Left for Dead

by Peter Nelson

  Mike Kuryla’s group included an ensign and a chief, but no one tried to take charge or tell anybody else what to do. They had about sixteen men sharing four rafts tethered together with about ten feet of line between them, but they had no food and no water. At first they thought they’d be picked up in a matter of hours, but as time wore on, men stopped believing the things they told themselves, and that was when they became suggestible, because they wanted to believe something. Somebody would start hallucinating that they’d found water, fresh, cool, drinkable water, just below the surface. He’d tell another guy and they’d both believe it. Sharks took their victims suddenly, without warning, but there was no way to anticipate it, so all he could do was wait, and hope. It was like a long bad dream, Kuryla thought, one he couldn’t wake from. They kept the wounded in the rafts, until they died, and then they turned them loose. Kuryla couldn’t believe some of the guys who were hanging on, when other guys who looked like they were in better shape seemed to quit. A fifth of the ship’s complement had been new. The younger sailors asked the veteran when he thought they’d be rescued, as if he’d been through something like this before.

  “Tomorrow,” Kuryla told them. “They’ll come and get us tomorrow.”

  Jack Miner carried with him a similar message of hope. He’d slid into the water with hardly a splash and swam with all his might, fearful that the Indianapolis would roll over on top of him. When a bucket struck him from behind, he dove underwater and kicked, holding his breath until he thought his lungs would burst. He surfaced in the middle of a small group of men. He turned in time to see the ship sinking.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” he told the others. “We sent the SOS.”

  “You sure?” someone asked.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “It went out. Now all we gotta do is hang on.” Seeing the needle move, of course, only told him that the message had been sent. He had no proof that the message had been heard. No listening station had radioed back asking for verification, but wasn’t the Pacific Ocean full of guys manning radio sets? Other ships, shore facilities, airfields, pilots in the sky—surely somebody out there had heard the SOS. He saw the needle move.

  Morgan Moseley was in the group with Jack Miner. At first he kept to the edge of the circle. He searched from face to face, recognizing no one. It was a large group. He couldn’t begin to guess how many men. He thought about the boy in the hatch, the one he’d waited for. He wondered if the boy had managed to get out. He felt guilty for not helping him. He’d tried to help, but he could have tried harder. On the second night in the water, a sailor who couldn’t have been more than seventeen told Moseley he was cold and asked if he’d hold him. Moseley agreed. He wasn’t going to let another chance to help somebody go by. The two men shared their body warmth and waited for dawn to come. The kid didn’t make it. Moseley saw the men around him growing so weak they couldn’t hold their heads out of the water, some of them mumbling, “We’re all going to die.” As far as Moseley was concerned, talking that way made it a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, so he decided if you could talk yourself into dying, you could just as easily talk yourself into living. He told himself, over and over again, “I’m not going to die—if anybody is going to live, it’s going to be me—I’m going to control my mind. . . .” It was particularly difficult when they saw airplanes overhead, one flying so low Moseley could read the numbers on the tail. The first impulse was to assume the pilot had seen them. Moseley’s hopes soared, then crashed when the passing hours brought no response. One night, he saw the navigation lights of an airplane flying overhead and then, in the distance, miles away, he saw signal flares launched from the sea telling him other men had made it off the ship—surely the plane would see the flares.

  Harlan Twible was more or less in charge of the group that included Jack Miner and Morgan Moseley. He was assessing the situation the morning after the sinking when Lieutenant Redmayne swam over to him and asked him if he was an officer. Twible suggested Redmayne take charge, but the lieutenant was badly burned and said he didn’t have enough strength to be of much use. Twible ordered a head count. The count stopped at 325. A quick survey turned up three rafts, provisioned with tins of Spam, malted milk tablets and four casks of fresh water; not much for so many men, but it was better than nothing. Most of the men were covered in oil and unrecognizable. As the sun rose, Twible ordered everyone who wasn’t covered in oil to smear some on themselves for protection. He told them to hold on to each other’s hands, to stay together. As men died from their injuries during the first day, Twible led or joined in prayer services over their bodies. Most of the men still believed that rescue would come soon. They scanned the horizon, looking for ships or airplanes.

