by Peter Nelson
“Was it zigzagging later?” Ryan asked.
“There is no question of the fact that it made no radical changes in course. It is faintly possible that there was a minor change in course between the time of the sighting and the time of the attack,” the translator said. Hashimoto spoke some English, and felt that his interpreter had mistranslated his words by adding “faintly possible” when what he’d meant to say was that he’d seen small zigzag movements. When he tried to protest to the judges, he couldn’t make his point in English, and the translator declined to make it for him.
“Would it have made any difference to you if the target had been zigzagging on this attack?” Ryan asked. It was the key question in Ryan’s prosecution.
“It would have involved no change in method of firing the torpedoes,” the translator said, “but some changes in maneuvering.” In a pretrial deposition, Hashimoto had told Ryan unequivocally that zigzagging wouldn’t have made any difference. Was the translator being completely accurate, or was the new qualifying phrase all Hashimoto’s? Hashimoto might have added that had his torpedoes missed, he could have fired his kaitens, which were piloted. He’d also said in his pretrial deposition that visibility was good in some directions, particularly in the direction of the Indianapolis, but poor in others. Oddly, neither Ryan nor Cady on cross-examination asked the Japanese sub captain about the weather. Cady began his defense on Saturday, December 15, by calling six enlisted men who told the court how they’d abandoned ship. Harlan Twible testified that he hadn’t gotten the word from the bridge because he was amidships, but it didn’t matter because he ordered the men on the fantail to abandon ship on his own initiative. His memory was clear about the weather as well.
“When I had gone on watch, it was quite light, but later on in the evening it got so dark that I had to request that the gun captain inform me if there was a man on the shield looking out over the sea, and when it came time for me to be relieved and my relief didn’t get there, I looked downwards towards the quarterdeck and noticed shapes down there, but I couldn’t tell if it was one man or two,” Twible told the court.
“Did you see any moon that night on the watch?” Cady asked.
“I can’t recall that I did,” Twible said. “There were breaks in the clouds, because I can definitely remember seeing the moon after I got in the water, but I could say that the sky was heavily overcast.”
“Were you able to see the horizon?”
“No, sir.”
On Monday, Cady called Marianas command surface operations officer Oliver Naquin to the stand and asked him why the Indianapolis hadn’t been given an escort. Ryan objected to the question as irrelevant and immaterial. The court sustained the objection. Cady then asked Naquin what the risk was from Japanese subs at the time the Indy sailed, and Naquin replied that it was “of a low order,” clarifying for the court that the three sub sightings Waldron had mentioned to McVay and Janney in his intelligence briefing were of the dime-a-dozen variety, and hadn’t been borne out by any actual sinkings. Why didn’t Cady ask about the ULTRA information from SIGINT regarding the Tamon group, or the July 21 Seventh Fleet intelligence center report that warned of Japanese subs active in the central Pacific area? Cady didn’t ask because Cady didn’t know about ULTRA. Captain Layton of CINCPAC intelligence, mindful of Admiral King’s directive that ULTRA information had to be handed directly to flag officers only, had taken steps to keep SIGINT information out of both the court of inquiry on Guam and the court-martial.
Next, Captain Granum from the Philippine Sea Frontier took the stand. Cady asked him what he knew of Japanese submarine activity in his area of control, since it was Granum’s job to track all ships in the area. A more aggressive lawyer might have asked Granum something like “If it was your job to track ships in the area, why didn’t you track the Indianapolis or notice when she was overdue in port?” Ryan would surely have objected, and his objection would surely have been sustained, but it would have gotten the point across. Cady never asked that question. His best move was calling his next witness, Captain Glynn Donaho, a submarine captain with four Navy Crosses, two Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars decorating his chest. Donaho had sunk twenty-eight vessels during the war. Of the over 4,000 ships in World War II sunk by U.S. sub commanders, most of the targets had been zigzagging. Donaho knew firsthand how ineffective the navy efforts had been.
“Based on your experience as outlined above,” Cady asked, “what is your opinion of the value of zigzagging of a target as affecting the accuracy of torpedo fire?”
“With our modern submarines,” Donaho replied, “fire-control equipment, high-speed torpedoes, a well-trained fire-control party, and with torpedo spreads, I didn’t find that zigzagging affected the results.”
“As commanding officer of a modern submarine, if you found yourself on the base course ten thousand yards ahead of a target whose normal speed—whose speed you estimated would be about twelve knots—would the normal zigzagging of this target affect the accuracy of your attack?”
“Not with a normal zigzag plan,” Donaho replied.
In his cross-examination, judge advocate Ryan did his best to shake Donaho’s testimony and get him to admit that zigzagging had to have some effect, however slight. Donaho said he always expected his targets to zigzag—that it was harder when they didn’t, or at least more confusing. Ryan finally got him to admit that zigzagging might work if the torpedoes had already been fired. However, all you had to do to avoid that, Donaho said, was to wait for a ship to zigzag, then fire. Donaho effectively seconded what Hashimoto had said, that zigzagging really didn’t make that much difference.
