Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  Acknowledging the order, Kirkland climbed out of the tilting mess and headed for the quarterdeck. It would be the last time anyone reported seeing Moore, who would remain below, fighting to save his beloved ship.

  • • •

  Topside, Seaman Second Class Harold Bray had reached his battle station on the fantail when he heard the quartermaster, Jimmy French, yelling at him over the noise. “You better go, kid! She’s going down!”

  Bray, eighteen, had been waiting since age fourteen to get on a ship and fight the Japs. He had just finished boot camp in April, finally joined a ship, and now he was going to abandon it?

  Bray hollered back, “I don’t think she’s going down!”

  Frenchy’s words just didn’t make sense. How could a ship as big and beautiful as Indianapolis sink?

  Fire Controlman Third Class Paul Murphy confronted a different question after the blasts. Murphy, Lebow’s poker buddy, finally made it up to the 8-inch after-control tower, his general quarters station, and found one of his good friends, Paul Boone Mitchell, fast asleep. Murphy wondered how anyone could sleep through such a jolt.

  He shoved a life jacket at Mitchell. “Take this and go to your general quarters.”

  Mitchell darted off. Now, near the stern and away from the damage forward, Murphy was encouraged to see hundreds of men leaning on the lifelines on Indy’s port side. Their collective weight had to be in the thousands of pounds, he thought. Surely, all that weight would right the ship. Murphy ran up to the port lifelines to help.

  When Seaman Sam Lopez saw this human ballasting effort, he turned to his buddy Hank McKlin and yelled, “They’re crazy! This ship isn’t going to tilt. It’s going to sink.”

  But it was impossible to get the ballast men to listen, so Lopez and McKlin climbed a ladder, grabbed four rolled-up cargo nets, and hoisted them atop the port railing. Their plan was to wait for the Abandon Ship call and then slide down the side of the ship, along with the cargo nets, and swim away together.

  • • •

  When only a few inches of air remained, the men in Engine Room 1 inflated their Mae Wests and let the jackets propel them up into the air locker. From there, one by one, they fought their way up through the falling water, and up through the hatch into the mess, letting their jackets pop them to the surface of the mess hall flooding. Each man vacuumed in deep breaths of air and relief. Conditions in the mess were very bad, but at least they weren’t lethal, as in the space they’d just escaped.

  After confirming that all hands had escaped Engine Room 1, Nightingale fought the deluge of water, trying to dog down the hatch. But it was impossible and he abandoned the effort. He decided to see if he could help in the after-engine room, a carbon copy of the compartment he’d just left.

  Nightingale waded out of the mess and headed toward the stern. On his way aft, he picked up a badly burned man in the passageway and carried him to the No. 2 mess, which had also become an aid station. When he climbed down into the after-engine room, the lights were on, and with the exception of wafting smoke, he could see pretty well.

  “Why have you abandoned the forward engine room?” a voice said.

  It was Lieutenant Redmayne, the engineering officer, who had been in the fancy crapper known as the “Head of Department Head” when the torpedoes hit.

  Nightingale explained what had happened in Engine Room 1. Redmayne said no more, only turned to inspect some gauges. The list was now approaching fourteen degrees.

  “Should I return to the forward engine room, sir?” Nightingale said.

  “No,” said Redmayne.

  When Redmayne said nothing further, Nightingale exited the after-engine room and attempted to make his way forward on the port side in order to check the steam stops.

  • • •

  The fire control officer burst onto the bridge. “Sir, I can’t get to the engine room. It’s fire everywhere below.”

  “Go back and try again,” McVay said.

  Janney then appeared on the bridge, and McVay told him to take another message down to radio. “Say we’ve been hit by two torpedoes. Give our latitude and longitude. Say we need immediate assistance.”

  The instant Janney left for Radio 1, Commander Joe Flynn arrived on the bridge. “Sir, the damage is serious,” he told McVay. “I recommend that we abandon ship.”

