by Lynn Vincent
In addition to admirals Lockwood and Murray, the court was composed of Rear Admiral Francis Whiting and Captain William E. Hilbert, a Navy judge advocate, or lawyer. There would be forty-three witnesses called before the court. In addition, throughout the proceedings, Lockwood and the court would name a number of “interested parties”—men not quite accused of anything, but rather put on notice.
Right away, Captain Charles McVay asked the court for permission to make himself an interested party. Even while skippering his little fleet of rafts with its castaway crew, he had known what was coming. At Peleliu after rescue, he sat on the porch of an old friend’s Quonset hut, staring out at the sea, grieving for his lost men and knowing that the Navy would try to hang the sinking around his neck. As an interested party, McVay would have the right to counsel, the right to be present for all testimony, and the right to introduce material into the record in the same manner as a defendant. He could even cross-examine witnesses. By naming himself an interested party, McVay secured himself a front-row seat at what otherwise would have been a closed-door proceeding.
In addition to his new status, McVay was also the first witness. The court asked him sixty-seven questions, eliciting a recitation of events as he remembered them. The court also asked if the ship had been on a zigzag course, to which McVay replied, “No, sir.”
McVay noted that the night had been dark and visibility poor, and that no intelligence was given to him about any submarine threat. McVay’s routing orders permitted him to cease zigzagging and steer a straight course under such conditions. But under questioning, he had to admit that his standing orders for the OOD did not include a directive to start zigzagging if conditions improved.
“Other than concerning the actual rescue of yourself and the party you were with,” said Hilbert, the judge advocate, “have you any observations to make with regard to the rescue operations?”
“Nothing except that I wish to call attention to the interval of time which elapsed from the time the ship was due in Leyte to the apparent commencement of rescue operations,” McVay said.
The next witness was Commander John Corry, an aerologist who was assistant officer in charge of Fleet Weather Central. Corry proceeded to paint a picture of weather on the night of the sinking that was postcard perfect. The weather was “excellent,” Corry said, citing “all reports available.” He then delivered a wordy technical soliloquy on ceiling and predicted visibility.
McVay stepped in instantly to cross-examine him, asking what he meant by “predicted” visibility, then forcing Corry to admit he was referring to conditions forecast and not actually observed.
“Your information related to the night of July 29 . . . was not a factual description of what the weather was in the twenty-five-mile area, was it?” McVay said.
“No,” Corry admitted. “It was not a factual statement.”
The next witness called was Lieutenant Joseph Waldron, the routing officer at Guam. The court asked him about Route Peddie and Indianapolis’s routing instructions, a total of thirty questions. After Waldron was dismissed, and the next witness entered, so did the whiff of corruption.
Captain Oliver Naquin was the surface operations officer at Guam when Indy sailed. His superior was Vice Admiral Murray, who now sat on the court. Naquin took his seat in the witness chair.
“In your capacity as surface operations officer,” said Hilbert, “if there has come to your attention data on the presence of mines and submarines in the general area between Guam and Leyte, please produce such data for the period 1 July to 9 August.”
“I have it here in a chart with tabulated data appended,” Naquin said.
On the chart, Naquin indicated blue triangles denoting reported mines and red crosses that represented submarine contacts. He had drawn in Route Peddie and the approximate location where Indianapolis sank.
Naquin’s chart was presented to McVay and to the court and entered into evidence.
“Can you tell us how many sightings were made along the Peddie line during the period covered?” a member of the court asked.
“My records indicate we had reports on one submarine contact, possibly sonar, by the Madison, on July 12,” Naquin said.
This was an outright lie.
Like his counterpart Captain Alfred Granum at Leyte, Naquin had been addressed on all message traffic regarding USS Harris and her protracted chase of an enemy submarine along Indy’s route on July 28 and 29. Naquin was also in possession of Smedburg’s ULTRA intelligence, including the information on the Tamon group, and specifically that I-58 was known to be operating west of the Marianas.