McVay himself was the last defense witness. To refute the second charge, he entered into the record documents containing navy instructions advising against abandoning ships too hastily, then took the stand to refute the first. He described asking for an escort from Guam. He described the visibility on the night of the sinking as poor, and tried to explain why he’d said it was good later on in his report to Forrestal. He said the officers who were supposed to wake him if anything changed were good men who knew their duty. When Ryan cross-examined him, McVay spoke of how he’d given the order to abandon ship, and said that the officer of the deck had resumed zigzagging while McVay slept on numerous prior occasions.
Testimony ended on December 18, a week before Christmas. The next day, the two lawyers gave their summations. Cady maintained that the charges had been disproved. Ryan summarized the evidence and defined negligence as failing to do something a reasonable man would have done, or doing something a reasonable man wouldn’t. “And the negligence, in this case, as we see it, is that the accused failed in his general overall responsibility to cause a zigzag course to be steered under the conditions proved, together with the fact that he failed to incorporate in his night orders, or by issuing definite instructions to commence zigzagging if and when the moon rose. He failed to issue these instructions to the officers of the deck.”
Many who’d watched the trial were sure Captain McVay would be acquitted, but in the end, Ryan’s argument prevailed—no matter what anybody said about how dark it was, there was enough light for Hashimoto to see and sink the Indianapolis, and if that was true, then McVay should have been zigzagging. He was acquitted of the charge of failing to give the order to abandon ship, but that was no surprise—the judge advocate general of the navy, Rear Admiral O. S. Colclough, sent a memo to Forrestal on November 29, 1945, admitting that the charge wouldn’t hold, since only two minutes had passed between the time the ship was hit and the time the order was given. In what amounted to a virtual confession that the court-martial would be a show trial, Colclough wrote:
This specification is recommended, however, on the ground that its use will permit Captain McVay to clear himself of criticisms made in the press. A further ground for its use is that it will prevent any adverse remarks suggesting the impropriety of determining the sufficiency of evidence by administrative action. Full justification for ord
ering a trial on Charge II springs from the fact that this case is of vital interest not only to the families of those who lost their lives but also to the public at large. It is therefore respectfully submitted that Charge II should not be omitted, despite the fact that the evidence may be held insufficient.
McVay was, however, convicted of hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag. In light of Rear Admiral Colclough’s November 29 memo to Forrestal, and the fact that McVay had admitted he wasn’t zigzagging from the onset, clearly the reason for the trial was not to ascertain blame or mete out punishment—both could have been accomplished in other ways. Captain Charles Butler McVay III was sentenced to lose 100 numbers in his temporary grade of captain and 100 numbers in his permanent grade of commander, a relatively light punishment. The seven members of the court even went so far as to recommend clemency to the reviewing authorities.
After the trial, Admiral Spruance wrote to the chief of naval personnel saying he thought McVay a skillful captain, and that he’d be pleased to have McVay command his flagship in future operations—words that might have been more useful volunteered from the witness stand, but a sound endorsement nevertheless. Newspapers around the country supported McVay, and said he’d been misused by the navy and was taking the fall for his superiors. For his part, McVay agreed, but he was resigned to it, telling Captain Ryan, “It’s for the good of the service,” after his old friend apologized when the trial was over, saying it was nothing personal.
When inspector general Admiral Snyder’s investigation was finally released in January, after the court-martial was over and it was too late to do McVay any good, the fuller story emerged. The report, 616 pages long, containing the testimony of fifty witnesses, indicated that his failure to zigzag had little to do with the loss of the vessel, and that McVay wasn’t responsible for the rest of the tragedy, or, in navy-speak, “the causal nexus between the failure to zigzag and the loss of the ship appears not to have a solid foundation.” Snyder interviewed Naquin a few days before Naquin was to testify at McVay’s trial, and Naquin told Snyder what he wasn’t going to tell the court, that he’d been fully aware of the Tamon group operating in the western Pacific and that that had posed an above-average threat to shipping. In the end, the inspector general’s report cast the majority of the blame for the loss of lives on the Philippine Sea Frontier for not reporting the nonarrival of the Indianapolis, even though Snyder agreed that reporting combatant ship nonarrivals wasn’t really their job. Gibson, Gillette and Granum were all given letters of reprimand, and Lieutenant Commander Sancho received a lesser letter of admonition, all for correctly implementing a flawed system. Those who created the flaws in the system escaped the consequences.
Despite the report from the inspector general, the navy maintained that its court-martial of McVay was legal and proper, on the grounds that he’d been convicted, technically, only of “hazarding” (placing at risk) his ship, and not of causing its loss or sinking. Technically, the navy was right—section 5947 of Title Ten, United States Code, warns that “commanding officers are required to take all necessary and proper measures to safeguard the physical well-being of the officers and enlisted persons under their command or charge. . . . A captain’s responsibility for his ship is absolute.”
