by Lynn Vincent
“That was not my question, if you please, Captain Donaho,” Ryan said coolly. “Under the conditions stated by the accused, would it have been more difficult for you to obtain the proper firing position if the target had been zigzagging?”
“No. Not as long as I could see the target.”
“Then are you telling this court that if the target had been zigzagging at the time you sighted it, and up until the moment you fired, you would not have been required to make any more calculations than if the target had been on a steady course? Is that what you wish to tell this court?”
“No, sir. If the target had been zigzagging, I would have had to change my setup in my torpedo data computer to meet the new course, or the new speed, from my sound gear.”
“Well, then, are you now saying that you would have had to make considerably more calculations if the target had been zigzagging than if she were not? Is that correct?”
Ryan seemed to have scored a point . . . until Donaho fired back. Despite increased calculations, he said, he could have fired on Ryan’s hypothetical zigzagging ship within ten seconds. In fact, Donaho said, “You always expect a target to zig, and you anticipate what is going to happen on the next leg. I have personally found that a target not zigzagging would have confused me.”
As Ryan and Donaho sparred, momentum careened between the prosecution and defense, back and forth, like the swings of a wrecking ball. Ryan suggested that Donaho was discounting entirely the merit of zigzagging as an antisubmarine tactic. Donaho said Ryan’s questions were too black-and-white. When pressed, Donaho said, “I maintain a qualified submarine captain does not have to have a target steer a straight course to get his torpedoes to hit.”
Ryan bore down: “Could you give the court some good reason for the zigzag plans set out in the current Tactical Orders and Doctrines? Could you give any reason why all those things have been done if zigzagging makes no difference to a submarine captain at all when he is attacking a surface ship?”
Here, Donaho was forced to admit that the captain of a surface ship, when executing a zigzag—that is, steering toward or away from a torpedo—had a fifty-fifty chance of making matters better or worse. Even then, though, in some cases, he might have been better off steering a straight course.
Ryan did not concede. He showed the court a rough sketch and began to describe a detailed hypothetical firing situation. Cady objected and lost.
Suppose, Ryan said, that a ship on a zigzag course were heading away from Donaho at a forty-five-degree angle and a rate of seventeen knots. The next zigzag took the ship even farther from Donaho, at twenty or more additional degrees, and he hasn’t been able to recalculate a firing solution. And the target “makes seventeen knots all this time, and you are submerged,” Ryan said. “What effect would those changes have on the accuracy of your torpedo fire?”
“I would probably miss,” Donaho said.
“Pardon?”
“I would probably miss.”
Ryan continued hammering, forcing Donaho to admit that zigzagging did have some value.
That was only true, though, after torpedoes were fired, Donaho countered.
Cady stood and brushed Ryan’s hypotheticals aside. He described instead the actual firing position in which Hashimoto found himself with respect to Indianapolis.
“Assuming, Captain, that original setup that we first put to you, where you found yourself about ten thousand yards ahead and on the base course, and that you had contact by periscope in that position ahead for about twenty-seven minutes. Would a zigzag of the target have made any difference to your ability to make a successful attack?”
“Not as long as I could see the target for twenty-seven minutes,” Donaho answered, referring to the length of time Hashimoto had Indy in sight.
Ryan jumped up and displayed to the court a classified zigzag plan. “Assuming that the target had been following this zigzag plan, is your answer still the same?”
Donaho: Yes.
Ryan: Supposing, Captain Donaho, that your submarine and the target were not keeping the same time. Would that have made any difference to you?
Donaho: No, sir.
Ryan: Your answer is “no”?
Donaho: Yes.
With this last exchange, the momentum had swung decidedly in McVay’s favor. Cady stood, hoping to keep it there.
Cady: Is it disconcerting to you as a submarine commander to have a ship, a target, zigzag?
Donaho: Yes, because you may be—just before firing, a zigzag throws your calculations off, and you have to get a new setup.