  By the second day, men began to hallucinate, seeing ships that weren’t there, seeing drinking fountains, islands. Squabbles broke out. Alliances formed. Some men were turning violent. As a precaution, Twible gave the command that everybody disarm. He was backed up by a forty-nine-year-old sea dog, a chief warrant officer named Durward R. “Gunner” Horner, who shouted, “You heard what the officer said.” Some did as they were told. Some didn’t.

  The sharks came in great numbers from all directions that afternoon. Perhaps there were men who’d dropped their knives who wished they still had them, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. First one man screamed, then another. The sharks seemed to be attacking the men who’d drifted loose from the nets. The men closed ranks. It didn’t help. Men were pulled under, and then their bodies bobbed back to the surface, minus an appendage, only to disappear again. Twible set up shark watches, appointing men to serve as lookouts, but it didn’t help much. The sharks periodically came and went, indifferent to both shouts and prayers.

  Cozell Smith joined a group of about 150 men hanging on to a floater net. It wasn’t much to hang on to, a square rope cargo net about twenty feet to a side, with twelve inches between the ropes and cork floats every two feet. If there was a safe place, it was in the center of the net. The men in the center were less susceptible to shark attack. An ensign was trying to organize the men and get them to move the wounded toward the center, but there were healthy men in the center who wouldn’t give up their spots. Everywhere men were screaming. Smith saw shark fins cutting across the surface of the water not ten feet away from him. He saw a man drift from the group, losing consciousness, and then the man jolted as a shark hit him from the side and pulled him under. Men without life jackets tried to climb on top of men with life jackets. Everywhere he looked he saw chaos, as men screamed, panicked, cursed, fought with one another, drowned one another, scrambled over one another like rats in a bucket, the sea black with oil and red with blood. It was, Smith thought, everything he’d ever read about hell.

  Suddenly Smith felt a shark take him by the left hand and pull him under before he had a chance to scream. His left hand was in the shark’s mouth up to the wrist. He couldn’t shake it loose. He could see the shark underwater. It was maybe eight or ten feet long. It rolled, then twisted, trying to rip his hand off. Smith held his breath and pushed at the shark, trying to get his left hand free as the shark jerked from side to side. Smith’s right hand slipped off the shark’s nose until he felt a soft spot on the side of the shark’s head. Smith plunged his middle finger into the soft spot and slid it in all the way to the last knuckle. His eye, Smith thought. I’ll rip his eye out if he thinks he can pull me down. Then the shark turned him loose. Smith kicked for the surface, certain the shark would take him again. He surfaced, gasping for air. His hand was torn and bleeding, but at least it was still connected to his arm. He swam back toward the group, but found he was no longer welcome there. Men feared that Smith’s wounds would only attract more sharks.

  “Get away!” someone yelled at him.

  “Get him!”

  “Keep him off—keep him away!”

  Gil McCoy was in Kuryla’s group, on a different raft, one of four rafts tethered with line. The malted milk tablets only made McCoy thirstier. He tie
d his T-shirt around his head to keep the sun off, but he got burned all the same. He prayed the rosary repeatedly, using the beads he kept in his pocket. He was the only Catholic in his group, so when the others discovered what he was doing, they asked him to pray out loud so they could learn the words: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. . . .” The sharks came, about a dozen, a constant presence. The words of prayer made the idea of dying more bearable, a connection to a world more perfect than this one, more painless and peaceful. It wasn’t long before men started losing their minds, saying silly, crazy things. The marine still had his sidearm with him, but after a few hours in the water, the .45 automatic had seized and wouldn’t fire. When things started to get nasty as disputes arose, McCoy used the malfunctioning gun to persuade his shipmates to drop their knives. Rank alone carried little authority in the water, but the sight of a .45 conveyed a certain influence.

