by Peter Nelson
Cozell Smith saw a plane circling overhead. It circled for a long time, flying low over the water. Finally it dropped a package into the water, about 300 yards off. He wondered whether or not he had the strength to swim to it but knew he wouldn’t last another night where he was. He set off, his damaged hand useless as a hand but somewhat useful as a paddle. His injury made for slow going, as the waves came toward him, pushing him back, and the wind blew in his face. He swam for what seemed like an eternity.
At last he touched the package. It was a two-man raft. It was upside down. He finally caught a wave that flipped the raft over, but he was too tired to climb in, so he simply hung on for an hour, resting. He was alone. He saw airplanes circling overhead. He gave it one more try, found the strength, pulled himself up over the edge onto the raft and collapsed.
By Thursday evening, Giles McCoy and Bob Brundige were barely conscious, awake but unaware that for the better part of the afternoon, airplanes had been circling and dropping survival gear. They’d drifted almost ninety miles since the sinking. When Giles McCoy saw the lights of the Doyle shining in the night, he tried to wake the others up, thinking it would give them hope if they could see the light.
The wait to be picked up was unbearable. The joy they’d felt at seeing the light in the sky didn’t last. At times they were certain they’d been missed, that all the rescue aircraft and ships were already departing the scene. Night gave way to dawn, and then the sun rose directly overhead to scorch them again, and nobody came. The sun slid west, promising another night, and nobody came. Surely they would not survive another night. At four o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, a PBY flew overhead. McCoy saw men wave to them from the aircraft. Within the hour, the USS Ringness sailed to within fifty feet of them and sent swimmers to pull the raft alongside. McCoy said repeatedly, “I can’t believe you found us,” but his tongue was so swollen that his words were barely intelligible. McCoy and Brundige tried to climb unassisted the ladder the Ringness had hung over the side, but they were too weak. When McCoy reached the deck, he tried to walk but fell flat on his face. Reluctantly, he accepted the offer of a stretcher, though it embarrassed him. He’d been right about one thing—the Ringness had indeed been leaving the scene, sailing for Peleliu, when it diverted to pick them up. They were the last survivors to be rescued, 113 hours after the sinking.
It was on the Ringness that McCoy was reunited with his captain, who’d been picked up earlier that morning. McVay’s group had seen airplanes circling to the south on Thursday afternoon. The sight cheered McVay up somewhat, because it meant there had to be other survivors. They waited all afternoon for the rescue planes to expand their search north. None did. They filled an ammo can they’d salvaged with life preservers and rags and then fired a flare into it to light a smudge pot, but it was too little too late, the signal smoke lost in the gloom of twilight. As night fell, hopelessness returned. They saw more planes at dawn on Friday, but they were searching even farther south than they had the day before. A man in a raft presents a much higher profile than a man in the water, and will drift significantly farther in the wind. McVay’s party was entirely in rafts—had they drifted completely out of the search area? The smudge pot had gone out. They decided to use the last flare they had to relight it, not because they hoped anybody would see the smoke but because they all wanted to use the flare to light the cigarette they’d saved. Weren’t condemned men entitled to one last cigarette? They passed it around, knowing hope was lost. When the reignited smudge pot extinguished itself, they settled in to wait for the end to come, some praying silently, others aloud.
The Ringness, under the command of Captain William C. Meyer, picked them up around 10:30 Friday morning. No one had seen the smoke from the smudge pot, but the metal ammunition can McVay had used to light the fire in was large enough to kick back a radar signal to one of the search planes. Once aboard the Ringness, McVay proceeded to the bridge, where he helped Captain Meyer draft a message to CINCPAC headquarters at Guam that read: HAVE 37 SURVIVORS ABOARD INCLUDING CAPTAIN CHARLES MCVAY III. STATES BELIEVES SHIP HIT 0015, SANK 0030 . . . 30 JULY. POSITION ON TRACK EXACTLY AS ROUTED PD [port director] GUAM. SPEED 17, NOT ZIGZAGGING. HIT FORWARD BY WHAT IS BELIEVED TO BE TWO TORPEDOES OR MINE FOLLOWED BY MAGAZINE EXPLOSION. McVay himself insisted the words “not zigzagging” be added, against Meyer’s objections.
