by Peter Nelson
Mike Kuryla was a coxswain from Chicago, a veteran sailor who’d seen a lot of men die, a participant in eight major battles and plenty of smaller battles in between. He’d enlisted young and he’d been trained well, which meant he was taught to kill. His duties included basic ship maintenance and manning the 5-inch guns. In his spare time he spliced line, made knots, jumped rope for exercise or tossed around a medicine ball. He liked to listen to baseball on the radio when they could get it, or to the Texas and Louisiana boys aboard ship playing guitar and mandolin, or sometimes the Polish boys from Detroit and Chicago playing polkas on their accordions. He stayed away from the card games but could occasionally be found below decks shooting craps on a blanket, throwing dice against the bulkhead in some corner of the ship with the other coxswains and bosun’s mates while somebody stood lookout in the hall.
Ship’s Cook First Class Morgan Moseley was also a seasoned tar. Morgan had quit school after the sixth grade to support his mother and sister. He’d worked as a sharecropper, plowing forty acres behind a mule when he was twelve years old, later hiring on with the railroad. He was on his way to church when he heard about Pearl Harbor. He joined the navy, went to boot camp in San Diego and then spent four months in cook school, joining the crew of the Indianapolis in May of 1943. He’d been working in the galley when the kamikaze plane hit the Indy at Okinawa, crashing through the galley and then the mess hall, killing nine men and chipping one of Moseley’s teeth.
Ensign Harlan Twible was a new officer, the son of a millworker from Gilbertville, Massachusetts. His father was an Irish immigrant who taught his children not to take for granted the opportunities or the freedoms their adopted country offered. Harlan was working his way through the University of Massachusetts when he passed a test that made him eligible for the Naval Academy. He took his appointment seriously, entered in 1941, studied hard and finished in three years. At Mare, Twible familiarized himself with his new ship and duties. He was the last officer to come on board, and a bit disappointed, having hoped to become either a pilot or a submariner, but he respected the authority of those above him and agreed to go where he was needed. “You’re Naval Academy and we expect a lot from you,” Captain McVay had said when he reported in. His duty station was sky aft, the secondary gunnery control atop a 100-foot-tall observation tower connected by telephone to the bridge, where he’d be in charge of the aft guns. It seemed like a lot of responsibility to give to a green ensign fresh out of the academy, but he was determined to learn his job and do his duty. He tried to have faith in the Indianapolis, but nevertheless sensed a certain aura about it that he couldn’t put his finger on, something that made him oddly apprehensive.
Giles McCoy was a ruggedly handsome twenty-one-year-old marine from St. Louis, the son of a butter salesman who’d fought in World War I. He was a pugnacious young man with a strong sense of justice, and used to beat up the bullies at school who picked on younger kids. He’d been a star athlete in high school, a shortstop with hopes of playing in the major leagues. He joined the marines in June of 1943 because they were supposed to be the toughest guys in the service. Marines were trained to provide security aboard ships and to go ashore in landing parties and fight, more like soldiers than sailors.
On the Indianapolis, McCoy, in addition to pulling guard duty, served as Captain McVay’s personal orderly, bodyguard and message runner. When Admiral Spruance was on board, it was McCoy’s job to accompany the admiral on his daily constitutionals and make sure he didn’t fall overboard. He found Captain McVay to be serious, polite, a real gentleman, somewhat formal but generally nice, a man McCoy liked and respected. McVay seemed to like him in return, because McCoy kept his shoes shined and his slacks pressed and stood at attention and did his job—when the captain gave him a message, he never had to repeat it.
McCoy went into San Francisco on liberty one night with three of his buddies while the ship was being repaired. They didn’t have enough money to get into any real trouble, but they did their best under the circumstances. They were walking down the sidewalk in their dress whites when one of them flicked his cigarette to the ground and it landed upright, standing on end, smoking like a chimney. The four stared in disbelief.
“Well, you know what that means,” a second man said.
“What?” the first one asked.
“It’s an omen,” the second man joked. “It means you’re going to get it when we go back out.”
The others laughed.
