Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  Toti had discussed his struggle several times with his wife, who was more cautious than he by nature.

  “These men are our friends,” Karen said. “If there’s any chance you’re going to make them mad, then maybe you shouldn’t do it.”

  “But how can I not do it?” Toti said. “I was an Indy captain. I sailed the same seas as McVay. I have imagined those events through his eyes too many times. And as a submariner, I’ve imagined the opposite side of those same events over and over again through Hashimoto’s eyes.”

  Then, that day at the reception, Toti had looked at the fire in Murphy’s and Morgan’s eyes and known there was no way he could turn them down.

  “Of course,” Toti had told them. “I’ll look into it.”

  After the deactivation ceremony, Toti and his crew spent ten months preparing the submarine Indianapolis for the boneyard, a meticulous (and laborious) process that broke Toti’s heart. Then it was time for new orders. He and Karen wanted to stay in Hawaii near her family, while Toti transferred “up the hill” to Pacific Fleet headquarters. But a four-star admiral preempted those plans.

  Toti had served in Admiral Don Pilling’s orbit during an earlier Pentagon tour, when Pilling had only one star. Fast-forward five years and three more stars, and the admiral was now Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Pilling was a man with an easy sense of humor and a brain the size of a warship. After graduating fourth in his 1965 academy class, he went on to earn a PhD in mathematics from the University of Cambridge. He spent most of his sea duty on smaller surface ships, rising to command USS Dahlgren, a destroyer, then Cruiser Group 12, and then Sixth Fleet naval strike forces in southern Europe. Throughout his career, Pilling remained a scholar, even serving a fellowship at the Brookings Institution. The joke around the Pentagon was that if he dropped his briefcase, math books, and not Navy paperwork, would fall out.

  The admiral had noticed Toti during his first Pentagon tour, when Indianapolis completed a mission so highly classified that Toti would not be able to talk about it for the rest of his life. After Indianapolis was deactivated, Pilling put out the word that he wanted Toti as his special assistant. And what the vice chief wants, the vice chief gets. So Toti, Karen, and their kids, Sara and Billy, flew east and moved into a brick colonial in Springfield, Virginia. The place was small, but after bouncing around Navy duty stations for more than a decade, it was their first real house, and they loved it.

  Now his family was upstairs asleep, and Toti was doing what he’d been doing on nights and weekends for an entire year. He’d reread every book written about Indy and her tragic end, as well as the court-martial transcript and reams of testimony that survivors had given at the Navy’s supplemental investigation in late 1945. He had been searching for a hidden answer, something a sub skipper might spot that had eluded the survivors for decades. He hadn’t found anything new—until this report that was now robbing him of sleep.

  It was the Navy’s latest legal analysis of the sinking and the court-martial of Captain McVay, prepared in response to a request by Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. To get a copy, Toti had stopped by the Offices of the Judge Advocate General at Washington Navy Yard—the scene of McVay’s 1945 court-martial—and asked for it.

  Along with the report, he had received a salvo of condescending glances from attorneys in the room: Oh, this sub driver thinks he’s a lawyer now.

  At more than seventy-two thousand words, Commander R. D. Scott’s report was a book in itself. It dealt with lofty constitutional principles as applied to civilian control of the military, the separation of powers, and the attenuation of individual rights in the military. When the report first appeared in 1996, it infuriated the Indianapolis survivors, who felt it not only perpetuated myths and misinformation, but added to them. Toti tended to agree. For one thing, Scott, a Navy JAG, had included his own assessment of Hashimoto’s submarine attack on Indianapolis. If McVay had been zigzagging, Scott reasoned, Hashimoto’s torpedoes would have missed, end of story.

  Toti, a sub commander, thought that analysis somewhere between naive and preposterous. Submarine warfare was not some kid’s game where, when your torpedoes miss, words pop up on your radar screen flashing GAME OVER, and you pack up and sail home. Toti reasoned that if Hashimoto’s first salvo had missed, he would simply have repositioned and fired again. At McVay’s 1945 court-martial, Captain Glynn Donaho, the only submarine expert brought to the stand, had said the same thing.

