Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  • • •

  On August 7, some Indy survivors landed at Base Hospital No. 18 on Guam. There, news of the atomic strike and its connection to Tinian Island zipped through the wards like a firecracker string. Finally, the mystery was solved. One by one, the survivors understood the sudden departure from Hunter’s Point, the secrecy, the strange drills, and the presence of the two Army officers who had sailed with them.

  At Guam, McVay submitted to another press interview, this one with three reporters. Leo Litz of the Indianapolis News, George McWilliams of the International News Service, and Paul Hughes of the Louisville Courier-Journal sat with the captain on a portico overlooking the Pacific. McVay sat in a wheelchair, a notebook in his hand. Already, he had been ordered to file a report on the sinking and had been writing down events as he remembered them.

  “My guess is that the Indianapolis was hit in an underwater torpedo attack,” McVay told the reporters. He went on to explain how, as soon as he got to the bridge, he tried to get word down to other parts of the ship. “But all the lights were out and I found that the explosion had paralyzed the communications system. I sent word to the radio room to see that the calls went out for help and later myself went to see about messages.”

  At first, McVay said, he was not sure the ship would sink. But as the ship began to list sharply, it became clear that she suffered from “serious, gaping damage.”

  Litz, McWilliams, and Hughes also interviewed Dr. Haynes at Guam. He sat with them, his hands bound in bandages. “I’m still in a daze,” Haynes said, relating the horrors of four days drifting at sea. The reporters asked the doctor whether he had any criticism of McVay’s actions.

  No, he said. “It was the most terrible thing that could be imagined, and everywhere there was confusion. Nothing worked—fire and blast had severed all wires—and it was impossible to make any kind of progress from one place on the ship to another.”

  Paul Hughes went on to talk with several more survivors, all of whom expressed their unqualified support for the captain.

  Admiral Spruance arrived at the hospital bearing Purple Hearts, and McVay accompanied the admiral as he bestowed medals on the wounded. Those who were able stood to receive their awards. Others received theirs lying in bed. Conflicting emotions tore through the men. Seaman Don McCall didn’t think he deserved the honor. Joseph Kiselica, a big, tall fellow from Connecticut, seethed with resentment. “I’m proud of you,” Spruance told Kiselica as he affixed the Purple Heart to his chest.

  Kiselica wasn’t proud at all. Not of what the Navy had done to him. And not of what the Navy had done to his shipmates, some living but most dead. First they ignore us for four days, he thought. Now they want to pin medals on us. Kiselica, a second-class machinist’s mate, didn’t dare say anything to the admiral, but after that day, he never wore his Purple Heart again.

  When Spruance and McVay got to the quartermaster, Bob Gause, the captain said, “If you decide to stay in the Navy, I’ll see to it that you make chief.”

  “Thank you, sir, but no thanks,” Gause said. After what he’d just been through, he was going to get out of the Navy double-quick and go home to Florida.

  Letters from home caught up with the men. Cleatus Lebow, who had felt that strange dread about returning to Indy at Mare Island, received one from his mother.

  “I had a dream,” Minervia wrote. “I heard you call me, and I got up from bed and went out on the porch to get you. Papa came out and got me and put me back to bed. It was midnight. At 12:15, I heard you call me again, and I got up and went out again to find you.”

  After Lebow read the letter, he looked at the date. His mother had written it on July 29, the day before the ship sank.

  As the survivors’ health improved, they asked to be allowed to let their families know they were still alive. The Navy let them—after a fashion. They were given a sheet of Red Cross stationery and a strict set of rules: They were not allowed to mention their whereabouts, the fact that Indianapolis had sunk, their nurses or doctors, or refer in any way to the ordeal they’d just survived.

  And so Machinist’s Mate George Horvath wrote lies to his wife:

  I’m still doing all right and getting along, or maybe I should say I’m getting settled to the routine life at sea. Three meals a day and a couple of watches to stand. Sounds thrilling, don’t it? I love you—George.