Chapter Five
The Mission
July 1945
The young men falling in and arming,
The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith’s hammer, tossed aside with precipitation,)
The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the court,
The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing the reins abruptly down on the horses’ backs,
The salesman leaving the store, the boss, the book-keeper, porter, all leaving;
Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm,
The new recruits, even boys, the old men show them how to wear their accoutrements, they buckle the straps carefully. . . .
Walt Whitman, “First O Songs for a Prelude”
On Sunday, July 15, the Indianapolis sailed from Mare Island, traveling south twenty-five miles to Hunters Point naval shipyard, just across the water from where Candlestick Park stands today. That afternoon, two nondescript army trucks pulled up alongside the ship. Sailors looking over the side to the pier below saw officers and armed guards and knew that something important was coming aboard, whatever it was. One team unloaded a large wooden crate, about fifteen feet long. “Probably whiskey for the admirals,” one sailor joked. Another thought it was full of money. A second team off-loaded a heavy 200-pound cylinder, about two feet high and eighteen inches in diameter, resembling a fat lead wastebasket. Traveling with the bomb, though only they knew it was a bomb, were an intelligence expert in atomic energy and an M.D. serving as medical overseer. His job was to monitor the cylinder with a Geiger counter for radiation leaks from the uranium 235 inside, an amount equal, in explosive power, to about 30,000,000 pounds of dynamite.
The Indianapolis received one other shipment of note at Hunters Point, a new supply of kapok life jackets, 2,500 of them, which was all well and good, except that the ship only carried a crew of about 1,200 men. Such mix-ups were not uncommon in the military, but it only added to the chaos aboard ship. Places had to be found to store the extra life preservers, usually stashed in hanging bags along the bulkhead. There also were 50 Mare Island shipyard workers sailing as far as Pearl Harbor to finish their repairs en route, in addition to 100 other passengers traveling to various destinations in the Pacific, all of whom needed to be housed and fed. McVay had 250 new crew members to train, inexperienced sailors who had to be put through fire drills and abandon ship drills and in general shown their duties and responsibilities. Usually he tried to greet his new recruits by name, but this would take some time. Thirty of his eighty officers were new as well. Training would be no easy task with so many passengers loafing about to get in the way. McVay had much to do to get the Indy in fighting trim before Admiral Spruance returned to his flagship.
She sailed from Hunters Point on July 16. In 1932, the USS Omaha had set a record by sailing between San Francisco and Honolulu in 75.4 hours, a record the Indianapolis broke by over an hour, arriving at Pearl the morning of the fourth day. After a quick six-hour layover to debark passengers, refuel and let her engines cool, the Indianapolis put out to sea again and headed for Tinian, 3,300 miles to the west.
Tinian was a forty-square-mile coral island, once home to a large and heavily fortified Japanese base that was taken by U.S. forces exactly a year before. Now that it was in U.S. possession, it was home to one of the busiest airfields in the world, the staging area for air raids on Japan. The Indy averaged twenty-four knots for this leg of the trip and finally dropped anchor offshore on July
26. There she received the following order:
DATE: 26 July 1945
FROM: CINCPAC Adv Hq
TO: Indianapolis
Upon completion unloading Tinian report to Port Director for routing to Guam where disembark Com. 5th Fleet personnel X Completion report to PD Guam for onward routing to Leyte where on arrival report CTF 95 by dispatch for duty X CTG 95.7 directed arrange 10 days training for Indianapolis in Leyte Area.
CINCPAC (pronounced “sink-pack”) stood for “Commander in Chief, Pacific,” the post held by four-star Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. His main headquarters were in Hawaii, but his advance headquarters were in Guam, a short sail from Tinian. The directive ordered McVay to visit the port director at Tinian for routing instructions, and then to sail to Guam. The order didn’t specify the date, and said only that McVay was to sail to Guam “upon completion unloading,” meaning whenever he was finished unloading whatever it was he had to unload (the order didn’t mention the atomic bomb, needless to say, because that was top-secret). “Disembark Com. 5th Fleet personnel” meant McVay was to drop off his passengers in Guam. After that, he was to report to the PD or port director at the Guam naval base for routing west across the Philippine Sea to the island of Leyte, Philippines. Upon reaching Leyte, McVay was to send a message saying he’d arrived to CTF 95 or Commander, Task Force 95, a fleet of ships then operating in the waters off Japan, led by Vice Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf aboard the USS Omaha. The last sentence of the order tells McVay that CTG 95.7 or Commander, Task Group 95.7 had been directed to arrange for ten days of gunnery training in the Leyte area. Task Group 95.7 was led by Rear Admiral Lynde D. McCormick, whose flag flew on the battleship USS Idaho.
