Left for Dead

by Peter Nelson

  “No. I think we can hold her. Go below and check again and report back. Lieutenant Orr—any word from the radio room?”

  “No sir, no word yet.”

  “Orders, sir?” Mack asked.

  “Stand by.”

  “Bugler,” McVay commanded, “check the inclinometer.”

  “Eighteen degrees to starboard, sir.”

  “Commander Janney,” McVay said. “Get to the radios and send a message that we’ve been hit. Give position and say we’re sinking rapidly, need immediate assistance.”

  “We’ve been damaged badly, Charlie,” said Commander Joseph (“Red”) Flynn, the Indy’s second in command. “We’re taking water fast. The bow is down. I think we’re done for—I recommend we abandon ship.”

  Flames rose into the sky. Thick smoke poured from the forward deck. There was no power and no lights, save the few emergency lights.

  “Commander Flynn, pass the word to abandon ship,” McVay ordered. A moment later, Coxswain Keyes rushed to the captain’s side.

  “Keyes reporting, Captain—I passed the word aft, sir, but I couldn’t get forward. There’s fire in sick bay and number one mess—I couldn’t go any further. Everybody aft is either out or getting out.”

  The ship lurched to starboard, the list worsening. McVay needed to make sure a distress signal was getting out.

  “Lieutenant Orr—see if you can reach the radio room.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  McVay shouted below. “Nobody go over the side unless you have a life jacket. She may stay here a minute or two. Get the floater nets against the stack.”

  To function as a flagship, the Indianapolis had been fitted with extra communications equipment to serve the needs of Admiral Spruance’s staff. There were two radio shacks, Radio I and Radio II, in rooms about 200 feet from each other. Radioman First Class Joe Moran had gone to Radio I. Also present were watch officer Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Dave Driscoll, Lieutenant Nelson Hill, Radioman Second Class Clifford Sebastian and Radioman Second Class Elwyn Sturtevant. There was smoke from a fire burning in the corner of the room and debris everywhere. Lieutenant Orr arrived from the bridge.

  “Get a distress message out right away,” he said. “Captain’s orders. Say we’ve been torpedoed and need help immediately.”

  “The phone to Radio two is dead,” Driscoll told him.

  “What’s the situation?” Hill asked.

  “I can’t get through to Radio two,” Driscoll answered, “and we can’t send or receive from here—there’s no power.” The transmitters were in Radio II. Messages could be sent from Radio I, but the signal had to travel along a wire from Radio I to Radio II, and apparently the explosions had severed the wire somewhere.

  “Sturtevant,” Hill said. “Go to Radio two and tell Chief Woods to set up on forty-two thirty-five and five hundred kilocycles.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Hill continued. “Moran, you and Sebastian see if you can key from here.”

  When Sturtevant reached Radio II, where the transmitters were housed, he found it an island of tranquillity in a sea of disorder. Everywhere, smoke billowed and flames poured down passageways as spilled fuel ignited or magazines exploded. Men ran with towels over their heads, scrambled topside, felt their way along darkened corridors, burned their hands on white-hot decks and grabbed for life jackets as the ship slowly rolled over to starboard, but in Radio II, the ventilation was working and the emergency lights were on. Chief Radio Technician Leonard T. Woods was there, accompanied by Jack Miner, who’d been asleep just around the corner in Battle II. Woods knew more about the electronics aboard ship than anyone. Miner noticed that Woods had been burned, but it wasn’t slowing him down any.

  “We can’t reach you from forward,” Sturtevant told the chief. “Lieutenant Hill says set up forty-two thirty-five and five hundred. We want to send distress signals.”

  “The transmitters are already warmed up,” Woods replied. “Tell Hill we’ll pipe forty-two thirty-five through to him on line three. Bring me a copy of the distress message and we’ll key it from here on five hundred.”