A number of ships stayed on the scene, but no other survivors were found. Of the 1,197 crew members aboard the Indianapolis when she sailed for Leyte, 317 men survived. Ninety-one bodies were recovered, bloated and decomposed, unrecognizable. About half of the bodies recovered afterward had been mutilated by sharks, but there’s no way of knowing how many of them were dead before the sharks found them. After the bodies were identified, when identification was even possible, they were tied with two-inch line and sunk with weights, each committed to a sailor’s grave. Everyone else either went down with the ship or disappeared into the deep.
Chapter Nine
The Guilty
August 2 to September 26, 1945
Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage and sternness. The Way of the ancient kings was to consider humaneness foremost, while the martial arts considered intelligence foremost. This is because intelligence involves the ability to plan and to know when to change effectively. Trustworthiness means to make people sure of punishment and reward. Humaneness means love and compassion for people, being aware of their toils. Courage means to seize opportunities to make sure of victory, without vacillation. Sternness means to establish discipline in the ranks by strict punishments.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Knowing how the men in the water died is not the same thing as knowing why they died. The 317 men who were saved from exposure and shark attacks were asking, “Why me? Why did I live when my shipmates didn’t?” The relatives of the other 880 men were asking the navy, “Why did this happen? Why wasn’t the ship given an escort? Was the captain doing all he could have done to prevent attack? How could the ship go down so fast? Why weren’t there more lifeboats? Why didn’t anybody hear the SOSs? Why didn’t anybody notice the ship was overdue in port? Why wasn’t anybody keeping track of it? Why didn’t somebody send rescue planes and ships immediately? What should the navy have done that they didn’t do?”
As he worked on his history fair project, Hunter Scott had some of the same questions. He tried to put together a timeline of events. The more research he did, reading books and interviewing survivors, the more unfair it seemed. What went wrong, and why was Captain McVay the only one punished, when clearly he was only one of a large cast of players in the drama, and among the least culpable? Deconstructing the tragedy with the benefit of hindsight reveals a long series of errors and omissions, any one of which, taken alone, might not have meant that much, but in combination they contributed to the deaths of 880 men, and changed the lives of 317 more.
After the sinking, the relatives of the men lost had a long list of things they wished hadn’t happened or weren’t so. If the ship had had better ventilation, she wouldn’t have been sailing under “Condition Yoke Modified” with all her hatches open and wouldn’t have sunk so fast. If the ship hadn’t been rushed into service to deliver the bomb to Tinian, her repairs still incomplete, no time for a shakedown cruise, with 250 new recruits on board and over 100 passengers getting in the way, her crew would have had more time to train and to practice abandon-ship drills, and perhaps would have loosened her lifeboats. If she’d sailed at top speed from Guam to Leyte to compensate for her lack of an escort, instead of sailing at 15.7 knots to conserve fuel and arrive in the morning, the I-58 might never have caught her. If she’d been equipped with sonar, she could have detected the submarine’s presence and taken evasive action. If only she’d been fully armored. If only she hadn’t been top-heavy with radar and radio antennae.
There were plenty of things the navy did know that, had they been fully understood, might have prevented the disaster. Th
ere were, first of all, things the navy knew that they didn’t tell Captain McVay before the Indianapolis left Guam. Admiral Spruance; Admiral Nimitz and his chief of staff, Commodore James B. Carter; and Captain Oliver Naquin (and possibly his assistant Lieutenant Johnson) at Marianas command all had access to information telling them that there were at least four Japanese submarines active in the southern Pacific within range of the Peddie route. They also knew that an American destroyer escort, the USS Underhill, had been sunk on Tuesday, July 24, three days before the Indianapolis arrived in Guam.