Copies of the order were also sent to the port director at Tinian, to Commander Brooks, the port director at Guam, to Vice Admiral George Murray, who was the head of the Marianas command with the responsibility of overseeing the area the Indianapolis had sailed from, and to Admirals Nimitz, Spruance and Oldendorf—seven copies, telling seven different people or offices what the Indianapolis was going to be doing and where it would be traveling. The Indianapolis arrived in Guam on July 27, then home to nearly 500,000 troops waiting to hit the beaches of Japan proper. At CINCPAC’s advance headquarters in Guam, Captain McVay met with Commodore James B. Carter, Admiral Nimitz’s assistant chief of staff. Carter told McVay he could sail the next morning. McVay left Commodore Carter’s office at CINCPAC believing, from the man’s words and tone, that nothing much was going on in this part of the war, a sensibility Admiral Spruance confirmed when he told McVay over lunch that “Nothing big was in the wind.” Spruance said he was not yet certain whether or not he’d ride with the Indianapolis to the Philippines or fly.
At 4 P.M., Captain McVay reported to the port director’s office, only to find Commander Brooks out. McVay met instead with Lieutenant Joseph Waldron, the convoy and routing officer. About 90 percent of the ships leaving the Marianas had been routed by Waldron, around 5,000 ships in the last ten months. McVay assumed Waldron knew what he was doing. He asked Waldron what speed he wanted him to travel at. A fleet order at the time recommended that ships without time constraints travel at a speed of sixteen knots to save fuel. McVay had two concerns. He wanted, first, to rest his engines a bit after two high-speed runs, one from San Francisco to Pearl and another from Pearl to Tinian, and second, he wanted to arrive in Leyte at dawn. A speed of twenty-five knots would have put him in Leyte on Monday morning, but that was too fast. Arriving in Leyte on Tuesday meant leaving at 9 A.M. Saturday morning, July 28, and traveling at 15.7 knots.
The next thing to be decided was the route. This was somewhat simpler. Wartime Pacific routing instructions stated, “Under normal procedures, combatant fleet components proceeding to or returning from combat areas shall be sailed on standard routes whenever such routes are available.” The standard route to Leyte, sailing west from Guam, was a direct line called “Convoy Route Peddie.” Peddie it was then.
McVay next asked for an escort ship. The Indianapolis was not equipped with sonar, and therefore had no way to detect enemy submarines. Ordinarily, ships without antisubmarine capabilities were accompanied by destroyer escorts, which carried sonar equipment and depth charges and which had proven quite adept at deterring submarine attacks. Waldron called the office of Vice Admiral Murray at Commander Marianas, and was put through to the surface operations officer, one Captain Oliver Naquin. Naquin, however, was out of his office. Waldron spoke instead to Naquin’s assistant, a Lieutenant Johnson, who told Waldron no escort was needed. The war had moved far north of Guam, and most of the hostile actions were now concentrated in the waters off the Japanese main islands. The Peddie route crossed what was widely considered the “backwaters” of the war. For his part, McVay had sailed unescorted many times before, often with Admiral Spruance on board, and often in waters apparently more dangerous than the ones he was about to cross. He recognized that as the war drew to a close, escorts were needed more in forward areas, both to escort ships and to rescue pilots who splashed into the sea flying missions over Japan. If no escort was available, he would make do, even though the Indianapolis would be the first capital ship (cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers were all categorized as capital ships) to sail from Guam to Leyte unescorted since the war had begun.