  Sturtevant returned to Radio I. With the power supplied on the line from Radio II, Moran and Sebastian had found that the transmitters in Radio I seemed to be working but the receivers were not, which meant they were unable to monitor their own signals to know for certain if any messages were actually going out. They keyed the message on faith, tapping out in Morse code: USS INDIANAPOLIS . . . TORPEDOED TWICE . . . LATITUDE TWELVE DEGREES NORTH, LONGITUDE ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE DEGREES EAST . . . NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE. . . .

  “Chief Woods wants a copy of the message,” Sturtevant said when he got back to Radio I. “He says he’ll send it from there.”

  Driscoll wrote out the message on a pad of paper and handed it to Radio Technician Second Class Fred Hart.

  “Take this to Woods as fast as you can.”

  Just as Hart left, the ship listed further. A piece of heavy equipment fell from the bulkhead. Driscoll gave an order. “Everyone out—now!”

  In Radio II, Chief Radio Technician Woods hadn’t waited for anyone from Radio I to return with a copy of the distress message. The radio receiver/transmitter was a large black cabinet filled with vacuum tubes, and though it lacked a transmission key, Woods had jury-rigged a way to send by flipping a toggle switch ordinarily used to test the equipment—he was, in effect, turning the machine on and off to get the signal out. He knew what to say, sending as fast as he could to transmit at 500 kilocycles, the international distress signal frequency: SOS LATITUDE 12 DEGREES NORTH LONGITUDE 135 DEGREES EAST . . .

  The signals went out over a powered antenna. Some officers felt the Indianapolis, built before the advent of radar, had had enough antennas and other equipment added to her to make her top-heavy and vulnerable. A meter in Radio II measured the power output of the antenna, such that if a signal was being transmitted, the meter fluctuated. Jack Miner watched over Woods’s shoulder as the thin red needle on the antenna meter fluctuated. It meant a message was definitely being sent. Miner watched Woods send the message at least three times over a two-minute period. Every radio operator around the world was supposed to monitor 500 kilocycles. The question was, would anybody be paying attention? Then the ship listed even more, and Chief Woods told everyone to get life jackets on and to get out while they still could.

  The Indy carried two twenty-six-foot-long motorized whaleboats, each designed to carry twenty-two men, and thirty-five life rafts that were supposed to be provisioned with survival gear, including first aid kits, Veery pistols to fire flares called star shells into the sky, signal flags and mirrors, bread in waterproof cans, potable water stored in three-, five- and eight-gallon wooden kegs, several three-and-a-half-pound tins of canned meat called Spam, lanterns, oil, lamp wicks, matches, needles and twine for sail making, tools, fishing reels with line, fishhooks, a hatchet, rifles and ammunition. Because the Indianapolis had sailed from Mare Island in such a hurry, not all the rafts were fully provisioned, nor had all the water breakers been refilled with fresh water. Men grappled with the life rafts but managed to free only twelve.

  After the first explosion, Mike Kuryla paused on the hangar deck, unsure what to do for a moment, then joined other sailors who were cutting down bundles of kapok life jackets and freeing life rafts. He handed them out as fast as he could, then put one on himself and slid down the ladder to the boat deck as the ship listed. He scrambled to the high side and tried to free one of the whaleboats, pulling at the pins to release it from its davit, but the list was too great. He was hanging on to the lifeline and trying to swing himself over it onto the high side when the ship rolled over on top of him. He took a deep breath, let go of the lifeline and pushed off with his feet, trying to swim out from under it, but the suction was too great. He kicked with all his might, clawing fiercely at the water. He saw his mother’s face, and his father’s face, and he thought of his brother and of his sister, who’d been sick the last time he’
d seen her. He said an act of contrition, thinking he was going to die.

  Then he was on the surface, coughing and spitting out black oil. He saw a raft floating in front of him, perhaps one of the ones he’d cut loose with his knife, and climbed into it. A seaman from his crew was already there. There was oil everywhere. He threw up.

  “Over here,” he called out to anyone who could hear him. “We’re over here!”

