewhere below him. McGinnis had felt the torpedo attack as a violent shaking and donned a life jacket, just in case. Now, the excruciating screams rooted him in place and seemed as if they would never end. Then something even more horrific happened: The screaming stopped.
The signalmen around McGinnis began stowing classified papers in weighted bags to sink them. Then, oddly, another of his buddies began the ordinary chore of tidying up, sweeping up spilled sugar and grounds from around the coffee station. For a minute, McGinnis thought everything was going to be okay.
Down in the port hangar, Jim Jarvis, a third-class aviation machinist mate, had not been awakened by the explosions, but by the profound hush that followed. Usually, the blower in the hangar was so loud that it made conversation almost impossible. But when the torpedoes hit, the blower stopped and Jarvis lurched awake in the strange quiet.
Also conspicuously absent was the near-constant yapping of the 1MC, which governed ship life even in emergencies. Like the blower, it remained eerily mute, paralyzing large portions of the crew as they awaited orders.
All over the ship, men snatched up handsets for the JL Talker, a kind of telephone network and a main conduit to the bridge, and tried to get information or report what they were seeing. On the darkened bridge, Seaman First Class A. C. “Tony” King manned the JL Talker and found that he couldn’t receive or send messages either. No one on the ship could talk to him, and therefore, to the officers in command.
• • •
Now dressed, McVay returned to the bridge.
“Somebody get the captain a life jacket!” Orr yelled.
L. D. Cox jumped to comply, retrieving one of the new kapok vests. He helped McVay into it then put one on himself. Cox noticed strange noises filtering up from below. The black smell of burning filled his senses, and the ship’s list began to increase. None were good signs.
Another sailor asked Cox if he was getting ready to be sunk. Cox glanced at him as he secured the kapok’s straps. “I’m going to be ready for anything.”
Lieutenant Commander Kasey Moore, who had already been forward, returned to the bridge and addressed McVay.
“Sir, we’re going down rapidly by the head,” Moore said, concerned but cool. “Do you wish to abandon ship?”
Even in good conditions with the ship properly trimmed and ballasted, she would capsize rapidly if the list angle reached sixty-five degrees. Now, McVay estimated that Indy had taken a list of only about three degrees. The kamikaze had produced a bigger list, which the crew had been able to control quite easily. McVay felt confident they could do the same here.
“Not yet,” McVay said to Moore. “Take another look and give me any further information.”
Then McVay turned to Cox. “We’re still making way,” he said. “Put your headphones on and see if you can raise the engine room. Tell them to cut all power to the screws.”
“Aye, sir.” Cox clamped on the phones, but the circuit was dead. “I can’t reach the engine room, Captain,” he said.
• • •
In Engine Room 1, below the waterline in the exact center of the ship, the effects of the torpedo hits had been catastrophic. The main generators tripped out due to short circuits in the forward power lines. The lights had gone out instantly, imprisoning the men in absolute darkness. The normal whine and hum of machinery wound down to a spectral silence.
In the cavernous, three-story compartment, a few battle lanterns flickered to life. Within the first minute, Norman Roberts and William Nightingale, both first-class machinist mates, could see that the steam pressure had plunged from three hundred pounds per square inch to seventy-five. They knew that could mean only two things: One, a torpedo had struck the forward fireroom next door, triggering a colossal steam leak, and two, the men in there were dead—likely flash-boiled.
Roberts was covered with coffee. He’d been holding a full cup when the torpedo struck, and the impact blew him so high he’d hit the overhead. Now, the ventilation ducts up there were spitting red-hot sparks. Without steam pressure, the forward turbines that drove the two outer screws stopped. The propellers still turned, though, driven slowly by ocean water dragging over them, like pinwheels in the wind.
All through this, the crewmen in Engine Room 1—the forward engine room—worked to establish communication with the men in the after-engine room. After several failed attempts, Nightingale managed to get a connection and reported that he had lost the electric lead forward and had no steam. Then Nightingale’s orders finally came through: start a main generator. It was the last successful transmission.
• • •
Radioman Jack Miner burst through the light-lock door between Battle 2 and Radio 2 and found that the overhead lights in the back half of the ship were on. Fred Hart, a second-class radio tech, was already in the room. Miner, a nineteen-year-old from Glencoe, Illinois, had completed a semester at Yale before joining the Navy to help win the war. He’d been aboard for only seventeen days. Now he stood in Radio 2, five decks above the waterline, with Hart, wondering about their next move. The ship’s transmitters were located here in Radio 2, but the receivers were in Radio 1 in the forward half of the ship.
Hart saw that all the Radio 2 gear seemed to be in place except for a transmitter that was in for repair and had slid off a rack onto the deck. All the transmitter pilot lights were lit, which meant they had power.
About five minutes had passed since the torpedo strikes. Hart could feel that the ship had taken on a slight list, and that she seemed to be settling gradually. He was thinking maybe they hadn’t been hit too bad when Chief Warrant Officer Leonard Woods entered the shack, burned and covered with soot.