The court then asked Naquin, “Would you judge that the estimate of submarine dangers along the route from Guam to Leyte at the time of the sailing of Indianapolis was considered to be heavy or light? . . . particularly precarious or nominal?”
“I would consider the calculated risk as practically negligible,” Naquin said.
• • •
On Monday, August 13, in Mayfield, Kentucky, Jane Henry, the Indianapolis dentist’s wife, was ready to turn in for the night when the telephone rang. Little Earl was already tucked in for the night, and Jane hurried to the upstairs extension to stop the ringing. Jane and the baby were staying with her parents, George and Bessie Covington, at their home on Eighth Street until Earl Senior came home. In a recent letter, he’d wondered at length about what they’d do after the war was over—where they would live, where he would work. In the last letter Jane received, he’d gushed about the photos she’d sent of little Earl and then said he felt America seemed to be closing in on victory. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he wrote, if the war was over by the time Indianapolis returned to the States?
Jane snatched up the phone before it woke the baby and heard her father’s voice, already on the line. He had answered downstairs just before she had. The caller was Uncle Buck—Dr. Claude Buckner—a relative by marriage who had practiced dentistry with Earl before he left Knoxville to go on active duty.
“George, we are so sorry to hear the news,” Uncle Buck was saying.
“What news?” Jane heard her father say.
Buck paused, and to Jane he seemed unsure whether to continue. “Horace and Arletta just got a telegram today from the Navy,” Buck said, referring to Earl’s parents. “It says Earl’s missing in action.”
Jane’s insides went cold, and her legs seemed to turn to water. She raised a hand to brace herself against the wall.
“We haven’t received any telegram like that,” said George, who happened to be the Mayfield postmaster. He expected they would have received something of such high importance, but supposed that it might have reached Knoxville first before their small town.
Jane couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Hot tears of bewilderment and grief spilled down her face. Quietly, she hung up the phone and fled to find her mother.
The next morning, George Covington walked the short distance to the Mayfield post office, assisted by a cane. He had called two of Jane’s friends, and they were at the house already, to be with her in case the news was as bad as Buck had said. At the post office, George found what he hoped he would not: a telegram from Western Union. He read it and hobbled back to Eighth Street, the thin slip of paper riding in his breast pocket like a stone.
Back at home, Jane read the telegram through a curtain of tears.
I DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND, EARL O’DELL HENRY, LIEUTENANT COMMANDER USNR, IS MISSING IN ACTION 30 JULY 1945 IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY. YOUR GREAT ANXIETY IS APPRECIATED AND YOU WILL BE FURNISHED WITH DETAILS WHEN RECEIVED. TO PREVENT POSSIBLE AID TO OUR ENEMIES PLEASE DO NOT DIVULGE THE NAME OF HIS SHIP OR STATION UNLESS THE GENERAL CIRCUMSTANCES ARE MADE PUBLIC IN NEWS STORIES.
At first, Jane couldn’t catch her breath. Pain spread across her chest and down into her gut. The shock felt like electricity coursing through her bones. Her friends leaned in to console her, but in truth there was no consolation, only a splinter of hope. She didn’
t know what had happened to Indianapolis, but she did know Earl was a good swimmer. If the ship had sunk, maybe he had been able to make it to an island somewhere.
She clung to this thought as the morning passed. Then, outside, a church bell in town began to ring. It did not stop, but kept on, its insistent peal floating down Eighth Street in joyous song. Another bell joined, and another, until it seemed every church tower in Mayfield had joined in some kind of rapturous chorus. Soon, car horns joined in, followed by full-throated shouts—men, women, and the high, sweet voices of children.
George opened the door to see people spilling out of their homes, laughing and crying and embracing.
Even inside the house, Jane could hear their words: “Japan surrendered! The war is over!”
She looked down at the wrinkled telegram in her hand and wept.
• • •
Eight hundred seventy-eight other families, enough people to populate a couple of small towns, received a version of the message sent to Jane Henry. Many, including Cleatus Lebow’s mother, Minervia, received a telegram stating that Indianapolis had gone down with “100 percent casualties.” Unaware that “casualties” can refer to injury as well as fatality, Minervia and many other mothers thought their living sons were dead.