  At least, Horvath thought, Alice Mae and their two boys would know he was okay.

  Also back at Guam, Malcolm Johnson and the other reporters drafted their articles. At Peleliu, Johnson’s first look at the survivors had scored his memory like a diamond cutting glass. Some were still bleeding, skin boiled and aflame, faces blistered over, some missing chunks of flesh, others unable even to speak. In the perverse gallows ethos of journalism, the sinking of Indianapolis was a “great” story, full of drama, tragedy, and heroism, with particulars almost too awful to believe. But it was also an important story that revealed flaws in the Navy’s system of tracking its ships.

  Was it possible, Johnson wondered, that as the last, climactic fight loomed to the north, complacency had set in among senior officers in the rear? Was the Navy guilty of negligence on a catastrophic scale?

  Through official channels, Guam public affairs personnel asked the Navy Department whether the journalists’ stories about the sinking could be released from Guam. The reply came back: no. They would have to first be sent to Washington. Johnson prepared his story accordingly. Soon, his piece, along with those of the rest of the Guam press corps, was en route to D.C. by air.

  2

  * * *

  AUGUST 9, 1945

  ON THE MORNING OF August 9, Japan’s Supreme War Council awoke to find that the number of their enemies had increased by one: They were now at war with the Soviets, too. The Soviets had informed Japan in April that they would not be renewing the neutrality pact the two nations had signed in 1941. The pact was not set to expire until 1946, but after Japan’s mokusatsu of the Big Three Powers’ Potsdam Declaration, the Soviets decided to accelerate their diplomatic break and announced that as of August 9, “The Soviet Union will consider herself in a state of war against Japan.”

  Within hours of this declaration, awful wheels were set in motion. Bockscar, a B-29 carrying a twenty-one-kiloton plutonium weapon dubbed Fat Man, rolled down the runway at Tinian. The decision to use the second bomb, made two days before at Guam, was not aimed at annihilating the enemy. It was psychological warfare, calculated to suggest that America had an endless supply of these apocalyptic weapons and would use them to systematically incinerate Japan unless she surrendered. It was follow-through on President Truman’s warning in his August 6 declaration after Hiroshima: “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city.”

  At 10:58 a.m., Bockscar released Fat Man over Nagasaki and seconds later, the light of a thousand suns flared in the cockpit. Between 40,000 and 75,000 Japanese people on the ground perished.

  • • •

  For the survivors of Indianapolis, the deployment of history’s second atomic bomb delayed an event that would reverberate for decades into the future. Admiral Chester Nimitz had ordered a court of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Indy’s sinking. The admiral ordered the court convened on August 9. But the Nagasaki strike—and the climactic combination of strategy and diplomacy that heralded the end of the war—pushed that date back to August 13.

  Loosely speaking, a naval court of inquiry is a fact-finding body, much like a grand jury. In this case, the aim was to find out what happened to Indianapolis, why, and who was to blame.

  Via naval message, Nimitz informed Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the Pacific submarine force, of his position as president of the court. Nimitz also appointed to the court Vice Admiral George Murray, commander of the Marianas Islands. The proceedings were to take place in Murray’s offices at Guam.

  It could be argued that Murr
ay, as the divert authority east of the Chop line, had an inherent conflict of interest. But rescue efforts had wrapped up only four days earlier and the circumstances of the sinking were still murky. No one was yet talking about the implications of the hunter-killer operation conducted by USS Harris. No one was talking about the positively identified submarine she had chased for a dozen hours dead ahead of Indianapolis. No one was talking about any responsibility that might lie with Murray for not having diverted Indianapolis, or even alerted McVay to the storm of message traffic that warned of a protracted antisubmarine chase in his path.

  Or if anyone was talking, it was below official radar. After the sinking, Hashimoto had disappeared to the north, his role in events as yet unknown. But once the epic disaster of Indianapolis came to light, officers on both sides of the Philippine Sea must have wondered whether the enemy submarine chased and lost by Harris and Greene was responsible.