  In some cases, Toti thought Scott had become transfixed by his own prose. For example, after his rescue, McVay testified that as his ship rolled catastrophically to starboard, he was swept overboard. Scott wrote, “The Navy has never challenged Captain McVay’s uncorroborated account that he did not go down with his ship because he was swept over the side by a wave, notwithstanding apparent conflicts in his testimony.”

  Here, Toti knew, Scott was suggesting that it was McVay’s duty to go down with his vessel, a notion that had no foundation in naval regulation or even naval tradition. Not only that, Scott was implying that McVay, a man who had won a Silver Star for gallantry, was lying about how he wound up in the water, while inexplicably telling the truth about other details that would surely damn him.

  As a seagoing captain himself, Toti found this personally offensive, and it washed away any lingering reluctance to help the survivors clear their skipper’s name. It was Richard Newcomb, the Associated Press news editor and author of Abandon Ship, who first triggered the survivors’ efforts. Newcomb was the first to explore the legitimacy of McVay’s court-martial and to reveal publicly for the first time the mechanics of his conviction. In writing his book, Newcomb scoured naval records, questioned Navy officials, and also interviewed the two captains, McVay and Hashimoto.

  In 1958, Abandon Ship stirred the hearts of the survivors, and in 1960 they held their first reunion. They held another one every five years until 1995, when the reunions became more frequent. To a man, the survivors believed McVay was innocent. Many family members of men lost at sea felt the same way. Galvanized by Newcomb’s research, the men, their families, and supporters began rattling cages. Writers and lawyers and lawmakers parsed the arguments over the captain’s actions, his trial, and its outcome. Many accused the Navy of a cover-up. The word “scapegoat” was frequently invoked.

  U.S. senator Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii read the Indianapolis story into the Congressional Record, and McVay’s adult sons, Kimo and Quatro, campaigned on their father’s behalf. Kimo even wrote to President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. But American presidents, the sons were told, had no authority to set aside a military court-martial. Meanwhile, McVay’s court-martial was legally correct, JAG officers had ruled, the verdict legally sound. Therefore, nothing could be done.

  In 1990, hope for exoneration flared briefly with the publication of Fatal Voyage by Washington Post foreign correspondent Dan Kurzman. But again hope quickly faded.

  Between 1990 and 1995, the Murphys—Paul and Mary Lou—along with Glenn and Mertie Jo Morgan, Jimmy and Mary O’Donell, L. D. Cox, Dick Thelen, and others, pressed even harder toward two goals: building a permanent monument to honor the Indianapolis dead and clearing their captain’s name. In 1995, they saw the first dream achieved when a stately granite monument to the ship’s final crew was erected beside the Canal Walk in the city of Indianapolis, Indiana.

  Still, the survivors did not rest. Instead, they plied the halls of Congress. Wearing buttons and other Indy memorabilia, they met by appointment with their state representatives and senators and presented their case for exonerating McVay. Lawmakers were always gracious, according the survivors the respect they were due. After each trip to Washington, the Murphys in particular were sure that this would be the time they put the ball in the end zone. But each time, as had been the case through five decades, their efforts came up short.

  Toti closed R. D. Scott’s noxious report, switched off the banker’s lamp with a little brass chain, and climbed the stairs toward be
d. He knew how heavy the weight that hung around McVay’s neck must have been. A captain develops a relationship with both his vessel and his crew. Toti himself had become intimately familiar with his Indy and her shifting moods. He wondered how losing her—how losing his men, his officers, his friends—would have felt. He wondered whether he could learn to live with it even as it tore him apart.

  Toti imagined McVay’s life a nightmare from the moment Hashimoto’s torpedoes blew off Indy’s bow. Something beyond a nightmare, really—a realm for which there was perhaps no word. He imagined McVay in the courtroom at Washington Yard, a base his father, the flinty admiral, had once commanded. Toti had been to that courtroom, had seen its imposing austerity.