The nontechnical argument that McVay would have been court-martialed for failing to zigzag even if he hadn’t lost his ship is, however, rather weak, and in fact, rather preposterous. There were 436 other combatant ships lost during the war, and none of those captains were court-martialed. There were perhaps thousands of captains who at one time or another ceased zigzagging at a time when they technically shouldn’t have. McVay had done it countless times with Admiral Spruance on board, and there is no record that Spruance ever told him he wasn’t in compliance with section 5947 of Title Ten, United States Code. By the same argument, when Lieutenant Commander Claytor turned the spotlights of the USS Doyle into the night sky, he was hazarding his ship. When Adrian Marks landed his PBY-5A, he was hazarding his aircraft. True, they’d done these things to save lives. Yet if the navy was arguing that the fact of hazarding can be regarded as discrete and separate from its effect—that is, that placing the ship at risk was grounds for a court-martial no matter what happened because of it, good or bad—then by the same technicality Claytor and Marks should have been court-martialed too. The heroism of their deeds and the lives they saved would have been, by the same logic, irrelevant.
Rather than admitting they’d made a mistake in court-martialing McVay and apologizing, Secretary of the Navy Forrestal arrived at a compromise. On February 20, 1946, Forrestal signed a statement approving the proceedings, findings and sentences of McVay’s court-martial but added that in light of his service to the navy, his numerous commendations and his Silver Star and Purple Heart medals, “and further, in view of the unanimous recommendation to clemency signed by all members of the court, the sentence is remitted in its entirety. Captain McVay will be released from arrest and restoredto duty.”
On February 23, at a press conference at the Pentagon headed by Admiral Nimitz, who’d replaced King as chief of naval operations, the navy issued a nine-page press release entitled “Narrative of the Circumstances of the Loss of the USS Indianapolis,” based on Snyder’s investigation, written by Vice Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, but when Sherman submitted an early draft to his superiors for their comments, a paragraph describing what Naquin knew from ULTRA information produced by SIGINT was deleted. Also cut was a paragraph admitting that CINCPAC had kept the information from McVay when he’d met with Commodore Carter on Guam. A short time later, Secretary Forrestal withdrew the letters of reprimand against Gibson, Gillette and Granum and the letter of admonition against Sancho, leaving only McVay to shoulder the blame.
The fact that McVay’s sentence had been remitted mattered very little to the family members who were still grieving, still looking for someone to hold accountable. Some agreed with the newspapers and felt McVay had been unfairly treated by the navy, but others disagreed. It wasn’t McVay against the navy, McVay was the navy, he was the navy’s chief representative on the ship, and their boys were gone because of him.
Chapter Eleven
The Price
1946–1997
These are the men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed. . . .
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black,
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
Wilfred Owen, “Mental Cases”
There are two basic ways to react to danger. We can either stand our ground, or we can run away. It’s referred to as the fight-or-flight response, describing how the autonomous nervous system, the involuntary part of the brain that controls things like breathing and swallowing, prepares the body for conflict. When a dog gets within thirty feet of a squirrel in a park, the squirrel becomes hyperalert, freezing in place, muscles tensed, heart racing to increase energy output, and when the dog closes the distance, the squirrel takes flight and runs to the nearest tree. When a cat is cornered by a dog and can’t run away, the cat arches its back to appear larger than it is, extends its claws, bares its teeth, its heart pumping, its adrenaline releasing, and if the dog closes the distance, the cat fights back. Once the danger has passed and the squirrel is safely up the tree, the squirrel’s nervous system resets itself to the default position. It doesn’t think about it anymore. Once the cat drives the dog off, the cat doesn’t retain any anger toward the dog, or wonder why the dog chose to attack it and not some other cat, and doesn’t ask itself whether or not it was a good cat or a bad cat for responding the way it did—its nervous system simply resets itself to the default position, and the cat goes about its business.
The human nervous system doesn’t always reset itself so quickly after a
life-threatening experience. It can happen when we find ourselves in a situation of great violence or danger, where we can neither fight nor flee. Instead we experience an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and loss of control over our lives—imagine the squirrel locked in a small room with the dog, or a cat that’s been wounded and can’t lift a paw to defend itself. For humans, it can happen when we’re assaulted or attacked, and it can happen in war. Such events cause not only physical injury, but psychic injury called trauma, and trauma does damage to the autonomous nervous system. Though the damage can’t be X-rayed or seen with the naked eye, it’s as real as a broken arm or leg.
When that psychic injury fails to heal, or evolves over time to become a permanent part of the victim’s life—when the reset button doesn’t work anymore—it’s called post-traumatic stress disorder. In military parlance, it was called “shell shock” during World War I and “combat fatigue” during World War II.
Three hundred and seventeen men survived the sinking of the Indianapolis, which meant that there were 317 different stories to be told afterward. The men who came home weren’t the same men who’d left. Some were changed greatly and permanently, some were changed only slightly and temporarily, but all 317 men experienced trauma and each man dealt with it in his own way.