  Morgan Moseley scrambled topside to the galley in his bare feet, wearing only his shorts, saw what was happening and headed below again for his clothes. A friend in the mess hall stopped him and told him he’d better get a life jacket on. He was headed for the galley when the ship listed hard to starboard. He changed his mind and decided the best way topside was through the head, or bathroom. He turned to see a kid behind him, just a boy, probably one of the new recruits. Moseley didn’t know the kid’s name, but he recognized him because he was always hungry and used to come to the galley to beg for snacks. Moseley told the kid to follow him, then turned the wheel to open the hatch. There was resistance from above. It was stuck.

  “We’re goners, Moseley, we’re goners,” the boy said.

  “Well, we ain’t gone yet, are we?” Moseley replied.

  But he couldn’t get the hatch open. He thought for a moment that he was going to die. He thought of all the bad things he’d done in his life, how he’d sassed his mother, how he’d stolen a watermelon from a neighbor’s watermelon patch. Then the hatch opened. Someone had been standing on the other side of it. He climbed through. He turned to help the kid, but the boy was fumbling with his life jacket. He was a good-looking kid, with black hair and a ruddy complexion. Moseley waited for him. There was fire forward, smoke billowing up from below, the angle of list increasing every second—there was no time to waste, no time to be fumbling with life jackets. The kid was halfway out of the hatch when someone fell from the high side, landed on him and knocked him back down the hole.

  The ship rolled. Moseley dove into the water.

  Harlan Twible saw men running everywhere, some partially clothed, some wounded, all of them scared. Commander Flynn told the young ensign to move the men aft. When Twible ran toward the stern, he passed a sailor who was handing out life jackets. The sailor turned out to be one of the men Twible had sentenced, as prosecutor at a captain’s mast, to ten days on bread and water in the brig for going AWOL in San Francisco. The ship listed harder to starboard. Perhaps as many as 500 men had gathered aft and were hanging on to anything they could, clustering on the high side, but the stern was rising as the ship went down at the bow. Twible knew men would be injured if it rose any higher. Those who weren’t injured from the fall could be crushed if the ship rolled on top of them. If they didn’t get into the water immediately, it would be too late.

  “Everybody to the low side—now!” Twible yelled. His voice was lost in the din. He repeated his command. “Everybody down the low side—the ship can’t be saved.” Again, no one heard him, or if they heard him, they were too afraid to obey. He decided to lead by example, shouting, “Everyone follow me!” He worked his way past the cook shack and over the starboard side lifeline. This time, the men followed him.

  “Swim away from the ship—as fast as you can! Swim away!”

  They swam. Twible turned in time to see the ship disappear, the propellers slowly turning in the air. He found himself in a group of men and asked if anybody had anything floating nearby. A quick survey turned up three life rafts and a couple of floater nets. Twible ordered that the wounded were to be placed in the rafts. Everybody else was to tie himself to a floater net. He had no plan, other than to keep everyone together until the morning. No one else seemed to be taking charge, and as far as he knew, he was the only officer in the group. He’d been trained to lead, so he did. It was as simple as that.

  Gil McCoy released his prisoners from the brig after the second explosion, fumbling for his keys in the dark as the bunk racks all around him collapsed, men falling on top of one another. He found a battery-powered battle lantern to light the compartment. With the help of the two prisoners, he set about pulling men out from under the fallen lockers, bunks and assorted debris, some with broken arms, broken legs, cracked ribs, perhaps as many as thirty men altogether. He’d freed as many as he could from the rubble, maybe twenty, when a chief petty officer stuck his head down from above and shouted through the scuttle, “Dogging the hatch!” McCoy left his lantern behind and ran for the hatch. He was the last man up the ladder, with one more level to go before he made it topside, but he paused, because he knew there were still men trapped below. He could hear them screaming for help, calling out, “Don’t leave us!” as the scuttle was closed and secured shut, or “dogged,” with steel pins.