They knew because a unit identified as SIGINT, short for Signals Intelligence, had broken the Japanese communications code and had, for some time, been intercepting Japanese radio transmissions and fleet signals identifying ship locations and movements. The top-secret information SIGINT gathered was classified under the code word “ULTRA” (the same name the British gave to the information they received from cracking German communication codes). One SIGINT report showed that the I-58 had left its base in Kure for general patrol on July 18. Another ULTRA briefing on July 23 reported that the I-58 and the I-367 were headed out to patrol the Marianas area west of Guam. The two subs were part of what the Japanese were calling the Tamon group, named after one of four Buddhist gods who were responsible for protecting Japan from her enemies.
Why, then, didn’t anyone tell McVay about the sinking of the Underhill or the activities of the Tamon group? Wasn’t the fact that there were four enemy subs actively hunting in the area he was sailing through something he needed to know? In part, he wasn’t told because he wasn’t of sufficient rank. On March 23, 1943, chief of naval operations Admiral Ernest J. King had issued a two-page directive instructing that the special intelligence developed from ULTRA be handled and distributed only by or to flag officers of commands afloat, meaning admirals. If Admiral Spruance had decided to sail to the Philippines on the Indianapolis, rather than fly, McVay might well have been given the information about the Tamon group or the Underhill, because Spruance was a flag officer. Even without revealing the source of the information or the reason for the warning, Commodore Carter might have made a casual remark, such as “Better be on your guard, Charlie—there are still Jap subs out there,” when he met with McVay. At the time, however, Carter didn’t know which route the Indianapolis would be taking, and he didn’t know if Admiral Spruance would be on board or not. Anyway, Carter assumed McVay would be given the intelligence he needed at the standard predeparture briefing by Lieutenant Waldron, the routing officer. Spruance could have said something when he had lunch with McVay, but it wasn’t an admiral’s job to give intelligence briefings, and besides, he was planning the invasion of the Japanese home islands and had a lot more on his mind than backwater transits. Waldron should have told McVay, but Waldron didn’t know, because when he called to ask about an escort, he wasn’t told by Lieutenant Johnson, the assistant to surface operations officer Naquin, who’d received the information on Japanese sub activity from Commodore Carter.
Naquin, charged with plotting the locations and movements of all ships, friendly or otherwise, in the Marianas area of control, was by some accounts a cautious man, maybe a bit paranoid about security breaches, a hoarder of intelligence, some said. For whatever reason, he didn’t pass the information on, perhaps because Waldron wasn’t a fleet officer, so he was just following orders, or because Naquin didn’t put much stock in the ULTRA information to begin with. There’d been a lot of false submarine sightings, a lot of bogus reports that never amounted to much. CINCPAC had issued a directive that capital ships sailing from Guam to the Philippines no longer needed escorts—one reasonable interpretation of that directive would have been that capital ships could take care of themselves from then on in those waters. Another interpretation might have been that without escorts, they’d need all the information they could get. The bottom line was that danger from Japanese subs was believed to be low within the jurisdiction of the Marianas command. Earlier in the war, a sub sighting like the one reported by the SS Wild Hunter on the 28th could have been enough to divert the Indianapolis from its route. As it was, Captain McVay sailed straight into harm’s way without knowing it because the system created to give him the information he needed had broken down, somewhere between surface operations officer Oliver Naquin and routing officer Joseph Waldron.
The next mistake the navy made was sending the Indianapolis on the Peddie route without an escort. If the priority given to deploying escort ships in the waters closer to the Japanese main islands was correct, then ships sailing without escorts should probably have been given safer routes. As it was, the I-58 was waiting exactly where Captain Hashimoto knew he could expect Allied ship traffic, on a straight line between Guam and Leyte. It would have been possible for CINCPAC to have told Waldron to assign the Indianapolis an alternative course without compromising their ULTRA intelligence.
Perhaps the biggest mistake the navy made was losing the Indianapolis in the middle of the ocean. A ship sailing on a straight line at a known rate of speed should not have been that difficult to track, and yet an unlikely sequence of mechanical failures, human errors, innocent assumptions and shortsighted policies led to that result.