  The sharks, of course, were not so easily bluffed. McCoy thought about his family, his father and his mother and his sisters, but he’d also had two brothers, one who died at birth and another who died at age seven. His main thought was that he didn’t want his mother to lose another son. When the thirst or the hunger overwhelmed him, he thought of the pumpkin pies his mother used to bake at Thanksgiving. He was probably the only man in the entire Pacific Ocean thinking of pumpkin pie, but all he wanted was one more piece.

  Captain McVay was in a smaller group still. He’d found a potato crate to hold on to at first, then chanced upon two life rafts stacked one atop the other. He climbed into one of the rafts. He’d watched his ship go down in the dim light of a hidden quarter moon, the fantail rising high above his head in ghostly form. He knew the image would be with him forever. He was riding on a greasy film of fuel oil when he heard three men calling for help.

  “Over here—I have a raft,” he shouted.

  He picked up Quartermaster Third Class Vincent Allard, who’d been with him on the bridge as the ship went down. Allard had two younger men with him who were retching and injured. McVay put the two sick men on one of the rafts and tied it to his. He’d been temporarily blinded in one eye by the oil but was otherwise unharmed. His rafts contained paddles, food rations, signal flares and other emergency gear. He knew he’d been lucky to survive the sinking. One of the widely accepted myths about the mariner’s life is that a captain is somehow obligated by law or custom or code of honor to go down with his ship. To the contrary, a captain in the United States Navy is commissioned to tend to the safety and well-being of his crew at all times, and would be derelict in his duty if he went down with his ship when there were still members of his crew who could benefit from his guidance.

  In the morning, McVay’s group hooked up with five men they found hanging on to a raft and a floater net. That made nine men, three rafts and a floater net. McVay ordered a survey of their possessions. They had paddles, biscuits, malted milk tablets, tins of Spam, a single dry cigarette salvaged from a saturated carton that floated by, emergency gear including a Veery pistol and twelve signal cartridges, signal flags and fishing tackle, and a breaker of water. McVay tasted the water and discovered it had gone salty, but he didn’t tell the others. He divided the food into rations to last them ten days. He found a pencil and a piece of paper and started a log, drawing up a schedule of two-hour watches for the men to keep, to be sure they didn’t miss it if a plane flew overhead. It was a small thing, a pencil and a piece of paper, but it showed leadership at a time when it might have seemed to some that all was lost. It mattered.

  Allard made everybody cone-shaped hats from a piece of canvas they found on one of the rafts. McVay, an avid fisherman, attempted to use the fishing gear he found to catch something they could eat. Allard had some luck catching smaller fish, which they used as bait to catch bigger fish, but the sharks that circled the rafts kept stealing the bait. McVay didn’t have strong enough tackle to catch a shark. As long as they didn’t dangle their legs in the water, his men were relatively safe from sharks, though sharks were known to attack boats and overturn life rafts. To keep their spirits up, they prayed, and they sang songs like “Oh Susanna” and “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.”

  The captain sang too. Ordinarily, on a ship, a captain can undermine his own authority by fraternizing too much with his men—he needs to have his orders obeyed immediately by subordinates who regard him as supreme lord and master of the vessel. On his flotilla of life rafts, McVay opened up to them in a way he couldn’t have aboard ship. He wanted to know them. He’d lost so many boys whom he’d never known and never would. He asked his men about themselves, where they came from, who was waiting for them back home, what their girlfriends were like, their families. They talked about how hard it was for married men to serve in the navy, constantly away from their wives and loved ones. McVay told them about his second wife, Louise Claytor McVay, what a great woman she was, a true soul mate, and how she shared his love for duck hunting and fishing. When his men asked him if an SOS had been sent, McVay assured them one had, that he knew it personally. In fact, he’d never heard back from the radio room, so he didn’t know whether or not an SOS message had been sent. It was a lie, but if he could set their minds at ease with a white lie, so be it.