  Meanwhile, at Murray’s headquarters, a series of grim lists took shape. One was a roll of missing Indianapolis personnel. Page 1 alone bore the names of Paul Candalino, the officer Lieutenant Orr sent to Radio 1 with a distress message, Father Conway, Commander Flynn, Lieutenant Freeze, Commanders Lipski and Janney, Kasey Moore, and the Marine commander, Captain Parke. Also on page 1 was Orr himself, who had calmly manned a bullhorn and policed “abandon ship,” though he had more reason than most men to leap quickly from the second vessel that had sunk from underneath him in less than a year.

  This list, typed in thick black Pica, stretched on for eighteen single-spaced pages. Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, uncles all swallowed by the deep. Other, overlapping lists arrived from rescue ships, all of which had ended their search for bodies on the day of the Nagasaki strike. USS French reported bodies found and assigned each a number.

  “Body No. 20 . . . no identification tags, rings, watch or other means of identification. Body unclothed except for a pair of socks unstenciled. Body 5' 11" black hair, no distinguishing scars or marks. Body very badly mutilated by sharks and decomposed.

  “Body No. 22 . . . no identification tags, rings or watch. Had identification bracelet but it was lost overboard while removing it from the arm of the body.”

  There were many such men and boys, unidentified and unidentifiable. Recovery vessels consistently reported the disfiguring impact of ravaging sharks. Other names on French’s list of the dead were, in their way, poignant, their personal effects revealing bits and pieces of young lives cut short. Carl Emerson Mires, for example, had in his pocket a wallet containing nine photos, his Navy ID, a news clipping, an address book, and another treasure—his Certificate of Domain of Neptunus Rex, the mark of a “Trusty Shellback,” a sailor who has made passage across the equator. Mires, though, had made his final passage, and French recorded him as Body No. 27.

  All such lists would make their way to the office of Admiral Louis Denfeld, Chief of Naval Personnel, whose staff would cross-reference them and match the names of the missing with those confirmed dead.

  • • •

  At the Guam hospital, the survivors had two nurses, one they loved and one they hated. The latter was a steel-jawed Valkyrie who stalked the wards with the mien of a warden. The men called her “Old Blood and Guts.” The other nurse was Eva Jane Bolents. Each day, Eva Jane glided down the rows of beds, administering mercy. She tended the men’s wounds with alcohol and soothed their chafed skin with powder. Eva Jane gave them back rubs and foot rubs, making sure they were cared for throughout the night. Before they left the hospital, several of the men proposed marriage.

  Lyle Umenhoffer was busy with other things, in particular, counting his money and his blessings. The day the ship sank, he had withdrawn $250 from his ship account. Through all the days in the water, the money survived in his wallet intact. At Peleliu, Umenhoffer had laid it out bill by bill on his hospital bed to dry. Now it occurred to him that all payroll and any cash aboard, along with all the accounting records, had gone down with the ship. A lot of the fellows in the hospital had literally nothing but the clothes on their backs.

  One survivor, Seaman First Class “Big Ed” Brown, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, received a surprise visit from his brother, Jim. Each brother learned for the first time that the other was involved in delivering the killing blow to Japan. While Ed had helped transport components of Little Boy to Tinian aboard Indy, his brother, a twenty-four-year-old Army sergeant, was attached to the 509th, the secret B-29 squadron that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ed had known Jim was at Tinian, but with only three hours in port, Ed had no time to look him up. Now the brothers were astonished to learn they’d both played a role in ending the war.

  Ed Brown wasn’t the only survivor with a visitor from Tinian. Lying in his hospital bed, Ensign John Woolston was surprised when Major Robert Furman appeared at his side. As soon as he could break free, Furman had hopped a plane from Tinian to Guam. His mission had been a success, but the crew of Indianapolis paid a catastrophic price. Had they not been tapped to transport his canisters, he knew, the whole crew might be in San Diego for refresher training right now, sitting out the balance of the war on some sun-swept beach. Furman wanted to at least visit the survivors, shake their hands, and thank them for what they’d done for their country.