  He put it out of his mind. He reached the main deck, found a life jacket, climbed to the boat deck on the port side and tried to take his shoes off, but he only had time to untie one of them. As the ship rolled, he walked down the side of the ship and slid off the keel. He swam with all his strength. When he turned around to look, he saw the stern of the ship rise high in the sky above him, men falling off the fantail, getting knocked unconscious as they hit the screws. As the ship went down, the suction pulled him under. He kicked against it. The ship was still exploding as it sank. He felt the concussions. He was finally lifted up by an air bubble, but the suction was strong enough to suck the other shoe off his foot. When he reached the surface, he had to push his way through a gummy mat of oil. He tried to swim underwater to get away from it, but it was everywhere. He swallowed enough of it to make him sick. He saw a raft in the distance and headed for it, but he had trouble pushing through the oil. The raft was drifting farther and farther away. The swim exhausted him. He was losing strength. He managed to grab a rope dangling from the raft, but he was too spent to hang on. Finally somebody grabbed him by the hair and pulled him aboard.

  One end of the oval raft had been damaged, but there was enough of a latticed wood floor to give some support. He was coughing and sputtering oil when someone saw the silhouette of a ship, a black shape coursing slowly against the sky. Most of the men in the water feared that the Jap sub had surfaced to strafe the survivors with its machine guns, a tactic practiced by both sides during the war, but McCoy was convinced the ship was a destroyer come to rescue them, so he drew his sidearm and fired two shots, hoping the muzzle flash would attract attention. He was lucky it didn’t. There were no U.S. destroyers in the vicinity, but Captain Hashimoto did bring the I-58 to the surface thirty minutes after the sinking to look for proof of his kill.

  Captain McVay was walking upright on the side of his ship as the bow went under, and a wave of water came and washed him into the sea. He swam. He watched as the fantail rose 200 feet in the air. He saw his men jump, and he watched them fall to their deaths. A man falling 100 feet into water might as well be landing on concrete. The Indianapolis paused a moment, then slipped into the sea, straight down, picking up speed, with another two miles to fall before she reached the bottom. Men covered in fuel oil wiped their eyes to look for their ship, but there wasn’t a ship anymore. They kept looking, but there was only the darkness, the black sky and the endless sea.

  It took only twelve minutes. Shorter than halftime at a football game, but enough time to kill about 300 men and put the rest in the water, roughly 880 men scattered 600 miles west of Guam, 550 miles east of Leyte and 250 miles north of the Palau Islands, the closest land.

  Twelve minutes.

  Chapter Seven

  The Ordeal

  July 30 to August 3, 1945

  Any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Because the ship kept moving forward as she sank, the distance between the first man to go into the water and the last was about three miles. Men were burned and bleeding, in agony from scorched lungs, broken limbs and cu
ts, and dazed from cracked skulls and concussions. About half of the 880 men in the water had life jackets, either kapok-filled vests or inflatable rubber belts. A southwesterly current carried them at a speed of about one knot, with winds blowing in about the same direction at an average speed of about five knots, meaning the men would drift about twenty-four miles a day from their initial location. Men in life rafts blew farther in the wind than men submerged in the water because they were more exposed.

  Robert McGuiggan got off the ship near his gun mount, sliding down as the Indy dipped forward and rolled to the right at a forty-five-degree angle. He was standing on the keel when he jumped into water covered in a slick of black crude oil, thick and noxious. He swam with his hands in front of him, executing a kind of frantic breaststroke as he tried to clear the muck away. In the darkness he heard a man screaming, “Help me—I can’t swim—I don’t have a life jacket.” McGuiggan turned to help him. The man grabbed him, nearly pulling him under.

  “Hang on to my arm,” McGuiggan said. “Take it easy—don’t panic. I got a rubber life jacket under my kapok.” He blew it up and handed it to his shipmate. They saw a group in the water and swam toward it. The group counted about 150 men on the first day. Men formed themselves into circles by tying their life jackets together, comforted by the sense that there would be strength in numbers. Men prayed together, and there was a measure of reassurance in that, as if God were more likely to hear a chorus of petitions than a lone voice in the sea. McGuiggan watched when a sailor swam off to retrieve what looked like a crate of potatoes, maybe sixty feet out, but the sharks got him before he got halfway there, and McGuiggan heard the scream, and decided he wasn’t going to look down in the water—if there was something there waiting to take him, he’d rather not see it coming. It was looking down that was making everybody crazy.