  McVay, who had utter regard for his executive officer’s ability, assessed the situation. As the list angle increased, the clinometer needle had swung slowly toward twenty degrees. With an unknown number of compartments flooding below, the ship’s stability would be seriously compromised. McVay made the mental calculations and determined that his ship was doomed. Now he had to allow enough time for his men to escape with their lives.

  He turned to Orr. “Pass the word to abandon ship.”

  With all communications out, the abandon-ship order would have to be passed man to man.

  • • •

  The radiomen Hart and Sturtevant missed each other in their sprints between Radio 1 and 2. When Hart arrived in the main shack, he saw Lieutenant Driscoll holding a flashlight over Radioman First Class J. J. Moran. The room was dim and filled with smoke. By the wavering glow of Driscoll’s light, Hart could see Moran trying to send a distress signal.

  Though the transmitters were physically located in Radio 2, all were set in remote position so that they could be controlled from the main shack. But the pilot light was dark. Moran couldn’t tell whether he was successfully transmitting his message, but he sent it anyway, in the blind.

  Moran, who came from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, had run to Radio 1 from a forward coding room where he’d been sleeping. The passageways had been blocked with fire and smoke, so he climbed out a porthole and up the outside of the ship to reach the main shack. Now, tapping the code key, Moran sent the distress message that Driscoll had jotted down on a piece of paper.

  XRAY VICTOR MIKE LOVE—WE HAVE BEEN HIT BY TWO TORPEDOES . . . NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE.

  He repeated each word twice and included the ship’s position by latitude and longitude, still unsure if transmission was going out. Frequency 4235 had been set up for just such an emergency ever since Indy sailed from San Francisco. Moran knew the transmitter could work even with a busted pilot light, and he hoped like hell that it was working now.

  Hart leaned over Moran’s shoulder and copied down the message. It included Indy’s designator, and also gave her position.

  Returning from Radio 2, Sturtevant crowded into the room. He relayed Woods’s message. “4235 is ready to go on Line 3!” Sturtevant said.

  By now Hart had copied down the full distress message. He told the group he would take it back to Woods in Radio 2. Hart turned and left the shack, but he soon found he couldn’t go back the way he’d come. The ship had lurched sharply to starboard, tilting the deck twenty degrees, and the quarterdeck was now awash. Hart knew the door to Radio 2 was located on the starboard side. Going back there might be suicide. Besides, that shack had probably already been abandoned anyway. Hart clambered over a gun mount and abandoned ship. With him went the slip of paper containing the last known coordinates of Indianapolis.

  19

  * * *

  WHEN COX HEARD CAPTAIN McVay order abandon ship, he left the bridge. He’d heard about captains going down with their ships, and God help him, Cox didn’t want to go down with him.

  Clambering down to the portside comm deck, he looked over the railing. He could see the fo’c’sle deck below him and knew that if he tried to jump, he would never make it past that deck and into the water. Thinking quickly, he looked around. There! A steel hook welded to the outside of the splinter shield. He remembered vaguely that the hook was used to store gaffs—part of the equipment for retrieving seaplanes. Cox reached out, grabbed the hook, swung out as far as it would take him, then let go. He saw the fo’c’sle deck go hurtling by beneath him, then slammed into the hull and tumbled into the sea.

  • • •

  On the bridge, McV
ay took stock. Neither Candalino nor Janney had returned from the main radio shack. It was absolutely essential that someone be notified of Indianapolis’s location. McVay turned to Orr. “I’m going down to Radio 1.”

  The main shack was directly below the bridge, two decks down. On the way, McVay knew he could take a look at the part of the main deck he’d heard was split near the No. 1 turret. He could feel the list increasing, see and smell fire, and hear the din of men scurrying around the ship. But no one had given him specifics about the damage, and he could not visualize why she was going down so fast.

  McVay ducked into the charthouse, where he picked up a kapok life preserver. On his way past his emergency cabin at the after end of the bridge deck, he ran into Captain Edwin Crouch, the friend who had hitched a ride to Leyte at McVay’s invitation.

  “Charlie, have you got a spare life preserver?” Crouch said.