That evening, three hours later, around seven o’clock, the Indianapolis’s navigation officer, Commander Janney, met with Waldron and was handed two reports, first the routing instructions and then an intelligence briefing. Janney studied them. The routing instructions contained the essential travel details, that the ship was to leave at 9 A.M. July 28, sail 1,171 miles west-southwest to Leyte at a speed of 15.7 knots, arriving in Leyte at 11 A.M. Tuesday morning, July 31. Clause 6 of the routing instructions read:
Commanding Officers are at all times responsible for the safe navigation of their ships. They may depart from prescribed routing when, in their judgment, weather, currents or other navigational hazards jeopardize the safety of the ship. They will return to the prescribed route as soon as safety permits. Zigzag at discretion of Commanding Officer.
The phrase “Zigzag at discretion of Commanding Officer” meant that Captain McVay was allowed to use his own judgment whether or not to steer a course that constantly changed, or zigzagged, as a way of evading possible attack by enemy submarine torpedoes. It was customary for U.S. ships’ captains to zigzag during daylight hours and at night in times of good visibility, though many captains chose to cease zigzagging at night under conditions of poor visibility. The reason to zigzag was, of course, that if an enemy torpedo was coming straight at a ship, changing course would take it out of harm’s way. On the other hand, submarines usually fired more than one torpedo at a time in a spread pattern, such that zigzagging was in some cases as likely to steer a ship into the path of one torpedo as out of the path of another. Many ships’ captains were aware that during the war, U.S. submarine commanders had sunk over 4,000 enemy ships, most of which were zigzagging. The value of zigzagging had been debated since the war began. At any rate, the routing instructions, which superseded any other sailing orders, left it up to Captain McVay. His decision whether or not to stop zigzagging at night would be informed in part by the weather and the visibility on any given night, and in part by the degree of threat from enemy submarine activities. For that, he would rely on the intelligence report Waldron gave Janney.
The danger seemed low. The intelligence report listed only three submarine sightings, none of them particularly ominous. There’d been a surface submarine on July 22, but that news was six days old, and the sighting had taken place 700 miles from the Peddie route. The intelligence brief also mentioned two rather dubious July 25 reports, first an “Unknown ship” reporting they’d sighted a “possible periscope at 13:56N–135:56E,” the second telling Commander Janney of a “Sound contact reported at 10:30N–136:25E,” but that “Indications at that time pointed to a doubtful submarine.” This was about 100 miles south of the Peddi
e route, arguably along the Indianapolis’s course, but all told, phrases like “unknown ship” and “possible periscope” and “doubtful submarine” didn’t set off any alarms. There’d been lots of false reports during the war, nervous merchant ships’ captains seeing threats in the darkness.
The night before sailing was uncomfortably warm. For all her speed and grace, the Indy was not a particularly well-ventilated ship, a situation that posed a problem when the ship was sailing in humid tropical climes. She often sailed with her hatches open below to allow the passage of air, but even so men frequently chose to sleep topside wherever they could.
On Saturday morning, Spruance informed Captain McVay he wouldn’t be boarding the Indianapolis for the trip to the Philippines. Promptly at 9 A.M., the Indianapolis hoisted anchor and departed for Leyte. At 10:40 that morning, Lieutenant Waldron’s office transmitted a message containing the essential travel details, that the ship left Guam at 9 A.M., July 28, averaging 15.7 knots on the Peddie route, and that it was due to arrive in Leyte at approximately 8 A.M. Tuesday, July 31, dropping anchor at 11 A.M.
Waldron’s message also indicated that the Indianapolis would be sailing between two control zones, leaving the Marianas command area and crossing over from east to west into the Philippine Sea Frontier at 130 degrees east longitude, the line between the two command zones usually referred to as “the Chop.” The crossover would happen sometime Monday, Waldron’s message said. Again, several copies of the message were sent: one to the shipping control officer, Marianas area; one to Lieutenant Commander Jules Sancho, who was the port director in Leyte; one to Rear Admiral McCormick of Task Group 95.7; and copies classified for “information” only forwarded to Admiral Spruance, Commodore Carter, Fleet Admiral Nimitz, Vice Admiral Murray and Vice Admiral Oldendorf. Both the Marianas command and the Philippine Sea Frontier had plotting boards to keep track of ship movements, and each was supposed to take the information Waldron had sent them and use it to follow the Indianapolis as she made her way from Guam to Leyte. Keeping track of a ship on a known straight-line route at a given rate of speed should have been a fairly simple undertaking, a question of moving a marker a few inches on a map every couple of hours.