“We’re in bad shape,” Woods said to the group in the room, which had grown to seven or eight men. He had been sleeping in his quarters when the explosions hit and had seen the damage forward, including a mass of flames. He suspected that the cables connecting Radio 2 with Radio 1 were severed. That meant the indicator board that would normally tell Radio 2 which sending positions the main shack was going to use, and which transmitter, was dead.
Woods did not seem to notice his burns. Instead, he simply took charge. “Grab a life jacket or life belt, blow up the belts, and keep calm,” he said. “Miner, power up the TBK.” The TBK was a 500-kilocycle transmitter. It was always kept warmed up, so all Miner had to do was throw the power switch.
“Hart, go to Radio 1 and get our position,” Woods said.
The radio chief didn’t know whether Hart would be able to get to Radio 1. It was two hundred feet forward through a maze of flames, smoke, and God knew what else, up and down four ladders tilted at crazy angles, around multiple gun mounts, across the quarterdeck, and up to the comm deck. Who knew what he’d find when he got there?
Woods didn’t know whether Radio 1 would be able to transmit remotely, but he did know this: The radio shacks had just become the most important compartments on the dying
ship.
17
* * *
RADIO 1 WAS WRECKED. Half the operating positions had been jarred loose and a hash of receivers, furniture, and typewriters clogged the space, lit only by the dim glow of battle lamps. Two receivers in a far corner of the shack were burning, sifting smoke into the room.
Elwyn Sturtevant, Radioman First Class J. J. Moran, and the rest of the radiomen crowded into the comm office with Lieutenant Driscoll. Without ports to see outside the room, the men were concerned that the enemy was still in the vicinity and would spot any light emanating from the ship. They planned to evacuate via an interior office door that would not emit any light, but when they opened that door to exit the space, the passageway was a tunnel of fire.
“Turn around,” Lieutenant Driscoll shouted. “Go out the main shack door!”
Sturtevant and the others turned to comply, but when they opened the main radio shack door, they ran into Paul Candalino, the junior officer of the deck under Orr.
“Transmit a distress message,” Candalino said.
Driscoll nodded and snatched up the telephone to call Radio 2. The line was dead. He tried the squawk box. Also dead. Thinking quickly, Driscoll said to the room that someone would have to go to Radio 2 and set up two frequencies.
“Aye, sir, I’ll go,” Sturtevant said. Driscoll issued brief instructions and Sturtevant sped out of the shack. Driscoll, a young officer who’d been aboard for less than a year, did not send the ship’s position with Sturtevant. It was an omission on which a thousand destinies hinged.
Sturtevant navigated the fiery gantlet to Radio 2, where he found Woods standing in the center of the room, issuing orders.
Sturtevant cut in. “Lieutenant Driscoll says to set up 4235 and 500 and pipe it to Radio 1.”
“We’re already up on 500, we’ll key that from here,” Woods said. “We’ll pipe up 4235 to Radio 1 on Line 3. Go tell Lieutenant Driscoll.”
Sturtevant dashed out, back through the bedlam toward the main shack.
Woods then moved to an emergency key that was connected to the TBK transmitter. The key was located at the starboard bulkhead. With the ship’s starboard list, Woods had to adjust his footing to remain upright.
Not knowing Indy’s position, he began to transmit the only message he could: SOS.
• • •
Plunged into thick darkness when the torpedoes hit, John Woolston could see nothing but sparkles of flame in the passageway that led from the wardroom to the quarterdeck. Except for mild burns, he wasn’t injured, but smoke and heat were pouring into the room. He called to the steward, who answered back from within the pantry, fear in his voice. Woolston found his feet, felt his way to the serving window, and swung himself through.
“Let’s find a wrench and open the ports,” Woolston said. He meant to open the two steel ports that covered the pantry portholes. They needed fresh air—and fast. The steward laid his hands on a wrench, opened the forward port, and handed the wrench to Woolston. The ports opened, he and the steward thrust their heads out into the night and sucked in air that tasted cool and alive. A few moments passed as Woolston gathered his strength.
“Okay, we better climb out of here,” he said.
But breathing the by-products of fire had already veiled the steward’s brain to reason. “I wanna stay here and rest a little longer,” he said.
Woolston knew if they stayed there, they would die. He looked down at the steward. There was no way he could lift the man to safety. He peered up at the porthole. It was small, but he was slim.
Woolston looked back at the steward again. “Don’t dawdle,” he said, then thrust his head and shoulders through the port’s narrow circle, braced his hands on the outside, and pushed. Directly below him, he saw a dark void, a straight drop into the ocean. There was no room for a mistake.
When his hips were through, Woolston was able to spin himself faceup so that he was sitting in the porthole, facing the ship’s skin. He reached up and grabbed deck lines that were strung above him. Eeling his way free, he pulled himself up to the fo’c’sle deck.