Mary O’Donnell had anxiously waited for her husband, Watertender Third Class Jimmy O’Donnell, to return to Indianapolis, the cruiser’s namesake city. When Indy abruptly departed for the forward areas back in July, Mary had stood on the Golden Gate Bridge and watched her carry Jimmy away. From that moment on, a premonition haunted her: A telegram with Jimmy’s name on it would be coming for her. Not one to panic, she’d pushed the feeling aside. And then the wire came. She called several friends and wives she’d met at Mare Island and quickly discovered that the entire crew was missing in action.
Lieutenant Commander John Emery, father of Bill Emery, the young quartermaster striker who joined Indianapolis at Mare Island, received the same telegram as the Henrys—his son was missing in action and he was to await further details. Five years earlier, John Emery and his wife had lost their five-year-old son, Billy’s brother, to spinal meningitis. Now, Emery did not intend to sit still for uncertain news about the death of a second child.
Unlike most Indianapolis families, he had contacts. Resources. Connections. Immediately, he sat down and wrote a letter to his friend Herb Armitage, who was serving in the Pacific theater. Could Armitage find Emery some answers about Bill? At Guam, a friend of Armitage’s tracked down Quartermaster Vincent Allard, who had been Bill’s supervisor. The news wasn’t good. Allard had last seen Bill on the bridge wearing a life jacket. No one had seen him since.
When this word reached John Emery, guilt compounded his grief. Believing that Indianapolis would likely sit out the rest of the war, he had pulled strings to get his son assigned to her. Now he asked himself, what had he done?
• • •
As Indianapolis families received news that their loved ones were missing, twenty-four men gathered again in the small, hot bunker with Emperor Hirohito to receive his final pronouncement on the war. The day after the war council’s August 9 meeting, Japan had agreed to accept the Potsdam Declaration—but with a caveat: The emperor was to remain sovereign.
In response, Truman ordered continued bombing runs over military targets. For days, Hirohito’s advisors were again deadlocked, this time on new terms for surrender. Though Japan’s government rested on the cooperation of monarchy, military, and civil institutions, the emperor’s word carried the force of deity, and on August 14 he declared fifteen years of war enough.
“If we continue the war, Japan will be altogether destroyed,” Hirohito told his war council, assembled again in the cramped palace bunker. “Although some of you are of the opinion that we cannot completely trust the Allies, I believe that an immediate and peaceful end to the war is preferable to seeing Japan annihilated.”
Hirohito was not worried for himself, he said, but rather for the many thousands of his countrymen who had died fighting, or who were wounded, homeless, and impoverished, with few resources to rebuild. He promised to do everything he could to help them, and with that, asked his men to write a radio script announcing Japan’s surrender. He would deliver it in his own voice in a national broadcast.
Concluding his remarks, Hirohito stood and exited the bunker. When he was gone, his counselors burst into uncontrollable sobs. Some collapsed to the ground, kneeling in grief, fearing for the fate of their emperor, whom they regarded as a god. But on that day, Hirohito appeared as an ordinary man, broken down by the long years of war.
The emperor himself understood the power his radio broadcast would hold. Apart from his cloistered government, few had ever heard his voice, “the voice of the Crane.”
• • •
At Guam, the court of inquiry ground on. Of the 316 Indianapolis survivors, only twenty testified. Besides McVay, there were four other officers: the engineering officer, Lieutenant Redmayne, as well as Gunner Horner, Twible, and Blum. The senior surviving watch officer, Lieutenant McKissick, did not testify. Nor did Ensign John Woolston, the surviving damage control officer, or Dr. Lewis Haynes, the most senior surviving officer besides McVay. Fifteen enlisted survivors also testified. As the judge advocate examined members of his crew, McVay periodically asked questions of his own.