  He’d already visited with Lewis Haynes, who confided the terrible news that only one of the Irish officers Furman had grown fond of had survived. Furman thought it a queer trick of fate that DeGrave’s most egregious humiliation, being put off the ship, probably saved his life.

  Now, Furman stood beside Woolston and thanked him for his role in the mission. Though wildly junior to the major, Woolston knew he’d never have this chance again. He told Furman about his epiphany at Tinian, about smothering his impulse to ask him about the mystery canisters.

  The young ensign’s lips curved into a smile. “What would you have done, sir, if I had asked you about the uranium?”

  Furman froze and looked down at Woolston, his face a cipher. Then he turned his back and left. Robert Furman had been a locked vault since 1943. He would not let his concern for the survivors cross the line into speculating about a security breach that never happened.

  • • •

  On the night of August 9, with Nagasaki still burning, the Big Six of the Japanese Supreme War Council convened for their third meeting of the day. A bright line still divided those who would accept peace and those who favored fighting on. Worse, the council was deadlocked, with three members dug in firmly on each side. Ending the war would require, if not unanimity, at least consensus on the council—more hawks would have to agree with the doves.

  Prime Minister Suzuki and Foreign Minister Togo knew what had to be done. They would have to break historical precedent and involve the emperor. Members of this council had recently reigned unopposed over much of the Pacific. This night, they met deep under the imperial palace in a bomb shelter that was sweltering and claustrophobic. At ten minutes to midnight, the emperor appeared, ready to determine the fate of Japan. Crammed tightly into the hot little space, Hirohito’s counselors mopped sweat from their brows with white handkerchiefs and kept their eyes averted respectfully away from His Majesty.

  After reading the Potsdam Declaration aloud, Suzuki summarized the two prior meetings that had also resulted in deadlock. He then apologized to the emperor for requesting his presence. But with the council in stalemate and even Suzuki’s cabinet divided three ways on surrender, it was necessary, the prime minister said. Breaking with centuries of protocol, Suzuki asked the emperor to weigh in.

  Hirohito absorbed all this quietly. Then, after a long, painful stillness, the council listened in devastated silence as their sovereign spoke the unthinkable.

  “Continuing the war can only result in the annihilation of the Japanese people and a prolongation of the suffering of all humanity,” the monarch said, his voice soft and controlled. “It seems obvious that the nation is no longer able to wage war, and its ability to defend its own shores is doubtful
. That is unbearable for me.”

  The emperor had long pressed Suzuki to find a way to end the war, but the war council members had remained intractably opposed to anything resembling surrender. Now, nearly 2 million people, military and civilian, were dead, and another 8 million wounded or homeless. And in addition to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 40 of his nation’s 206 municipalities had been completely destroyed. Tokyo and thirty-seven other cities had lost more than 30 percent of their developed areas. Meanwhile, every major city in the country had suffered damage, save the Kyoto historic temple area, which American leaders had avoided out of respect. The emperor now declared it enough.

  “The time has come to bear the unbearable,” he said. “I give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation on the basis outlined by the foreign minister.” The emperor then exited the room without another word.

  The war council sat mute and shell-shocked. How could Great Japan admit defeat? they wondered. Would not people all over the land commit seppuku, die with honor rather than surrender in shame? Though Hirohito had voiced his opinion, his counselors were still charged with making a final decision. Many military leaders suspected that the emperor was under the spell of traitors, and some even whispered of a coup. When they heard the emperor’s shameful words this night, how long would it be until those leaders rose up and overthrew him?

  3

  * * *

  AUGUST 13, 1945

  AT 10 A.M. ON August 13, Admiral Charles Lockwood convened the Nimitz-ordered court of inquiry. Though eleven days had passed since the survivors were spotted, the public had not been told that Indianapolis was lost. Even the next of kin of those lost at sea remained in the dark, although telegrams would go out later that day.