  McVay ducked into his cabin and grabbed an inflatable life belt. He handed it to a quartermaster named Harrison. “Blow this up for Captain Crouch,” he said. McVay then continued on his mission to ensure a distress signal got off the ship. He would not see either Harrison or Crouch again.

  • • •

  In the after-engine room, Redmayne made a decision that would affect every man who left the ship. The chief oil king and one of his assistants reported to Redmayne and asked if they should pump fuel oil from the starboard fuel tanks overboard. Doing so would help shift ballast away from the list. Redmayne gave the order, and the oil king executed it. Great gouts of fuel oil, thick and viscous, glugged out into the sea around the ship.

  Now Redmayne found himself at an impasse. While Engine Room 1 had controlled specific elements of Indy’s propulsion system, the after-engine room could control all four screws. The choices Redmayne made next could determine the fate of the ship, and he was unsure of what to do. What he needed was more information from the bridge, so he decided to head up there himself. Before climbing the series of ladders that would take him out of the huge space, he turned to his men. They were to remain in the after-engine room until he returned, he said. The order was a death sentence.

  • • •

  In Radio 2, Chief Warrant Officer Woods was still at the emergency key. With the ship heeling rapidly to starboard, it had become almost impossible to stand. Miner and others grabbed bolted-down objects and held on. Woods braced himself against the starboard bulkhead, leaned over the key, and kept tapping out his SOS.

  Peering over Woods’s shoulder, Jack Miner saw the needle on the antenna circuit jumping and waving like a friend offering help. His heart soared. That meant they were transmitting! The SOS was going out!

  But Hart had still not returned, and without the ship’s position, it was just the SOS, again and again. Still, the TBK was a powerful transmitter. As long as the antenna meter was loading up, the signal should be heard all over the Pacific.

  • • •

  Indianapolis now lay in the water at a forty-five-degree starboard list. Half her main deck was awash and smoke billowed aft from the obliterated bow, carrying with it the smell of explosives. Black clouds rolled over the knots of men topside still struggling to reach the high side of the ship. Shouted orders flew through the haze against the sound of churning waters.

  When Redmayne left the after-engine room, gauges showed steam pressure holding at three hundred pounds per square inch, and the No. 2 screw continued making 160 turns per minute. This propelled Indy forward and down, in a long, slow loop to port.

  On various decks all along the high side, men three and four deep clung to rails, lifelines, and each other. Nightingale was there, as were Lebow and his poker buddies, Smitty and Gaither. While Lebow was climbing to the high side, the ship had taken another hard lurch and he had seen a motor whaleboat jump from its saddle, barely miss Nightingale, and crush several men against a bulkhead.

  More men had begun leaving the ship, some leaping into the dark, oily sea and others walking down the hull. George Horvath, a twenty-five-year-old motor machinist mate from Ohio, was near the fantail when he saw something that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Two black stewards came racing up a nearby ladder and ran full speed toward the fantail.

  “No! No! No!” Horvath screamed. “Don’t do it! Don’t jump!”

  But it was too late. The stewards leapt over the lifeline, off the fantail, and right into the turning screws. Horvath froze, his mouth still formed in a scream, his mind unable to process what he’d just seen.

  They died quickly, they died quickly, they died quickly, he thought rapid-fire.

  It was the only thing he could do to reconcile himself to the horror.

  • • •

  An exterior ladder connected the after end of the bridge to the signal bridge below it. As McVay put his foot on the first ladder rung, Indianapolis took a sickening roll and he saw people sliding past below him. Clinging to the angled ladder, he managed to climb down. As he reached the signal bridge, the ship heeled over another fifteen to twenty degrees. The list had now passed forty-five degrees and Indy was still rolling and going down steadily by the head. By clinging to fixed objects, McVay was able to wrestle himself to the ladder leading down to the port side of the communications deck. Soon the ship seemed to steady itself at a sixty-degree list. He could see young sailors on the high side jumping overboard, some without life jackets, all with faces full of fear.