  He imagined himself in McVay’s position, a cruiser commander in a victorious Navy, having played a key role in that victory by delivering the Little Boy components to Tinian. Knowing that as the world settled into a costly peace, he had become the public symbol of one of the American Navy’s most devastating defeats, a disgraceful counterpoint to his nation’s epic victory.

  Toti imagined McVay still fighting, still reliving those torpedo blasts, still replaying his own decisions, wondering if there was anything else he could have done.

  BOOK 4

  TRIAL AND SCANDAL

  PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS AND WASHINGTON, D.C.

  AUGUST 5, 1945–JUNE 30, 1949

  1

  * * *

  AUGUST 5, 1945

  AT BASE HOSPITAL NO. 20 on Peleliu, sixteen reporters crowded around Captain McVay and scribbled furiously as the skipper, his skin still scorched and windblown, described the horrors of those days at sea. Malcolm Johnson, a Navy-accredited war correspondent, noticed that McVay had the presence of mind to ask that a stenographer be provided to transcribe the interview. The captain’s story was vivid and detailed, and Johnson thought the transcript would make one heck of a read.

  The reporters asked pointed questions, the most consequential of which was, “Why was no search begun?”

  “That is my sixty-four-dollar question,” McVay said with more than a trace of indignation. “And I intend to ask it.”

  The news that Indianapolis’s crew had languished for days in the open sea hit Johnson with a seismic jolt. He listened as McVay’s frustration bubbled up.

  “We were due at our anchorage at 1100 hours [on Tuesday]. I should think by noon or 1300, they would have started to worry,” the captain said. “A ship that size practically runs on a train schedule. I should think by noon they would have started to call by radio to find out where we were, or if something was wrong. So far as I know, nothing was started until Thursday.”

  Johnson was an experienced reporter who had covered the Pacific war from inside the theater. McVay left no doubt in his mind that he believed a search should have been instituted within twenty-four hours of his ship’s becoming overdue. Johnson jotted down this fact in his notes.

  AUGUST 6, 1945

  Major Robert Furman and a knot of officers and scientists leaned toward a radio like young trees in a gale. The Enola Gay was returning to Tinian from Hiroshima, her bomb bay triumphantly empty. In the preceding days, tension had stretched like a tightwire over Tinian as poor weather, military strategy, and diplomatic chess moves delayed the order to strike. But fifteen seconds after 9:15 a.m. on August 6, Enola Gay’s bomb bay doors opened and the weapon known as Little Boy dropped free, hurtling toward Hiroshima.

  Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew counted off the seconds until impact. When they hit “forty-three,” the sky flashed white and a jolt rocked the plane. On the ground below, as many as 140,000 souls perished.

  Now, news tumbled from the radio about the B-29’s success. As the plane neared her final approach to Tinian, Furman broke away and joined the stream of celebrants flowing down to the airfield. About two hundred men—officers, enlisted, scientists, and technicians—began lining the taxiway. A throng of dignitaries had gathered as well. The most senior was General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces. After VE Day, Spaatz transferred over from Europe, where he had worked directly for General Eisenhower. During the final climactic drive to defeat Hitler, Spaatz, who was then Strategic Air Forces commander in the European theater, convinced Eisenhower to make serial strikes on the Reich’s oil supply his top air priority.

  “The chimera of one air operation that will end the war . . . does not exist,” Spaatz argued then. His comment would prove prescient: In the Pacific theater, it would take two.

  Furman watched as Enola Gay touched down in a thrum of propeller noise and taxied to her coral hardstand through a gantlet of cheers. Tibbets, Captain Deak Parsons, and the rest of the crew descended the ladder. B-29s had a tendency to crash on takeoff. Parsons’s job had been to arm Little Boy midflight so as not to accidentally blow Tinian off the map.

  “Attention to orders!” a voice cried out. The crew and all in uniform snapped to attention.

  Spaatz marched up and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to Tibbets, pinning the medal to his flight suit.

  Tibbets then said a few words to his men. “We have accomplished today what the 509th was organized to do,” he said. “We saw a Jap city and wrecked same.”

