by Lynn Vincent
USS RALPH TALBOT (DD-390) Bagley-class destroyer. Launched 31 October 1936 and commissioned 14 October 1937. Lieutenant Commander Burns Walling Spore in command at rescue. Rescued 24 men.
USS REGISTER (APD-92) Converted to a Crosley-class high-speed transport, 17 June 1944. Commissioned 11 January 1945. Commanding officer at time of rescue: Lieutenant Commander Furman, John Rockwell, USNR. Rescued 12 men.
USS RINGNESS (APD-100) Redesignated a Crosley-class high-speed transport, 17 July 1944. Commissioned 25 October 1944. Lieutenant Commander William C. Meyer, USNR, in command at time of Indianapolis rescue. Rescued 39 men.
SEARCH & RECOVERY SHIPS
USS MADISON (DD-425) Benson-class destroyer. Launched 20 October 1939 and commissioned 6 August 1940. Commander Donald Wooster Todd, Jr., was commanding officer at the time of rescue, and also Senior Officer Present Afloat.
USS ALVIN C. COCKRELL (DE-366) John C. Butler–class destroyer escort. Commissioned 7 August 1944. Lieutenant Commander Merrill M. Sanford, USNR, in command at rescue.
USS AYLWIN (DD-355) Farragut-class destroyer. Launched 10 July 1934 and commissioned 1 March 1935. Lieutenant Commander Karl Frederick Neupert in command at the time of rescue.
USS FRENCH (DE-367) John C. Butler–class destroyer escort. Commissioned 9 October 1944. Lieutenant Commander T. K. Dunstan, USNR, in command at rescue.
USS HELM (DD-356) Gridley-class destroyer. Commissioned 16 October 1937. Earned eleven Battle Stars in World War II. Commanding officer at time of rescue was Lieutenant Commander Albert Francis Hollingsworth.
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I. Doyle/PBY count taken from USS Cecil J. Doyle action report, August 2–4, 1945.
APPENDIX B
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Journey with Indianapolis
by Sara Vladic
I became captivated by the USS Indianapolis story when I was about thirteen years old. I was watching a documentary with my dad, and they mentioned one line about the ship that stuck with me. “The ship carried the bomb and was lost at sea, leaving the crew of nearly twelve hundred men abandoned at sea for five days.” I couldn’t believe it was a real event when I heard about it, and if it was, how could something so important be reduced to one line? I had to know more. I went to my local library and started searching. There was very little information to be found, but it was indeed a true story. I thought it would make a great movie, and I couldn’t wait to see it come to the screen. At the time, I knew I wanted to make movies, but I figured someone else would make it long before I was old enough to do so.
Jump forward eight years. After graduating college and realizing nobody had told the story yet, or at least no one had done it justice on the screen, I began reaching out to the USS Indianapolis survivors—and the real journey began. I never imagined that the research materials gathered in order to write a screenplay would someday turn into a full-length documentary, and lead to a book. That was nearly seventeen years ago, and at the time, around 117 survivors were still alive.
It was surprising to learn that many people had written books and attempted to make movies without ever interviewing those men who lived through it. Time and time again, I found that I was blessed to be put in a situation where these men became my friends and trusted me with their stories when they hadn’t shared them with anyone else for more than fifty years.
A few years passed, and even though my desperate desire to tell this story increased, the possibility still seemed extremely remote. Until that day when I met with Paul and Mary Lou Murphy at Denny’s in Las Vegas. I arrived prepared to spend whatever time and money it took (from the senior deal menu because, at the time, that was about all I could afford) to convince them that I would be the one to tell their story. What I didn’t realize was that they were going to beat me to the punch. Paul sat in that crowded diner and said, “Sara, I’ve been talking to the guys, and we’ve decided. . . . You’re the one we want to tell our story.” There were many prayers answered that day. And it would take another book to tell you about all of them, but there’s no question that I now had a specific purpose, and there was no way I was going to let these men down.
Now’s the part of my story that everyone should know. I wanted to give up, probably a hundred times (maybe a thousand), but if nothing else, these men taught me there was no such thing as giving up. This was only punctuated by the fact that on those days when I would cry out, asking God why He tasked me with something so huge and then made it “impossible,” I would hear from one of the survivors almost immediately, asking me how I was coming along with their story, and how I was doing. It might be a call, or a letter, or just some small thing that dangled the carrot enough to keep me going. This happened EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. And then, when it got even harder, and I’d be working eighteen-hour days, and chunks of time would pass with no breakthroughs, and someone from Hollywood would attempt to shut me down or “ruin me” . . . I’d pray. And ask my close friends and family to just pray for a clear path, or wisdom. Something! What else could I do? I was young, not really experienced in that industry yet, and not even close to rich, but then time after time, something out of this world would happen that made no sense. And there would be a breakthrough that would lead me one step closer to dream becoming a reality. So I trucked on.
In the following years, I had written an event series screenplay, but it kept coming up that we needed a book, so that it could be marketed as a “based on” story. Now what, God?