And with that, the wrecking ball smashed into the defense. Donaho had endured more than fifty questions, triple that of any other defense witness. Amid the storm of Ryan’s sometimes condescending cross, he had held his course, maintaining at all times that zigzagging was only minimally useful. But this, his last answer, undercut all he had said before. Cady, and McVay with him, fell victim to a classic tactic of opposing counsel: keep a damaging witness on the stand long enough for him to make a fatal mistake.
Recognizing the moment, Ryan stood and addressed the court. He had no further questions. And after one more witness, the trial of Captain Charles McVay was over.
15
* * *
ON DECEMBER 19, 1945, in Marlton, New Jersey, Oliver F. Bower listened to the McVay verdict on the radio: guilty. Of hazarding his ship by failure to “zigzag.”
Bower, an ordinary citizen, was astounded—not at the verdict itself, but rather at the news that a key witness for the prosecution had been Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, the Japanese submarine captain who sank McVay’s ship. Bower couldn’t believe that the United States Navy had dragged a representative of America’s defeated enemy to testify against a well-known and decorated naval officer.
Galvanized, Bower immediately sat down at his typewriter and tapped out a letter to Navy secretary James Forrestal. “I am not attempting to judge the right or wrong of the case,” Bower wrote. “In my opinion it was, to say the least, pure discourtesy if not an insult to call the Japanese officer from his home all the way to Washington to testify in this trial. Knowing the Japanese to be what they are it is very doubtful that even under our oath and the Japanese oath such a person could be trusted to tell the truth. I sincerely believe that he would welcome an opportunity to see one of his former enemies squirm under a conviction in which this foreigner had played a part.”
Bower’s letter sailed down to Washington, D.C., arriving amid a blizzard of less civil-sounding protests addressed to Forrestal and to President Harry S. Truman. Mail arrived in droves from ordinary citizens, veterans, even mothers of the war dead.
Mrs. Jack Hunt of Wichita, Kansas, lost her son, Fireman First Class Jack Culver, in the Pacific when a kamikaze crashed his destroyer. “I am writing this because I am so outraged (as plenty of other Navy mothers must be) at the idea of having a ‘dirty Jap’ brought over to testify against one of our Navy men.” Mrs. Hunt was sure McVay had done the right thing by his crew, but even if he hadn’t, even if her son had been killed on the Indianapolis, “I still feel that I would never want his commander hauled into court with any lousy Jap to say anything against him.”
World War I veteran Russell Chase of Marblehead, Massachusetts, didn’t stop at one protest letter, but informed President Truman that he had also written to two senators, a congressman, Secretary Forrestal, and the judge advocate general of the trial board.
The government directed all these letters to the Navy, which replied via form letter.
In Washington, D.C., Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts and Representative Henry D. Larcade, Jr., of Louisiana each protested Hashimoto’s testimony in fiery speeches on the floor of the U.S. House. Larcade called McVay’s court-martial “a blot on the Navy that will never be erased” and deplored the “despicable Japanese commander” of the submarine that sent McVay’s ship to the bottom.
Blistering headlines also followed the Navy proceeding, including op-eds from resp
ected newspapers such as the Chicago Sun and the New York Herald Tribune. A column in the New York World-Telegram repeated the opinion of unnamed naval officers that McVay was a “fall guy for higher-ups.”
In an op-ed that ran in the Pittsburgh Press, war correspondent Malcolm Johnson, who had been among the first reporters to interview McVay after the sinking, weighed in. Johnson reminded readers of the survivors’ “nightmarish days in the open sea” and laid out for readers how Washington had scotched his story along with all the others. How the news of Indy’s sinking, delayed for nearly two weeks, was suddenly revealed on VJ Day. At Guam, he had asked himself why. In light of the court-martial, the answer now seemed clear. In Johnson’s opinion, the Navy had deliberately sabotaged the efforts of correspondents to get complete, detailed stories into their own newspapers, calculating that on VJ Day, of all days, the joyous news of Japanese surrender would render the Indianapolis disaster a comparative footnote. Johnson would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for other investigative work. For now he had to content himself with outrage.