  As Furman looked around, he could see that the men of the 509th were nearly overcome with emotion. Speaking of the medal Spaatz had just pinned on his chest, Tibbets let his eyes roam over the whole squadron. “I owe it to you,” he said, then praised every division individually, from the cooks and mechanics to the utility workers and office staff. “No one could do anything without you.”

  After the airfield ceremony, a day of celebration unfolded. It was, Furman thought, a display of food, drink, and entertainment equal to what any remote, ultrasecret, womanless island could have mustered. But soon, black news cast a shadow over his sense of mission accomplishment. Word was bouncing around the Allied archipelago that Indianapolis had sunk. The news grieved Furman. He had grown fond of the naval officers—the first lieutenant, Kasey Moore. The executive officer, Joe Flynn. Stan Lipski, the gunnery officer. Had any of them survived?

  Days later, the press descended on Tinian for limited interviews with the Enola Gay crew and Project Alberta scientists. It was then that Furman released the information crediting Indianapolis and her crew with the dangerous transport of the atomic bomb materials from San Francisco to Tinian. He thought they deserved that much. But someone higher in the food chain put that revelation on ice.

  AUGUST 7, 1945

  An entire day had passed since seventy thousand structures in Hiroshima were leveled by the first atomic bomb, but most Japanese leaders seemed largely unfazed. The Japanese Army released an underwhelming communiqué stating that Hiroshima was attacked by “a small number of B-29s” causing “considerable damage” and that “a new type of bomb” had been used. Details, the communiqué said, were now under investigation.

  The Japanese government took no other action except to send a fact-finding team to Hiroshima, and to delay any further response to the previously ignored Allied surrender terms issued at Potsdam until the team returned. It was clear that the Americans were following through on their vow to rain “prompt and utter destruction” on Japan if she failed to surrender. But the Empire had weathered devastating B-29 raids before, including the apocalyptic firebombing of Tokyo in March that destroyed sixteen square miles and killed between 80,000 and 130,000 people. How was this attack on Hiroshima different? The Supreme War Council could obtain very little reporting except for news that a single bomb had essentially wiped the city from the earth.

  Sixteen hours after the Little Boy blast, Truman released a statement from the White House that removed all doubt about what had happened. “It is an atomic bomb,” Truman said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” He reminded the world that the terms offered from Potsdam were meant “to spare the Japanese people
from utter destruction.” If Japan did not now accept those terms, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

  In view of the Americans’ new weapon, Foreign Minister Togo urged Emperor Hirohito to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. The emperor agreed. The tragedy of Hiroshima must not be repeated, he said. Togo was to tell the prime minister, Suzuki, that he must find a way to terminate the war without delay. Suzuki called an emergency meeting of the Supreme War Council, which included the top leaders of Japan’s military, but was told that the council had “more pressing business” to attend to.

  The Army, long opposed to surrender, then busied itself with suppressing the news seeping in from Western sources that the Allies had, with Potsdam, offered the opportunity to surrender. Through a combination of news censorship and government propaganda, many Japanese citizens believed that although they were starving and living in constant fear of the ominous shadow of B-29s, their nation was still on the verge of victory. But the war council had found that it could not suppress America’s attempts to communicate with the Japanese people through a campaign of direct mail.

  Newspapers and leaflets written in the Japanese language and printed on Saipan were loaded into bomb casings designed to open at four thousand feet and release a blizzard of information. Since at least July 27, the day after Potsdam, Superfortress crews had been papering the countryside, informing the people of the true state of the war and urging them to evacuate cities targeted for air raids. On August 1, B-29s dropped one million leaflets over thirty-five cities, warning civilians to evacuate areas scheduled for bombing within the next few days. The names of targeted cities appeared in Japanese writing under a picture of five airborne B-29s releasing bombs. Before the war’s climax, U.S. planes would drop 63 million leaflets over the country. But even after Hiroshima, the Japanese military portrayed them all as propaganda and warned its citizens that anyone caught in possession of these enemy lies was subject to arrest.