It wasn’t unusual, for example, for a flagship to change course without notifying anyone, because a flagship served at the whim of the flag admiral who used it. Combatant ships, in general, sailed rather independently. The Indianapolis had sailed many times, and changed course many times, with Admiral Spruance on board (often on a straight line without zigzagging, even in combat zones), because Spruance needed to get where he wanted to go in a hurry. It wasn’t unusual for a flagship not to show up when and where it was expected. Any of the commands charged with plotting ship traffic might have concluded, after the Indianapolis was overdue in port, that McVay had received orders they didn’t know about and headed off in some other direction.
It was also common for them to assume that no news was good news—that if they didn’t hear otherwise, nothing was wrong. To reduce radio chatter and to keep the Japanese from intercepting U.S. communications and learning Allied ship locations, Allied ships at sea didn’t report in on a regular basis or send progress reports of how they were faring or when they thought they’d arrive. The consequence of such practices was that when they hadn’t heard anything from the Indianapolis by 11:00 Tuesday, the plotters at the Marianas command and at CINCPAC simply assumed the Indianapolis had reached Leyte and took her off their plotting boards. That left only the three commands waiting for her at the other end of her transit to notice the Indy was missing—Admiral Oldendorf at Task Force 95, Admiral McCormick at Task Group 95.7 and the port director in Leyte, one Lieutenant Commander Jules Sancho. Of the three, the first two didn’t notice, and the last one noticed but didn’t say anything.
Why?
Recall the order the Indianapolis received from CINCPAC’s advance headquarters on Guam on the 26th, two days before sailing to Leyte, that read:
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.
The directive ordered McVay to sail to Guam but didn’t specify the date, saying only that McVay was to depart “upon completion unloading,” meaning vaguely whenever he was finished unloading whatever it was he had to unload. The nature of what he was unloading was, of course, top-secret, because he was unloading the bomb. After that, he was to take his passengers to Guam, but the directive didn’t specify when that would happen either. Finally, upon reaching Leyte, McVay was to send a message saying he’d arrived to Oldendorf on the Omaha, then sailing in the waters off Japan, and then McVay was supposed to report to McCormick on the Idaho and join his task group for gunnery training in the Philippines. Copies of the order were sent to McCormick and Oldendorf, to the port directors in Tinian and Guam, to
Admiral Murray at Marianas command, and to Admirals Nimitz and Spruance. However, when the message was received aboard the Idaho, the person who decoded the message wrote down that the addressee was CTG-75.8, not CTG-95.7. In any miscommunication, the fault may lie with the sender, the receiver or the medium in between, and it’s unclear why the Idaho’s radio room got it wrong. Whatever the reason, McCormick’s radio technician assumed he’d received, in effect, a wrong number, a message that wasn’t meant for him. It was only classified “Restricted,” not “Top-Secret,” so he assumed it wasn’t that important, and didn’t ask the sender to repeat the message. It wasn’t his problem—it was CTG-75.8’s problem, whoever they were, or else it was the sender’s problem.
Then at 10:40 A.M. Saturday morning, July 28, Guam routing officer Waldron transmitted a second message containing the Indianapolis’s essential transit information, when it was leaving, when it would arrive, how fast it was traveling and when it would cross “the Chop” into the Philippine Sea Frontier. Copies of the second message were sent to Commodore Carter at CINCPAC (who might still have warned Captain McVay about Japanese sub activity, now that he knew when and where the Indy was sailing), to Lieutenant Commander Sancho in Leyte, and to Admirals Nimitz, Spruance, Murray, McCormick and Oldendorf. This time, McCormick decoded the dispatch correctly and learned that the Indianapolis was on its way, but because he’d missed the first message, he had no idea why the Indy was joining his task group. He could only wait to see what was going on when she reported in, and again, because she was Spruance’s flagship, chances were good that she’d divert and go somewhere else.