  McVay pulled himself up to the lifeline where boys were leaping from the ship. “Do not jump over the side unless you have a life jacket!” he yelled. “Or go back by the stack and cut down a floater net! Throw that over the side before you jump!”

  McVay heard a voice yell from above him, “That is the captain talking!” It was Orr calling down to the boys from the bridge. “Now get your floater nets and your life jackets!”

  • • •

  As Glenn Morgan and Ralph Guye climbed toward the high side of the ship, Morgan saw Lieutenant Orr standing outside on the bridge wing, yelling into a bullhorn, directing traffic with his free hand. “All hands, abandon ship! All hands, abandon ship!”

  Morgan marveled at the young lieutenant’s calm demeanor, the businesslike way he instructed the men to leave the ship in a safe manner. Orr had been through this drill before, only it hadn’t been a drill. He’d been aboard the destroyer USS Cooper when she was torpedoed and broken in two in Ormoc Bay, Luzon, just seven months earlier. Cooper sank within a minute with more than half her crew lost.

  Feeling Guye’s hand grip his shoulder, Morgan paused and turned his head. Guye looked into his eyes. “What do you say we stick together through this?”

  Morgan nodded. “Yes, let’s do.”

  Happy to have a friend like Guye to face this with, Morgan turned and scrambled up the incline, reaching the bridge with Guye behind him. When they reached Orr, the lieutenant called over the noise. “Did you hear the word to abandon ship?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Another of Morgan’s buddies, the bugler Donald Mack, stood next to Orr with a plastic horn in his hand.

  Morgan yelled at him, “Well, are you gonna blow that damn thing?”

  “When I get orders to!” Mack hollered back.

  • • •

  Woolston clambered back down from the afterstack and struggled to reach the port rail, since he was climbing the deck sharply uphill. Another steward crawled up, clinging to the port rail to keep from sliding downhill. He did not have a life jacket. Woolston grabbed the steward by the arm, guided him to an open deck edge, and the two slid together into the darkened sea. Woolston and the steward splashed down into a slick of fuel oil that was clotted with unclaimed life jackets and a mass of men. Some, frozen in fear or shock, lingered in the dangerous water near Indy’s keel. Others swam away to avoid the suction that a sinking ship was said to create on her way down.

  Woolston helped the steward into one of the jackets and urged him to swim toward a group well away from the ship. Then Woolston struck out, swimming the strong craw
l he’d learned while growing up on Puget Sound. When he felt he was out of immediate danger, Woolston stopped and turned around. The ocean was consuming Indianapolis.

  20

  * * *

  WORD FINALLY MADE ITS way to Harrell’s emergency station: Captain McVay had given the order to abandon ship. He knew that abandon-ship procedures called for him to leave from the high side. Turning his eyes forward, he saw that much of that part of the ship had already disappeared into the sea. Harrell found he could barely stand on the leaning deck. He could see men leaping from the ship, landing on top of each other in the water.

  Harrell made his way carefully to the port side and paused there, staring down into the inky dark. Fire and screams and death raged behind him, and the oil-slathered sea heaved below him, 280 miles from the nearest land.

  Terror suffused him, but he also knew that this moment had been ordained for him by his Savior. Looking down into the oil-slicked mire of the sea, he remembered Jeremiah, whom God rescued after the prophet’s enemies had thrown him into a miry cistern to either drown or starve. Harrell knew only one thing to do: he cried out to God.

  In the blink of an eye, his fear was replaced by a sudden enfolding peace that Harrell would remember as supernatural. The transformation was not an act of will. Instead, Harrell felt it as the warmth of divine assurance. His God was with him and would see him through.

  In two long strides, he traversed the port hull to the waterline. He jumped into the water, splashing down amid the fuel oil. Immediately, his life vest leapt up around his head, and he struggled to keep his face out of the oil. Caught between the liquid darks of sea and night, Harrell plunged forward, swimming. As he cut the water, trying to escape the drag of the ship, snatches of Scripture raced through his mind, passages he’d memorized over the years: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”