  They saw planes flying overhead on Monday, most likely bombers leaving from Tinian to bomb the Japanese home islands, and tried to signal to them with mirrors and yellow signal flags, to no avail. McVay saw a raft in the distance that day, bobbing on the waves about a mile off, occupied by a lone sailor. They saw him again Tuesday morning and paddled over to him, a four-and-a-half-hour exercise that left everybody spent. It turned out he was just a kid, barely old enough to serve, scared and alone, his face black with oil. It made the captain feel good to bring him into the group, which now consisted of ten men and four rafts. He pointed out to the others that the Indianapolis had been due to arrive in Leyte this morning, and that when they didn’t show up, a search would surely be ordered.

  At least that was the way it was supposed to work.

  In a general sense, what the men in the water were experiencing was beyond their comprehension, a lesson of pain and suffering that made its impression as much on their minds as on their bodies. The first to die in the water were those who drowned or succumbed to injuries suffered aboard ship. Most of them were burn victims. In the early hours of the ordeal, the injured men slowly bled out, went into shock and died from exsanguination. Before the bodies were set adrift, they were searched for dog tags or personal effects to be forwarded to the next of kin. Not everyone made it off the ship with identification on them.

  Many of the men who didn’t die of burns or injuries suffered during the sinking died from exposure. “Exposure” (sometimes the word “immersion” was used) was a kind of catchall term to describe a variety of maladies and afflictions, each terrible in its own way. When experienced together, they proved a deadly combination. First, there was the water itself. Salt water is corrosive to human skin and can cause saltwater ulcers, a condition affecting the parts of the body that remain above the water, where grains of sodium chloride deposited on the skin through evaporation get ground into the epidermis by abrasion or chafing—a life preserver strap rubbing against the neck, for instance—causing microscopic cuts that then become infected. Next, there was the sun to contend with. At midday, in midsummer, a mere twelve degrees from the equator, the sun is fierce, pushing the temperatures over 100 degrees. Ultraviolet light doesn’t penetrate seawater beyond a few feet, but all the same, the sun glaring off the surface of the water burned men’s faces and necks. Severely sunburned skin coming in contact with salt water can feel like you’ve been splashed with acid. Second-degree sunburns were accompanied by blistering. Sunburned ulcers would have been excruciating.

  Those men who were covered in fuel oil found themselves grateful for it, despite the vomiting and nausea caused by the fumes, because the oil coating protected them from the sun’s ultraviolet rays—protected everything, that is, except their e
yes. Without shade or protection, and with white-hot sunlight refracting and reflecting off every wave and facet of the ocean’s surface, many men suffered from “photophobia” or sunburned corneas, where the eyes become hypersensitive and any exposure to light hurts. Some men tied their shirts around their eyes as blindfolds, while others covered their eyes with their hands or arms and waited for night to come.

  Because the body can survive for weeks without food by metabolizing its own energy reserves, first fat and then muscle tissues, starvation was not much of a problem. Emotionally, hunger could have contributed to a feeling of despondency or listlessness or a lack of benevolence toward one’s fellow man. Food would also have helped combat the effects of hypothermia, a far more immediate threat than malnutrition.

  Hypothermia describes a condition in which the body’s temperature drops because of exposure to cold. Water has to reach ninety-five degrees before it’s considered thermally neutral, the point at which heat lost from the body is balanced by heat produced by the body’s metabolism. Even in the tropics, the water doesn’t get that warm. The midday sun would only have heated the water near the surface. Water from the chest down would have remained cold. Because air is a poorer conductor of heat than water, those men in life rafts who were able to stay dry were less likely to suffer from hypothermia than men who remained submerged.

  Hypothermia can kill, once the body’s core temperature drops below eighty-eight degrees, but for the men of the Indianapolis, it had a more insidious effect. When the body senses its core temperature dropping, it restricts the flow of blood to the extremities, but that blood has nowhere else to go, and as a result, the body’s core fills up with fluids. The brain senses the buildup of excess fluids in the core and directs the body to get rid of them through urination—why waste energy keeping urine warm when you can just expel it? The result is dehydration.