After several starts and stops down various avenues, I asked those close friends and family for more prayers, and then asked if anyone knew any authors I could speak with who might be able to help me with some advice. Through my mother-in-law, I was connected with Lynn. What I didn’t know at the time was that Lynn had been praying for an epic World War II story to work on as one of her next projects.
Eventually, we decided to meet, and from the moment she rode up on her Harley and walked up to me, I knew—and I can’t explain it, other than to say God told me right then and there that she would somehow be part of this journey.
And boy, was he right. Together Lynn and I got to work. We collected additional research material via trips to the National Archives, the Naval War College, the Naval Institute, the Indiana Historical Society and War Memorial, and lots and lots of web searches and additional interviews and reading journals and diaries of those involved. We were both elbow-deep in learning about Indy, and we played our role as writers and researchers, each becoming subject matter experts in our own right. The book resulted from a joint effort that was above and beyond anything we imagined.
During my seventeen-year journey with Indianapolis—from dream to series screenplay to documentary and now to this book—I have made some of the best friends I’ve ever known, and have been adopted by the survivors and their families as a granddaughter and keeper of their legacy, and was made an honorary survivor, a title I don’t take lightly. It was for them that I made it through this rocky roller-coaster of a process, and for them that I’ll keep fighting to make sure the story is told as it should be. It’s so much more than just a cheap thriller about a massive shark attack. My hope is that when readers finish this book, they will have a complete understanding of the importance and legacy of this great ship, and those final months of the war. I want them to know the crew, and to understand how ordinary seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids fought and paid the price for our freedom. And that those same teenagers grew up, started families, and continued their fight to exonerate their captain, never once asking for recognition themselves.
METHODOLOGY
Our hats are off to the authors who tackled this epic story before us. We’d like to mention four in particular: Richard Newcomb, author of Abandon Ship, was the first writer to recognize the importance of the Indianapolis story, to realize that an injustice had occurred with respect to McVay, and to write the story in long form. Raymond Lech, author of All the Drowned Sailors, was the first writer to pull together reams of primary sources in a single volume and
to write the story based strictly on those sources. Dan Kurzman pounded the pavement to produce fresh reporting some fifty years after the sinking, and shared our love for digging deep into primary sources. Finally, Doug Stanton, author of In Harm’s Way, was first to interview literally scores of survivors and then write, in his words, “a survival story” that focused on the ordeal the men faced while adrift at sea.
Following in the wake of these greats, we faced a humbling task. Our aims were several: to write an accessible and human naval history that placed Indy in her proper historical context, reminding today’s readers that hers is more than a sinking story. Indianapolis was the ship from whose decks Spruance built his island bridge from Pearl Harbor to Japan and won the Pacific war, a victory that has relevance today for every American. We also wanted to range out and show the Japanese point of view. We hoped to treat men like Ugaki, Hashimoto, and Hirohito, though they were enemies at the time, as men who acted with sincere conscience and conviction. We wanted to share with readers for the first time the inside story of how superspy Major Robert Furman shepherded a world-changing weapon to its launch point. Furman’s story shows the final braiding together of the European and Pacific conflicts that led to the end of the war.
Stories like that of Indianapolis are necessarily told by survivors. We wanted to tell the survivors’ stories while also focusing deeply on men who were lost at sea, developing them as full human beings so that readers could experience what it must have been like to lose them. We wanted to fully explore the drama of the rescue, and honor the brave men who sped to the scene to save their brothers-in-arms. We wanted to touch on the home front, to delve deeply into the grief experienced by the families of Indy’s lost sailors and officers, and also to explore the lifelong impact of the sinking on the men who survived it and their families. We also wanted to tell for the first time the full story of the exoneration of Captain McVay.
Ironically, we did not set out to tell the story of the investigation and court-martial. But our deep dive into primary sources, particularly correspondence among the admirals, revealed a tale of injustice that begged to be told. It was a story that went beyond scapegoating to an institutional wall of silence that, while not a conspiracy, proved a shield for the powerful. After all these decades, we have that in writing, from Admiral Snyder to Admiral King, listing the culpability of men who far outranked McVay but who were never held to account.
Primary sources are the lifeblood of this book. Fact by fact, we were determined to build the story from scratch and have attempted to provide copious documentation. We haunted the National Archives, the Naval War College, the Library of Congress, Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com (for contemporaneous history), and Fold3.com, an online database of military records that operates in conjunction with the National Archives. We visited libraries housing collections of the private papers of historical figures. To experience Indy herself, we visited Quincy, Massachusetts, and clambered up and down the ladders of USS Salem, the only World War II heavy cruiser still afloat. We tapped memoirs, letters, diaries, and journals to bring alive the men’s thoughts as they lived and died and develop the stories of men lost at sea. There were scores of formal interviews of survivors, rescuers, families, and friends, as well as families and friends of those lost at sea.
It evolved that Lynn’s continuing research and focus centered more on the storylines involving the bomb transport, Admiral Spruance, Captain McVay himself, the court-martial, and the exoneration, along with naval history and protocol. Her service in the Navy helped a great deal in understanding this part of the story. Lynn also concentrated on developing the stories of historical figures. Sara focused on the personal stories of the crew and their families, the sinking itself, and the men’s time in the water. Sara and her husband, Ben, a mechanical engineer, also concentrated (or should we say geeked out?) on the history, construction, and technical specifications of the ship itself, as well as mining new information that only became available in late 2017 because of the discovery of the wreck of Indianapolis. The providential timing of that event allowed us to lay to rest forever exactly what happened during Hashimoto’s fateful attack.