The court then zeroed in on why the operations and shipping control staff at Leyte did not report Indianapolis overdue. Witnesses included acting Philippine Sea Frontier commander Commodore Norman Gillette. Under questioning, Gillette did not mention the Philippine Sea Frontier War Diary for July 1945, or its entry for July 28 concerning the merchant ship “Walk Hunter” (Wild Hunter, misspelled). The diary entry noted that the vessel reported a periscope sighting at 10-25N 131-45E, and fired on it. Then:
The HARRIS (DE-447) was ordered to the scene and obtained a sound contact evaluated as highly probable. She attacked and was joined in the operation by APD-36 and a plane of T.U. 75.1.2. Contact was lost at 290600 and the search was later discontinued.
In fact, Harris had evaluated the contact as a certain submarine. Given the ensuing storm of message traffic, and the fact that Harris launched fifteen separate attacks on her target, the war diary entry seemed strangely minimalist. Gillette signed it on August 13, the day before the court of inquiry began.
The court lasted until August 20, and its officers delved deeply into the failure of Lieutenant Stuart Gibson and his superior, Lieutenant Commander Jules Sancho, to report Indianapolis overdue at Leyte. A string of officers from both Guam and Leyte filed into the hearing room, one by one, to be grilled on the subject.
Gibson told the court that he knew by dusk on Tuesday, August 1, that Indianapolis was overdue, and that he did not report it. At this news, the court made him an “interested party” and read him his rights. Immediately, Gibson requested an attorney.
Gibson’s superior, Sancho, told the court he did not know Indianapolis had not arrived. Sancho’s superior, Commodore Jacob Jacobson, said his officers had no duty to report Indianapolis at all, because she was scheduled to report to Admiral McCormick for training.
Philippine Sea Frontier operations officer Captain Alfred Granum said his officers assumed that Indy had arrived but did not check to be sure. Granum blamed this on 10CL-45, the governing policy on reporting the arrival of combatant ships. The policy, issued in January 1945, stated that “arrival reports shall not be made for combatant ships.” 10CL-45’s implication, Granum argued, was that nonarrival reports should not be made either.
10CL-45 was drafted by Commodore James Carter, the old friend with whom McVay had met before sailing, in the same building where the court of inquiry was taking place now. It had been Carter who told McVay that “the Japs are on their last legs and there’s nothing to worry about.”
Now Carter told the court that both McCormick and Leyte should have realized something was amiss, and had a moral obligation to report it.
What was no
t discussed was the string of intelligence and communication failures that led to something being amiss in the first place—failures of which Carter, Gillette, and Naquin, as well as Vice Admiral Murray, a member of the court, were well aware.
4
* * *
AUGUST 15, 1945
ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, headlines—bold, all caps, and glorious—unfurled in newspapers across the nation:
New York Times:
JAPAN SURRENDERS, END OF WAR!
Orlando Morning Sentinel:
PEACE: JAPS QUIT
Cincinnati Enquirer:
WAR ENDS AS JAPAN QUITS. TODAY, THURSDAY ARE LEGAL HOLIDAYS
Western radio broadcasters also heralded the surrender news, and that is where, on August 15, kamikaze commander Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki learned for the first time that Great Japan now suffered before the world in humiliating defeat. The emperor himself addressed the nation via radio at noon. Ugaki was the commander who had sent the kamikaze planes—including the one that crashed Indy—against the U.S. fleet at Okinawa. Now, due to a poor signal, he could not understand Hirohito’s broadcast very well, but he could guess most of its sickening detail. As one of the officers His Majesty had entrusted with a nation-saving mission, Ugaki’s heart filled with shame.
Six months earlier, Ugaki had written in his journal that he would one day follow the example of the young kamikaze. Now that time had come. He had not personally received a cease-fire order, so he told his men to prepare Suisei planes at Oita airfield immediately.
At four in the afternoon, his men were to meet him there to drink the farewell cup. Ugaki sat down and made a final entry in his journal. He hoped that “all the Japanese people will overcome all hardships expected to come in the future, display the traditional spirit of this nation more than ever, do their best to rehabilitate this country, and finally revenge this defeat in the future. I myself have made up my mind to serve this country even after death takes my body from this earth.”