Woolston took stock. Despite billowing smoke, he could see no fires topside. Still, Indy’s bow was under and she was listing badly. To Woolston, it looked like the end, but the men he could see—both officers and crew—seemed controlled. Shouting orders and rushing about, but in an orderly way. He climbed down to the quarterdeck, then up to the afterstack, which he reached by climbing a two-story ladder that canted forward as though he were climbing a hill.
• • •
On the second deck, badly injured Marines were stumbling into Mess No. 1, the compartment just aft of the Marine Corps berthing. The second torpedo had decimated the Marines’ quarters, and those not killed instantly were severely burned and in shock. A corpsman ordered the men laid out on the mess tables and then circulated among them, administering morphine to relieve their pain.
The No. 4 throttleman was also in the mess, doing his best to close the auxiliary steam stop and isolate his broken boiler. He noticed that the room was beginning to fill with oily seawater and decided it was getting bad enough that he should warn the men in Engine Room 1 below. A ladder connected the mess with a hatch at the forward starboard corner of that compartment.
The throttleman yelled down the ladder well into the engine room: “Main steam line in the port side parted at the forward bulkhead and dropped down about four inches!”
Nightingale acknowledged and glanced at the clinometer, which now showed a ten-degree list. Because Indy’s decks were tipping to starboard, seawater in the mess had begun pouring down the ladder well into the engine room, the way one cup in a tilted ice cube tray pours water into the next.
Nightingale assessed the situation. The electric generators wouldn’t start. The auxiliary steam line aft couldn’t get any steam. There was no battle power to light off the dynamo plant. Now, loose equipment was starting to tumble to the low side of the compartment.
Again, the throttleman’s voice echoed down the ladder well: “Get out of there!”
Nightingale agreed and made it an order: “All hands clear the engine room,” he said.
The crew surged toward the ladder but quickly found they had waited too long. As the list increased, the water streaming down the ladder swelled to a deluge, blocking their escape. They would all drown in minutes if they didn’t find a way out.
• • •
Having abandoned the pilot house, Glenn Morgan and Ralph Guye had attached themselves to the tilting handrails as best they could and clambered up.
“We need kapoks,” Morgan said. They stopped briefly where the life vests were supposed to be secured to a line near the bridge, but all the vests were gone.
The men looked at each other. “We’ve still got these,” Guye said, jerking his chin toward the inflatable fastened to his belt.
The skipper and Lieutenant Commander Moore had required every crew member to carry a rubber, self-inflating life belt at all times, and always made a big deal out of it, even posting mess hall watches so that a man couldn’t get chow unless he had his life preserver with him. Morgan was glad for that now. The two men quickly snapped the inflatables around their waists and headed for the bridge. Morgan was in the lead, clasping the port rail to keep upright against the list.
• • •
Aboard I-58, the suicide pilots were pleading their case. Since the enemy ship wasn’t sinking, the kaiten pilots begged, “Send us!”
It was true. Through the periscope, Hashimoto could see no signs that he had sunk the cruiser. Despite the dark, the stricken ship would now certainly be an easy target for the kaiten. But what if she sank before they reached her? Hashimoto thought. That would be a waste of both men and ammunition.
A report came in that the enemy was using underwater detection gear. Hashimoto was sure he had scored three hits, but it seemed the target intended to return fire. Before the enemy could get a good contact, Hashimoto decided to dive and reload in the safety of the d
eep.
18
* * *
ONLY SIX TO SEVEN minutes had passed since the torpedo strikes. Roberts and Nightingale led the men of Engine Room 1 toward the gushing water that tumbled from the overhead hatch. They crowded behind the ladder that led to the No. 1 mess and looked up. There was an air locker up there, above the hatch but below the mess. It was a small crawl space that extended laterally beyond the column of the ladder well. The air locker would not fill with water unless the entire engine room was filled first. If they could reach it, they could brace themselves in the air locker one at a time and force their way up through a hatch into the mess, even as water continued to fill the space.
Each man was wearing a “Mae West” life vest, named for the curvaceous 1930s star. The vests were inflatable, but the men did not inflate them yet. Instead, as seawater crashed into the engine room, they waited. As the rising flood carried them toward the air locker, they prayed that no one up there would see the hatch open and dog it down.
• • •
Up in the mess, choking smoke danced between the battle lantern beams, and an eerie red glow seeped in from somewhere, possibly from the fires in sickbay below. The mess was already filled with injured Marines from their berthing, and even more wounded had crowded in—many scarlet-skinned with severe flash burns—who were helped there by men who were better off. One man wandered in wearing only undershorts. He was burned head to toe, and fire had singed off all his hair. The compartment was waist deep with oily water now, and a flotsam of kitchen tools and tables and benches clustered near the starboard bulkhead, drawn there by the list.
Seaman First Class Marvin Kirkland was in the mess and heard someone shout his name. When Kirkland turned to look he saw the chief damage control officer, Lieutenant Commander Kasey Moore, working to unwind a fire hose from a bulkhead rack.
“Get topside and see how much hose you can find,” Moore said. Concerned about fires in the forward areas of the ship, he ordered Kirkland to get more help, and to return on the double.