For many families of the lost, the court-martial verdict produced outrage of a different sort. It ratified their belief that McVay was to blame for their suffering. Dorothy Josey Owen, of Granbury, Texas, lost her older brother, Clifford Josey, in the sinking. Josey had been friends with L. D. Cox, who held his fellow Texan in the water for an hour before he died of severe burns. Dorothy remembered her brother as blond, handsome, and likable. She loved the affable way he wore his Dixie cup on the back of his head. Now he was gone, and her entire family laid his death at McVay’s feet. After all, the Navy had said he was to blame.
Admiral Wilder Baker and the military court sentenced McVay to lose two hundred numbers toward his advancement to admiral. Put plainly, this meant the Navy would move two hundred men of McVay’s rank ahead of him for promotion. The court forwarded that sentence to King and Forrestal with a recommendation for clemency based on McVay’s previous outstanding record.
Following the court-martial, four other officers received letters of reprimand: Gillette and his operations officer, as well as Stuart Gibson, who failed to report Indy’s nonarrival. His superior, acting port director Jules Sancho, received a letter of admonition. However, all four of these letters were subsequently withdrawn. It was as if they had never happened. Meanwhile, no one at Guam—Carter, Murray, or Naquin—was disciplined for their failure to provide McVay with the intel in their possession.
King retired from the Navy in December 1945 shortly after McVay’s court-martial concluded. The new chief of naval operations was Chester Nimitz, who had not agreed that McVay should be tried in the first place. In 1946, Nimitz recommended to Forrestal that McVay’s sentence be set aside. The secretary concurred and remitted the sentence in March 1946.
In April, in a quiet ceremony at the Potomac River Naval Command, McVay was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for courage displayed at Okinawa during the kamikaze strike on Indianapolis, three months before she sank. News of the award was not released through regular Navy public relations channels, but only as an item of “local interest” by the Potomac River command.
The slight could be construed as a bellwether: McVay’s career was ruined. He would never again serve in command. Instead, he was assigned as chief of staff to the commandant of the Eighth Naval District in New Orleans, where he served his remaining time in uniform. In June 1949, in conjunction with his retirement at the age of fifty, McVay was promoted to rear admiral. This “tombstone promotion,” the military equivalent of a gold watch and a swift kick out the door, occurred four months before McVay’s father died. The old man’s son had finally been awarded a star.
After leaving the life that was his family legacy, McVay carried his fate with stoic resignation. While many retired naval officers kept in contact, became members of auxiliaries and service organizations, and attended reunions of their units and Academy class, McVay let his military service fade from view. But grief did not fade for the families of the lost, and many undertook a campaign never to let McVay forget it. While their son or brother or father or husband had disappeared into the deep, McVay, in their view, had received a slap on the wrist and a lifetime pension.
Letters arrived in his mailbox in envelopes that seemed sealed with venom:
If it weren’t for you, my son would be 25 years old today!
If it weren’t for you, I’d be celebrating Christmas with my husband!
If it weren’t for you, my girls would have a father!
At first these rants came weekly from families like the Brophys, the Joseys, and the Flynns. Then they tapered down and came mainly around Christmas and other milestone dates, such as the anniversary of the sinking or birthdays of those lost at sea. But they never stopped. Not all families of the lost blamed McVay. But in the ensuing decades, many dunned the captain with hateful letters that arrived like due-bills that could never be paid.
JULY 1960
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
AS HIS PLANE DESCENDED into Weir Cook Airport in Indianapolis, Indiana, Charles McVay sat in a seat beside Louise and found that dread filled his heart. It was a familiar emotion, having settled into his chest more than six months earlier, when he received a letter from his former Marine orderly, Edgar Harrell. There was a survivors reunion coming up—their first—to be held July 30 and 31, 1960, on the fifteenth anniversary of the sinking.
“As program chairman, we would like to extend to you a very special invitation to be guest speaker at our banquet,” Harrell wrote. The reunion was to take place at the Severin Hotel in Indianapolis.