In our telling, there is a key element that cannot be underestimated: Sara’s seventeen-year relationship with the survivors and their families. This relationship began in 2001, and then continued in 2005 with formal interviews, which evolved into hundreds of more intimate conversations during which survivors revealed information that they’d never shared with anyone before. Over a decade and a half, Sara crisscrossed the country visiting the men and their families, attending birthdays, hometown ceremonies honoring the survivors, and sadly, dozens of funerals. Her relationship with the survivors grew past “interviewer” and “filmmaker” to supporter, then friend, then honorary survivor, and in many cases, even honorary granddaughter. This critical relationship became a window into the deeper truths of the men’s 1945 ordeal as many survivors decided to share details, often horrific, that they’d once sworn to keep bottled up forever.
These Greatest Generation heroes were of a different time, when men did not complain about their circumstances, but simply bore up. Several, though, wanted to finally unburden themselves and found in Sara a sympathetic listener whom they knew they could trust to keep new details private. Those stories do not appear in this book. Other men, though, nearing the ends of their lives, told Sara that they wanted the whole truth known before it was too late.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt aboard Indianapolis, his ship of state.
Indianapolis sails under the Golden Gate Bridge. The ship was commissioned in November 1932, two months before construction of the bridge began.
(L to R): Admiral Raymond Spruance, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, and Admiral Chester Nimitz with Brigadier General Sanderford Jarman.
Cooks and bakers on liberty. In no particular order: Raymond Kinzle, Keith Owen, David Kemp, John Spinelli, Clarence Hupka, Fernando Sanchez, Sal Maldonado, and Morgan Moseley.
Kyle “Kasey” Moore (left) and Father Thomas Conway (in profile) share a moment of laughter in the Indianapolis wardroom. Notice that Moore is wearing his uninflated life belt, as required.
A portion of Indy’s Marine detachment, 1945. Top (L to R): Miles Spooner, Earl Riggins, Paul Uffelman, Giles McCoy, and Melvin Jacob. Bottom (L to R): Max Hughes, Raymond Rich, Jacob Greenwald, and Edgar Harrell.
Liberty time: (L to R) Robert Owens Jr., Arthur Labuda, Ralph Guye, Marion Schaap, Edward Alvey Jr., Glenn Morgan, and Vincent Allard.
Adolfo Celaya (center) poses with two Marines on Guam.
During general quarters, Indy’s stewards manned the guns.
CDR Stanley Lipski
LT Charles B. McKissick
LT Richard Redmayne
This photo of McVay and his officers was taken just before Indy sailed from Mare Island, California, with components of the first atomic bomb. (L to R, front) CDR Johns Hopkins Janney, CAPT Charles McVay III, CDR Joseph Flynn, CDR Glen DeGrave. (L to R, back) LCDR C. M. Christiansen; LCDR Kasey Moore; LCDR Lewis Haynes, M.D.; LCDR Earl Henry, D.D.S.; LCDR Charles Hayes.
CWO Leonard Woods
ENS John Woolston
Capt Edwin Parke Marine Corps
Japanese Zeke exploding near USS Essex after being shot down by USS Indianapolis near Southern Honshu, Japan, March 19, 1945.
Burials at sea following the March 31, 1945, kamikaze strike on Indy.
Following the kamikaze strike, Spruance visits a wounded sailor in sickbay.
Bugler Earl Procai’s obituary.
WT3 Jimmy O’Donnell and his wife, Mary, just before Indy’s final mission.
ENS Harlan Twible and his bride, Alice. The two married on June 6, 1945, the week after he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy.
LCDR Kasey Moore and his daughter, Mary.
Seaman Dick Thelen and his father just before Thelen shipped out.
LCDR Earl Henry and his wife, Jane, at Memphis, Tennessee’s famous Peabody Hotel the mon
th before Indy’s final mission. Jane was expecting.
Three members of the crew of Enola Gay: (L to R) Navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, pilot Paul Tibbets, and bombardier Thomas Ferebee.
The scientists, technicians, and military leaders of the Manhattan Engineering District’s Project Alberta on Tinian Island, 1945. In the second row (6th, 7th, and 8th from left) are the “Tinian Joint Chiefs,” ADM William Purnell, GEN Thomas Farrell, and CAPT William “Deak” Parsons. At the end of the second row on the right (leaning forward) is Army CPT James Nolan, who, with MAJ Robert Furman, accompanied the Little Boy components aboard Indianapolis.
MAJ Robert Furman, Manhattan Project intelligence chief.
The Imperial Japanese Submarine I-58.
A young Mochitsura Hashimoto with his wife and two of his three sons.
Hashimoto aboard I-58.
ULTRA intercept of a July 30 message from Hashimoto to his higher headquarters reporting that I-58 had sunk an enemy ship. See diagrams pp. 204–205.
Rescue pilot Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, who spotted the Indy survivors.