McVay was at his home in New Orleans when he received the invitation. He sat on the letter for more than a week. He couldn’t help but wonder how these men would receive him. The Navy had ruled the tragedy his fault, and that was the official truth as far as the public was concerned. Many families seemed to agree, judging from the mail he still received on a regular basis after all these years. Countering these opinions was Richard Newcomb’s new book, Abandon Ship, for which McVay had given interviews. Newcomb argued that McVay was railroaded, but the retired skipper had no way of knowing how many people had read it.
Finally, McVay summoned his courage and jotted a note back to Harrell in early December 1959, managing to inject a little humor despite his misgivings:
Please do not reserve more than fifteen minutes for my talk. I feel certain that is sufficient time for anyone at such a function.
After the tumult of war, the court-martial, and his stint working in the Eighth Naval District before retirement, McVay settled into the comparatively tame world of insurance. From where he had once stood, working shoulder to shoulder with admirals like Spruance and at the threshold of promotion to commodore, it was a long fall. Still, the Navy and its ethics were in his blood, and he had passed them on to his sons, Kimo and Quatro. After half a lifetime in the service, McVay was shocked to learn that the business world was different—that corporate integrity had gradations, “degrees” of honesty. Despite permission from colleagues to cut corners, he never did. There was right and there was wrong, and that was that.
The airliner turned off the runway and began its taxi to the terminal. Through the windows, McVay could see men running out to the tarmac to park the plane and chock her wheels. The dread settled all the way into his belly, but it was too late now. The McVays gathered their things and melted into the line of passengers to deplane. A stewardess opened the forward hatch, admitting a blast of warm, humid air.
Outside, the ground crew had rolled up some loading stairs. When McVay stepped out of the plane, he saw something odd: twin lines of people, scores of them, men and women. They formed a path across the tarmac to the terminal, and when McVay neared the bottom of the stairs, someone shouted, “Attention on deck!”
Amid the crowd, the surviving crew of Indianapolis snapped to attention. Tears welled in McVay’s eyes. He had not known what to expect, but he had not expected this. As he made his way forward, Louise at his side, he s
aw faces transformed by time, boys who had become men and men who had entered middle age. Someone began clapping, then another and another, and soon McVay found himself walking toward the terminal through a channel of smiles and fountains of applause.
Out in the parking lot, the welcoming party divided itself into twenty-five cars and caravanned back to the hotel. Giles McCoy, of Indy’s former Marine detachment, chauffeured the McVays. Back at the Severin Hotel, an opulent chandelier of Austrian crystal presided over the lobby, and a marble staircase led the way to upper floors. McCoy, one of the main reunion organizers, presented McVay with the nametag he would wear for the weekend. It read: “Rear Admiral Charles B. McVay III.”
McVay gazed at it for a moment, as if peering at a photograph of a stranger. He handed the nametag back to McCoy with a gentle smile. “Let’s have it say ‘Captain,’ ” he said. “I was an honest-to-goodness captain, and I never was really a rear admiral.”
Quickly, McCoy had the new nametag written up and pinned it to McVay’s jacket, both men smiling as a newspaper photographer snapped a picture. There were reporters everywhere, in fact. A press room was set up in the Severin, and a public relations firm had stocked it with reporting essentials: press releases, photographs, and hot coffee.
• • •
The weekend spun out in a flurry of activity, all of it affectionate, welcoming, and laudatory. On July 30, McVay sat for a press conference with Indiana congressman Joseph Barr, followed by a live radio interview on WXLW with McCoy. Mayor Charles Boswell proclaimed July 30 and 31 “USS Indianapolis Survivors Memorial Reunion Days,” and asked that all city flags be flown at half-mast. Louise and the other survivors’ wives turned themselves out in pretty summer dresses, hats, and gloves, and were whisked off to a formal tea at Butler University. The former Dumbo pilot Adrian Marks, now an attorney in Frankfort, Indiana, gave a speech to survivors and guests, as did the author Newcomb and assistant chief of naval operations Admiral Redfield Mason. But the brightest star, the person everyone wanted to talk to, was Wilbur Gwinn, the PV-1 Ventura pilot who first spotted the survivors, the man they called their “angel.”
